The political bloggers are working overtime (see Memeorandum’s coverage) because of John Edwards’ missteps in hiring bloggers for his campaign.

I link to this for a couple of reasons.

1) I was on his plane six weeks ago.
2) The lessons here for corporate blog teams are many.

Some lessons here:

1) Hire people who the community will defend.
2) If you want a job as a blogger for a political organization, or a business, you better worry about all those “out there” posts you made.
3) Firing people just makes the problem worse. If you hire them, defend them cause it’s your own idiocy and lack of due diligence that got you here.
4) I’d be more transparent about moves regarding bloggers than either Edwards or, say, Microsoft was when it sent out review laptops to bloggers. Transparency — before a decision is made — will help the community vet moves like these.

What would I do now?

Take the heat and overcommunicate. The more insular the campaign appears the more people will get turned off. It’s time for John Edwards to show up on Daily Kos and take his lumps.

UPDATE: Dave Winer wonders when the New York Times will call off its war on bloggers.

Ahh, yes, Fred, of A VC blog, nails why I think John Edwards had me on his plane last month. Tech has money. Politicians need it to run for office.

I think we’ll get a large number of visits by all the candidates in Silicon Valley. Fred doesn’t even live here and already he’s sick of the begging for cash (he’s a VC in the tech industry).

Great day today at the train museum in Sacramento. Looks like first people to post are using “trainmuseum” or “sacramento” as the tag over on Flickr. Here’s the ones from the tag “trainmuseum.”

I found some more with the tag “photowalking.” Oh, and even more with “flickrphotowalk.”

Shel Israel, my coauthor, was there too and made a few nice images. UPDATE: he just added a very nice report on his blog. He says “what Scoble and Hawk did was simple and brilliant.”

Actually, Shel had a brilliant idea of his own: start your own photowalks. I’d love to link to those from my ScobleShow.com site if anyone tries it out.

More than 20 people showed up today, and we got some really great video.

A guy from Apple showed up (works on the Aperature team) and Ryan Montoya, of the John Edwards campaign showed up (do they miss a beat?)

My favorite, though, was Phil Glatz who showed me his rig for taking 3D pictures. He gave me a set of 3D glasses and showed me some of his images taken with a handmade rig and a pair of low-cost 3D cameras. Very cool. He even shows you how on his blog.

Anyway, there are tons of photos coming. If you took some, please leave a link to where they are in my comments here.

And with that, I’m off for a while. Got a heck of a lot of email. I think I’m over 700 now. 739 are in my inbox now. Sigh.

UPDATE: Martin McKay learned not to use 1600 ISO, cause it makes the images look “grainy.” That’s really chip noise, when you push them like that it really brings out the noise. One reason that Thomas Hawk can take lots of images in low light is because his chip in his $3,000 Canon 5D has very low noise characteristics. Not to mention he was sporting a new $1,600 50 F1.2 lens (lowest F-stop lens on the market, that sucker is like a black hole).

Funny aside. The museum wouldn’t let me bring in my tripod. Grrr.

On the way home we were treated to this stunning sunset. Look at that photo on Flickr: it was just posted a few hours ago and see how many comments are there and how many people have already marked it as a “favorite?” And how many “pool” groups there are? Now you are seeing the power of Flickr’s community.

UPDATE 2: if it works out we’re going to do our next Photowalking at Mavericks, where the waves get to be 30 to 60 feet tall. The problem is we’ll only have three days warning that the waves are that tall and the surf contest is on (interestingly enough the contest is sponsored by Ask.com). Then we’ll need to rent Thomas a 600mm lens.

Oh, and thanks to Seagate for giving us $1,200 worth of 8GB Compact Flash cards to hand out as prizes and for sponsoring Photowalking and making that possible to bring you.

Thanks too to photosharing site Zooomr, who not only lends us Thomas Hawk (he’s CEO) but founder Kristopher Tate came today too. I’ll link to their shots when they get them up.

UPDATE 3: I think Kamilyun got the funnest photo of the day.

UPDATE 4: Thomas Hawk has a great writeup and some even better images. Oh, and SmugMug, according to TechCrunch, has a bunch of new features on its photosharing service.

UPDATE 5: Here’s Thomas Hawk’s images. It’s very interesting to compare Thomas’ images with everyone else who was there. He sees things I just didn’t see.

UPDATE 6: Here’s Phil’s 3D images. You’ll need red/blue 3D glasses to view these, but they rock.

One thing I just saw over at TechMeme is that USA Presidential campaigns now are conversations?

Really? So far only one Democratic candidate has met with bloggers who aren’t avowed supporters of his (and has had live chats on DailyKos), that I can see. Only one candidate has invited a blogger behind the press lines.

Yet I find it interesting that some people are giving credit for “best viral media use” to Obama. And others are giving credit to Clinton for being conversational on her Web site.

I thought conversations needed to require two-way discussions. I thought being viral isn’t a good thing unto itself? Anyone can point a video camera at their face and post that to YouTube or Blip.TV or other video services.

Personally, can we save the credit for candidates who actually have two-way conversations and who are actually doing more with technology than Howard Dean did?

And with that, I’m outta here.

Hey, Barack, have you met with any bloggers yet? Edwards met with dozens on his first media stops.

Also, has any non-political blogger met with either Hillary or Barack to find out if they are doing their own blog and/or if they are really transparently available to both bloggers and mainstream press? (Edwards let me follow him around 100% of the time, even when meeting with his staff and didn’t keep me out of the back rooms).

So far no one from PodTech has been approached by either of the other two candidates.

Barack does have a good podcast, though, and Beet.TV has links to some of his other online videos.

UPDATE: MyDD says that Barack is winning in gathering blog links.

UPDATE 2: Huffington Post says Barack made the first “direct to you” announcement. Funny that they missed my interview with John Edwards as well as meetings John had with bloggers in both Iowa and in New Hampshire.

Barack Obama looks like he’s going to annouce that he’s running for President (Beet.TV has a link to the news, along with news about how Barack is using online video). Already most of the press (and most political bloggers) have decided that the race for Democratic nominee is between three people: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards.

I’m getting pissed off about something I’ve noticed in my conversations. No, not when people tell me they either don’t know enough about Barack, or think he’s not experienced enough. That’s quite acceptable at this stage in the game.

But I’m throwing a little test into the conversation. I then follow up a comment like that with this: “I think he isn’t going to get elected because of the color of his skin.”

What follows my statement is what really pisses me off: I haven’t had many people disagree with me. Admittedly small sample size, but now more than 100 people.

That’s what I call “default” racism. You might call it “invisible” racism. Or something else. But it still is racism. If someone says something racist to you, and you don’t disagree, aren’t you also racist by default?

It’s also interesting that I haven’t seen the major political blogs, or Web sites, take on the issue of race and the 2008 candidacy.

Oh, and what does this have to do with technology? Not much until I start remembering my Silicon Valley childhood when I was my son’s age. I remember a neighborhood family coming around to my parents asking “we’re thinking of selling our home to a black family and wanted to let you know about it.”

I’m sick of the default. What about you?

The experiment in sleep deprivation that the rest of you know as CES is almost over (the BlogHaus closes in 45 minutes and we start cleaning up and heading for home). I’m struggling to get some videos up, we did two more Retrevo gangs that I might not be able to get up for a while (probably next week), along with a ton of videos. But nothing like what you’ll see over on GearLive.com over the next week. They uploaded more than 100 videos. Those guys are machines. Andru Edwards tells me they’ll roll out that 100+ videos over the next week.

Congrats to both Engadget and Gizmodo. UPDATE: Looking over the past week I think Engadget did the best job, but that doesn’t mean Gizmodo was a loser. I found a lot to value on both sites. (I did keep up my link blog all week long and it seems I linked to a few more Engadget items than Gizmodo ones. Either way I find I linked to a lot more of their stuff than anyone else put up, including CNET, who had a sizeable booth). The loser is everyone else. After visiting both Gizmodo and Engadget all week, I came away with a much better idea of the best stuff on the show floor than I would have gotten anywhere else.

Thanks to everyone who came to the BlogHaus, it was an over-the-top success for both us and our sponsors (Seagate, AMD, and Microsoft). Definitely will happen again.

UPDATE: Loren Feldman’s bubble bath is hillarious. His gestures toward Doc Searls and Jason Calacanis got me to snort up my orange juice. Loren is the video blogger who slammed my videos for being too long and boring. We’ve spent quite a lot of time together and he’s nicer and funnier in real life.

Hey, Tim Bourquin, the guy who runs Podcasting Expo, just walked in. Former CEO of Corbis is here. But, who cares about the cool people in the house? We care about the toys. And here Geek News Central gets the first news up. Andru Edwards, of GearLive, is sitting right next to it, so I’m sure video will come up soon about that.

I’m watching Google’s Blog Search to see who reports from the BlogHaus. This place is crowded and getting more crowded every minute.

UPDATE: Engadget has the usual great reporting from the keynote.

UPDATE 2: Paul Mooney has a good photo of just one part of the BlogHaus. The bandwidth ROCKS here.

In the middle of all the chaos up in the BlogHaus (I’m sitting next to Andru Edwards of GearLive, who will get up about 80 videos from CES this week alone. Damn. And he’s not the only one, the BlogHaus is rocking. Engadget just showed up here too. Actually, I loaned them my limo to go to the Gates keynote) there was some sad news that came through Google Reader: Thomas Raftery’s mom just died. Thomas is a geek who lives in Cork, Ireland, who is one of my favorite Europeans.

My thoughts are with you Thomas, have a good cry. You took me back to last year when my mom died.

On happier news, happy birthday Mr. Messina!

Om Malik is one of my favorite bloggers and I’m very happy to have him on the ScobleShow today. In the interview you’ll learn how he earned the title “GigaOm” from his mom and he gives his view on what makes a good blog. “Respect people’s time,” is his top advice.

Also on the ScobleShow is a killer new music service, iLike. Meet iLike’s CEO, Ali Partovi, and get a demo of what makes iLike a great service.

Oh, and thanks to Theresa Valdez Klein who paid me a great compliment on the Blog Business Summit blog: “I’m not just kissing Scoble’s ass when I say this-the questions he asked Senator Edwards were better framed and delivered than any that I’ve heard a reporter ask a political figure in a long time. He cut right through the bullshit and got some straight answers out of a politician. I congratulate him for that.”