• by August 2, 2004

Happy August!

The Riff is on vacation but your Online Minute is not. We're here, having entered the hazy, hot, and humid dog days of August in New York City, full of new terror warnings and street closure announcements in advance of the Republican National Convention.

It sucks--New York in August.

But it could be worse, as in you could be in Baghdad.

An insightful blog I mentioned a few weeks ago called Baghdad Burning is back. It is written by a young woman who lives in the Iraqi capital and chronicles with visceral clarity the sights, sounds, and emotions of a city struggling to carry on. I'd been missing BB, as the last entry was June 18 and I kept looking for a new one. I went to the site today and found an entry for July 31.

Here's a sample excerpt:

"The heat is unbearable. It begins very early in the day and continues late into the night. You'd think that once the sun has set, the weather would cool appreciably - no such thing in Baghdad. Once the sun sets, the buildings and streets cease to absorb heat and instead begin to emanate it. If you stand a few centimeters away from any stucco or brick wall, you can feel the waves of heat coming at you from every crack and crevice."

Our blogger (I can't find her name), describes power outages, the death of her aunt, overcrowded cemeteries, abductions, and other chaos. The July 31 entry is a poignant account of life in Baghdad, one that you're not likely to get in any newspaper on- or off-line.

A few other tidbits: Moveon.org was highly organized for last week's Democratic National Convention, and I suspect it's in high gear, as are other groups, planning activities around the RNC which begins later this month. I spotted more than a dozen "house parties" listed online last Thursday night where someone could join people to watch John Kerry's speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president. All you had to do was type in your zip code and party listings popped up. More and more people are also plugging in zip codes on search engines to find a local restaurant or plumber. I haven't tried that, but I should.

The Democrats launched a $100 million TV ad campaign over the weekend targeting key battleground states. At least part of that must be earmarked for the Web. The Kerry campaign, as of June, racked more than 70 million ad impressions, versus 94,000 for the Bush/Cheney ticket, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. The Republican National Committee had just 234,000 online ad impressions. The Republicans must be holding their Web ad dollars for the fall.

According to the Online Journalism Review, the Kerry campaign was the first to buy online ads via Blogads, a blog ad network run by Henry Copeland, who tells OJR that the candidate has already run four ad campaigns. Blogads, which keeps 20 percent of the ads it sells, runs ads on influential news/culture/politics blogs including Daily Kos, Wonkette, InstaPundit, Andrew Sullivan, and Hugh Hewitt. Apparently though, the Bush/Cheney campaign hasn't taken to Blogads in quite the same way as the Kerry/Edwards ticket has.