Joe Trippi: Hello. Phil Noble: Joe? Joe Trippi: Yeah. Phil Noble: How ya doin'? Joe Trippi: Good, Phil, how are you? Phil Noble: Good. I just wanted to talk with you a little bit about the project that you've been working on with Cindy Sheehan in Texas, and we are already recording the interview, and tell us a little bit about what's happening there, because it's a very interesting Internet story about how quickly things were mobilized and moved and just tell us a little bit about your role in it and how you got started. Joe Trippi: Well, I was, like I think a lot of people, just had been reading a little tiny bit about Cindy Sheehan and what she was doing down in Crawford on a few blogs and it wasn't really getting a whole lot of press coverage, but I decided I would pick up the phone and see if there was any interest in putting a blog conference call together that she would be able to tell her story to the folks in the blogosphere, and I think we had about, I would say about 250 bloggers come on or call about one o'clock in the afternoon. Cindy Sheehan came on. It was hosted by myself, Bob Verteg from democrats.com, or the afterdowningstreet.org. Phil Noble: 250 bloggers on the call? That's an amazing number. Joe Trippi: Well, it was a -- we had been doing a lot of this. We hosted a conference, same kind of blog call concept, for the Live-Aid concerts with Geldof and Bono and those guys, and it really helped to get the word out. On this thing it was amazing because what happened was about an hour after that call, I mean literally within an hour of the call, Cindy Sheehan became the number one searched item on technorati.com, Google, and a whole bunch of other search sites. Basically, the power of those 200 or so people getting off that call, blogging about it, starting to talk about Cindy Sheehan and her son, Casey, and her request to see the president, just exploded after that call, and then that's when you started to see suddenly CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and a whole bunch of cable and then eventually NBC Nightly News, it went from there to the real mainstream media and to the networks. But a large part of that was because of how it launched out of the blogosphere. Pretty amazing to watch. Phil Noble: Is that the most rapid growth and issue like that that you've seen? Joe Trippi: Definitely. Nothing like it on Live 8. Nothing like it on -- yeah, I've done or been part of or co-hosted calls like that since the Dean campaign occasionally once or twice a month or maybe once or twice every two or three months and never saw the kind of explosion that we saw on the Cindy Sheehan call and the response from the blogosphere, and then it just kept spreading around. It was amazing not just how fast, but how many other blogs who weren't on the call started to blog about it. Phil Noble: Yeah. And what besides blogging and giving her lots of attention and lots of press coverage, what has been done in terms of trying to move beyond just blogs to money or activism, and so on and so forth? Joe Trippi: Well, for me it was the blog call and trying to engage the blogosphere. What happened after that was something that we saw in the Dean campaign where there were so many other people out there now in a decentralized environment starting to host coffees on their own to get money to the Peace House down in Crawford or to fund buses going there or to hold candlelight vigils. I think moveon.org hosted I think it was something like 1,700 vigils throughout the national where people met offline, holding a vigil in support of Cindy Sheehan and her stance to ask the president to meet with her, and I think that was 35,000 people at 1,700 vigils, so different things sort of spawned out of the blogosphere through sort of interested folks, bloggers, other internet-related web sites who just on their own grabbed the torch and started to carry it around the country in support of Cindy Sheehan and opposition to war. Phil Noble: You know it is, I think, sort of interesting that it began with the old medium of sort of a phone call, hearing the real voice, the real people. You know, there's no substitute for flesh and blood, as they say, even if it's just a voice. Joe Trippi: That's true. Absolutely true. And then like I said, the amazing thing about it was from that moment on there was nothing centralized about it. In fact, I just get amazed at people's creativity, their energy. You know I saw it in the Dean campaign. I saw it here with Cindy Sheehan, and it's amazing what a whole bunch of people without much power can do to really at least effect a debate in the country and try to effect some change. I think in both cases, I mean, you look at the president's numbers on the war, his favorability ratings and things and you know, I believe, that the effort made people start engaging in the debate and having discussion. If that's all the Sheehan phenomenon did, it's been well worth it. We'll see where it goes from here. Phil Noble: Well, where does it go from here? She's on a road tour now. Right? I mean, is there significant web component or technology _________ to that tour? Joe Trippi: You know I think there is, but the other thing is you run into events, and I'm not sure with Hurricane Katrina -- I mean that's where frankly almost all my efforts have gone in the last week or to have been to try to rally money and support for those folks. It's one of those things where I think Cindy Sheehan's movement and what she's doing is important, obviously, the Iraq War, you know I've been opposed to it from the inception, I just don't know to what extent the media is going to give Cindy Sheehan any space right now for probably quite some time, but that's not gonna stop us from continuing to try. Phil Noble: Yeah. It is sort of live and die by the sword. Joe Trippi: Even the blogosphere, rightfully so, right now is very much following Katrina and helping publicize relief efforts and what people can do, so I think there's probably going to be a likely period here where Cindy Sheehan and the Iraq War are as much as I fervently believe the president should meet with her and we should bring our troops home, as do other Americans, I think right now Katrina is more paramount in people's minds, and so I think you'll see a lot of web activity there. Phil Noble: I wonder if she's getting significant local press through the local tour and if there was some way to leverage that, if that's being leveraged in some way online. Joe Trippi: You know I know that afterdowningstreet.org is following her every move, and I do think she is getting considerable press when she rolls into a local town. I still think that that can move around the blogosphere because you've got plenty of room in the blog to talk both about Katrina and Cindy. I don't know that we'll be able to move that into the national news, but that's one of the pluses of the blogosphere. You can continue to move information without the limits of a 30-second newscast. Phil Noble: Talk a little bit about the Live Aid stuff and what you know of that happened with online, because what little I saw, to tell you the truth, I was surprised that I didn't see anything much other than people saying go to the site, sign a petition, and that was about it, and I haven't seen any followup since then. Did I miss something or what do you know that sort of came off of what you'll did? Joe Trippi: Well, Live 8 was an amazing thing because unlike Live Aid where Geldof had come up with the idea a year or so before the Live Aid concert. Elton John, Bono, and all those guys had a year. You know, it was like a year -- save the date a year from now. What happened this time was Geldof came up with the idea about six or eight weeks before they actually did it. The first problem was the band had to all cancel out of events that they had already scheduled. There weren't any decent bands that weren't booked for July 3, 4, 5, 6, that whole period, in major stadiums, so that happened. The second thing that happened, and this was really interesting is that Live Aid when it happened there was no Internet. There was no way to set the thing up, so when Geldof and these guys decided to do it this time they started working to get the bands all out of their legal obligations and get them there and then all of a sudden somebody realized internally -- it wasn't me -- somebody realized, "Oh man, this is totally different. We have the Internet. We have cell phones, and let's call Trippi," and they had a couple of other people, and the problem was by the time we all got together and they figured this out that they needed to do something it was about four weeks out. It was barely enough time to get -- what had happened 27 million people submitted their emails or their mobile phone text messaging identity. Phil Noble: That's a pretty big number. Joe Trippi: That's a huge number. Would I have loved to have done more? Yeah. Now there were a lot of things that we did do. What we did was at each concert we credentialed 10 bloggers. That turned out to work in some places. It was a fiasco in others because in some of these sites the security people on the ground did not know that there were blogging credentials and we had headaches. Phil Noble: Sure. But if you got 27 million emails, you oughta be able to do something with that. Joe Trippi: Yeah, that's what I think in the end that's where the question is what will one dot org and the Live Aid organizers do, you know, they got the concerts done and now it's moving forward, and so I think you're gonna see obviously some usage, some outreach. There not likely to hammer those people with an email a week. That would be I think a horrible waste of the resource, but I think the next G8, no, there's not gonna a year of the G8 Summit, but the next time something dealing internationally with Africa and poverty pops I think those people will be called to action, or at least told what they can do to help. But we did do some amazing things. We had five bloggers, and this worked on Richard Branson's 747, or whatever it was, huge plane, went from Philly to Scotland. Those five bloggers covered the G8 Summit and all the activity there, you know, real connection between Live 8 and the blogging community, even though some of it went haywire, it was well worth the effort. We learned a lot from how you do it and how you integrated with the blogging community. I wouldn't call it a complete success. There were some failures, but again, we're doing stuff no one ever done before. Phil Noble: Well, it's always interesting to talk with you about what you're doing because it is always new, it's always cutting edge, and it's always bit. So what else is on the horizon for you? Joe Trippi: Oh man, (laughter) I'm still at 49 and still trying to figure out what I'm doing with the rest of my life, but I'm gonna work for some candidates out there and try to look for -- I mean, right now I'm really interested in sort of what's going on with energy, trying to figure out if there's a way to build something on the net or in the blogosphere that starts the community that's concerned about global warming and the way we need to rebuild our energy future, but that's sort of on the drying boards. I just wanna keep making a difference somehow. Phil Noble: Well, I'm sure you will, and thank you for taking the time to talk us with us, Joe. Joe Trippi: Okay. Phil Noble: Thank you. Bye-bye. Joe Trippi: Bye. 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