Looking backward, and then forward

Matt Welch has a nice little summary of what it was like to be a blogger at the Democratic convention. Me, I only took part in one interview, with the New York Times, and that was only to set the record straight on this site’s often-overlooked but rather crucial role in Trent Lott’s downfall.

Other than that, I tried to stay pretty low key. On my first or second day in Boston, I read a feature story in the Boston Globe about some kids who had been credentialed to cover the convention for the Weekly Reader, and it suddenly hit me — that’s what the bloggers were. A novelty act, like the kids from the Weekly Reader. If there had been a talking dog at the convention (outside of last week’s TMW, I mean), or maybe a horse that could do arithmetic, we would have all been lumped into the same category.

As for New York…as it turns out, I’ve got some fairly non-negotiable obligations which are going to make it extremely difficult for me to get away from home that week. So chances are, I’ll be watching the convention on television — which, as I noted in a previous post, has its own advantages. What I’m mostly going to miss out on, I think, is the action outside the convention center — so I’m putting out an open invitation to those of you who will be on the ground. Send in your updates, your eyewitness reports, and I’ll try to post them here. I’d like to post your photos as well, but I’m bumping up against my server’s bandwidth limits lately, so I’m not sure about that. (If anyone has some extra server space to donate for image hosting, shoot me an email.)