http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/1/15/161017/816I did not get to the part where Mathew Gross speaks, but I will later. There is a summary of what was said here.
SNIP..." Regarding the suggestion that is still swirling around the blogosphere regarding the role that Markos and Jerome played on the Dean campaign: Laura Gross (no relation) is 100% correct when she says:
hese guys were hired as technical consultants. Specifically, they helped the Web team pick a technology platform for the blog (Movable Type) and helped manage Internet advertising (banner ads, Google ads, etc.). They weren't paid to write content -- either for the campaign or on their own blogs. And just in case there was any ambiguity, the campaign made sure they had a notice saying "I am a paid consultant for Howard Dean" right smack on the front of their personal blogs.
As for the accusation that we had any other "internal goal": As is well known, I was the Director of Internet Communications and "Blogger in Chief" for the Dean campaign. To my knowledge, there was never any internal expectation that either Markos or Jerome would provide anything other than technical or advertising advice or services, and those were the only services they did provide."
I frankly thought Trippi was not good at making points, but Dave Winer was rather antagonistic to be blunt. This link seems to summarize pretty well.
Trippi made one point I liked. He said they were the first campaign to allow bloggers on the campaign plane, the big one. He said they were entering new territory. I have trouble listening to him now, but I will try to finish it.
One poster at the site I linked said the WSJ and others are "swiftboating Dean"....WSJ, though they know their reporter has said this to DFA, has links to two articles about it....just perpetuating it.
I think DFA may have to attack this formally, maybe.
Here is summary from Jerome about what he did for the campaign, which is well known anyway...it is sickening this is going on.
SNIP.." And to even further clarify, I directed and managed all of the online advertising campaigns and expenditures for DFA. The "technical consulting" that Markos did for the campaign included building out the ForumForAmerica.com website, which Murshed Zaheed managed; Markos was to build out the 50 state websites through MT, but Zephyr decided we should build them by developing Drupal's platform from the groundup instead (so only a few wound up actually happening); and after migrating DailyKos.com onto Scoop from MT, he proposed that BFA be migrated onto Scoop under his advice, but some on the webteam (not I) feared that Scoop couldn't scale. ha!
What's left of this now? The accusations of Zephyr Teachout did not pan out, neither were they ever confirmed, and now have been contraditcted by the person who hired us, Joe Trippi, and the Blogger in Chief of the Dean Campaign, Mathew Gross."