Brief blog reveries: Simon World's excellent notes from a John Zogby talk in Hong Kong led me to Cicero's post about The 'No' Vote at Winds of Change.

Dan Gillmor makes a nice counter-intuitive point in his San Jose Mercury News column today.

If you're in NYC on Tuesday night, check out Matt Kohn and Dan Efram's new film, "CALL IT DEMOCRACY." It's showing from 7-9pm, FREE, at the New School, Swayduck Auditorium, 65 Fifth Ave, between 13th and 14th Streets.

Advokit is an open-source grassroots-network voter-file campaign-management tool developed by veterans of the Dean primary campaign and available either as a hosted (ASP) service or as a stand-alone install.

Bush's official campaign site seems to be rejecting visitors from outside North America.

Video Vote Vigil is asking for volunteer videographers to send them video of disturbances outside polling locations on Election Day. Jon Lebkowsky writes that they aren't quite set up to accept content yet, but volunteers who are willing to take their cameras to the polls can sign up now to be notified when registration and uploads are implemented.

What is it with Republicans confusing .coms and .orgs? The GeorgeWBush.org parody site gets a lot of misdirected mail at their catchall address. Amidst the chaff were the occasional strategic or informative message sent to ad-hoc cc lists of Republican operatives, including a few that discuss out-of-compliance local campaign organizations and, most telling, a few with attached spreadsheets identifying lists of voters in a few Florida precincts.

The collection of essays now known as Extreme Democracy should appear in book form early next year, but it is coming out in serialized PDF (portadble document format) at the moment at the project's blog.

Now think about this. Most of the highest traffic, most famous blogs are about politics. I know on Tuesday, Election Day, they will be at full throttle, but as we wind down in the next few weeks -- where will that leave these Alpha Bloggers anyway? Is Tuesday the political bloggers' day of reckoning? And where will it leave the whole institution of blogging? Will this give voice to bloggers with a less political style of reportage? I can't wait to see.

The stereotypical view of the contest between Bush and Kerry as we enter the final 48 hours to Election Day is that this is now a battle between a command-and-control model of political organization (Bush/RNC) and a more distributed and loosely coordinated network (Kerry/DNC/labor/NAACP/ACT/MoveOnPac/AmericaVotes etc.). Top-down vs bottom-up, or perhaps, sideways-up.

That's certainly the image conveyed by this story in today's Los Angeles Times:

For the Bush campaign, the final push has been engineered mostly by a single top-down organization that sets goals in Washington and relies on a vast network of neighborhood volunteers. Kerry, in contrast, depends on a conglomeration of party, labor and issue organizations that use multiple messages to target divergent audiences....

Bush-Cheney '04 officials say they have 1.6 million volunteers across the nation, and an organization that reaches down to the precinct level in most voting locations in the dozen most competitive states — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. With a pyramid organizational structure that has been compared to Amway or Tupperware, the campaign has set goals for volunteer recruitment, registrations and voter contacts. [emphasis added]

....The ground forces the Democrats are martialing this weekend, in contrast, come from many sources — led by the party's 250,000 volunteers, 226,000 union members and more than 140,000 workers from two big-money liberal organizations — America Coming Together and MoveOn PAC.

Well, I'd love to hear whether people think these stereotypes are accurate. Also, if so, whether one model seems to work better than the other.