The Final Word on Hillary & YearlyKos

After a flurry of rumors and clarifications, organizers of the YearlyKos netroots convention and Clinton Campaign officials now say that Hillary Clinton will appear at a breakout session with bloggers on Saturday. In a Friday afternoon press release, the Clinton campaign announced that she will appear at the convention's Presidential Leadership Forum and "participate in a breakout session with her senior staff" - a meeting that convention organizers had said she would skip as recently as Thursday night.

Clinton's Internet Director Peter Daou told me that he will attend the breakout session with Clinton and two other campaign officials, Howard Wolfson and Ann Lewis. Daou stressed that the campaign had worked to overcome scheduling and miscommunication problems to arrange the meeting. "Senator Clinton made sure to have her staff rearrange her schedule because she wanted to make sure that people who signed up for the breakout session are able to meet her and speak to her," he said. Clinton is giving a speech to the National Association of Police Organizations Convention in Chicago on Saturday morning before the YearlyKos convention.

The varying rumors about Clinton's plans spread in waves across the convention over the past two days, demonstrating again how swiftly information -- or misinformation - can move across wired social networks. Officials from the convention and the campaign posted diaries on DailyKos to tamp down complaints and miscommunication about the Senator's plans, which convention attendees were quick to debate and parse. In the end, netroots activists will focus more on what Clinton says on Saturday than how she fit the events into her schedule.

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Ari Melber writes for The Nation, where this post first appeared. He is covering the YearlyKos convention in Chicago, and serves on the volunteer advisory committee to the convention's leadership forum.