I’m at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in NYC today and tomorrow, so e.politics is on an irregular publishing schedule (“erratic” is a better word, in many ways). If you’re here, look me up.
– cpd
May 18th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
The major presidential campaigns have put tons of effort into creating websites, building their own social networks, creating online videos and reaching out to voters through Facebook and MySpace, but they’re so far mostly ignoring a simple and effective tool to help their supporters find volunteers, raise money and spread messages: web widgets.
Widgets are little snippets of HTML code that you can drop into a page, a blog post or a blog template to add a rich feature. For instance, the ChipIn widget lets you embed a donations collection tool into your site to support your own custom fundraising campaign, and many online publishers offer widgets that display headlines of recent stories. Widgets have a social media component as well, in that they can often spread from one site to another via a “get this widget for your site” link.
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8 comments May 16th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
If you’re in New York this weekend or looking for an excuse to head to the Big City, why not check out the second day of the Personal Democracy Forum Conference, the unConference, on Saturday? It’s a very cool idea — rather than the usual canned presentations by Big Names, it’s you and me passing information back and forth in discussions that we choose to put on. The unConference is a self-organizing community, which is about as Web 2.0 as you’re going to get. And, it’s only $35, which includes lunch (mmmmmm, lunch).
So come on out, whether or not you’re planning to go to PDF’s main event on Friday — I guaran-damn-tee you it’ll be worth it, if you’re into this crazy online politics stuff at all. I went to something similar put on by the New Organizing Institute soon after the ’06 elections, and it was like a summer camp for online advocacy nerds. I.e., a hoot and a half. Come up and say howdy if you’re there, and be sure to thank organizer Nancy Scola, who’s a badass and is working her heart out to make this thing happen.
Add comment May 15th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
[Update: The Politico's James Joyner responds.]
Guest article! My good friend and colleague Burt Edwards has a bone to pick with a recent Politico article, and he’s not afraid to do it in public for your amusement. Be warned — if you’re going to portray your publication as being for political insiders, you’d better write something other than the bland and blatantly obvious. Take it away, Burt:
I hate to pick on Politico.com, but I found their recent article on Netiquette: How to Befriend a Blogger a bit…lacking. I give them kudos for putting some thoughts out there on a subject that has drawn much debate in the public affairs community as of late; however, I found the seven listed “tips to make sure you’re reaching bloggers most efficiently” was walking the line between obvious and odd — “odd,” as in, “disturbingly oblivious to what I think most of us would consider standard good public affairs practices”.
3 comments May 14th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Michael Scherer has an excellent article in Salon today on a significant way that the Internet is altering the pace and direction of political campaigns, while also subtly changing the role of political journalists, not for the better. To boil it down, the growth of blogs and alternative journalistic outlets (Drudge Report, etc.) has given political opposition researchers a huge number of new avenues to distribute dirt or distracting information about a rival while still maintaining their own anonymity. In the process, political reporters risk losing their investigative role in favor of being channels for stories that campaigns are driving behind the scenes. Some excerpts:
Though reporters, and blogs like the Drudge Report, take credit for scoops, the news of the day is more often than not produced by the invisible hand of one campaign or another.
…
Add comment May 14th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Hey kids! Sorry to be AWOL the last couple of days, but things have been a little nuts around here. Since Tuesday, I’ve launched two brand-new sites for my day job at National Environmental Trust while also fixing bugs in third site that went live last week. Plus sending out a couple of action alerts and similar excitement. Whew! I’m one tired puppy — time for a beer (or ten).
Some news on the e.politics front — if you’re going to the Personal Democracy Forum conference in NYC next week, look for me meandering around the halls. I found out this week that I received a Google Scholarship to the conference, no doubt because of my striking looks and great personal virtue (hah!), so I’ll be going without having to shell out $$$ for the privilege. Ah, the difficult life of a Famous Blogger — will someone please come feed me grapes as I recline on a couch?
Shameless promotion: those projects that just launched? The one I finished a few minutes ago is a contest to rename Glacier National Park now that global warming is melting the ice (let’s see some creative entries from the e.politics crowd, eh?). Earlier in the week, I finished popping out a quick brochureware site for a new coalition campaign on mining law reform (sexy stuff, yup) — designed on Tuesday, built on Wednesday! Finally, last week we tossed a new site into the water to help a woman who’s canoeing up the U.S. east coast from Miami to Maine to highlight ocean conservation. It’s based on a blog platform that’s tailored for oceanic and mountaineering expeditions and which will take blog posts from a Treo/Blackberry or a satellite phone. Next site: god only knows, but I guarantee that it’ll be 1) incredibly, amazingly, incomprehensibly urgent, and 2) more complicated than the project organizers think. Gotta love this job.
– cpd
Add comment May 11th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
[Cross-posted at TechPresident.]
Tameka Kee with MediaPost asked an excellent question yesterday when we were emailing about her recent article on the Post’s online political coverage: what about the Yahoo/Huffington Post/Slate online debates: revolutionary, over-hyped, or just what we need?
My answer: business as usual for the world of the ‘net, since just about any media presentation we can think of is eventually going to migrate online, at least as an experiment. In this case, I’m not too confident that the results are going to be satisfying — I can think of few things more excruciatingly boring than staring at a bunch of talking heads in suits for an hour in a tiny window on my computer screen. People seem to like to consume online video in short bursts, not the marathon viewing session that a debate requires. In other words, streaming is SO broadcast-era. But if debates are a product of the television age, what would the Internet equivalent be?
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1 comment May 8th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
IPDI’s Julie Barko Germany dropped a bit of a bomb into a sun-drenched over-coffee conversation a few minutes ago: the folks at the Institute are operating under the assumption that candidates at all levels will raise and spend between $12 billion and $15 billion total in the 2008 U.S. election cycle, up from $4-5 billion in the 2004 elections. Considering how much money the presidential candidates have raised in the first quarter of this year alone, numbers this large shouldn’t be surprising — though I can’t help but be a little shocked (that’s a lot of money).
So, how to spend the cash? TV will get the bulk of it, since it’s still the medium of choice for reaching uncommitted voters, but already in ’04, some major media markets were essentially saturated with campaign ads — there wasn’t room for more commercials even if campaigns had been able to buy them. Maybe a little of the sugar will land in the Internet this time around? Let’s hope — baby needs a new pair of shoes, after all. And political campaigns so far have lagged behind commercial advertisers in the percentage of their outreach budgets spent online. More on that later.
– cpd
Add comment May 7th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
– cpd
1 comment May 7th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
This weekend, Lawrence Lessig and others reported that CNN will release the footage of two upcoming presidential debates for use by the public, in a victory for information freedom and citizen-generated content. Lessig and compatriots in the academic and political worlds had been pushing for networks to set the video free for everyone to use without restrictions; this is a big step forward. Ladies and gentlemen, start your editing software…
– cpd
Add comment May 7th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Something else hit me about the digital rights protest song “Oh Nine, Eff Nine” — as a social phenomenon, it’s both inextractably embedded in the structure of a new medium AND a continuation of a tradition that’s probably as old as language.
First, it’s a piece of music intended to make a political point about a modern conflict, one inherent in the nature of networked digital communications — authors and copyright holders have long profited from creative works by charging to distribute them, but in a digital world, books, music and movies can be made in unlimited copies and shared essentially for free.
Add comment May 5th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
I just a call from Waldo Tibbetts, formerly the online ad sales guru at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, who’s resigned his Post gig this week to take a position at The Politico. The new publication has already stirred up the Washington media world by grabbing top talent on the editorial side; now they’re moving in on the business side as well. You can imagine the frantic scrambling at WPNI as the guy who’s been working with their political advertisers for eight years walks out the door…you can wipe his contacts database, but you can’t keep him from taking those kinds of personal relationships with him as he goes. Waldo had already been experimenting with some fascinating advertising targeting strategies, so let’s see what he can do working for a publication that seems not to mind taking some risks and is focused on building a niche audience of political influentials.
– cpd
Add comment May 4th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
What is this man singing about? What is that bizarre string of numbers and why is it printed on candy hearts? If you haven’t been following the recent saga of the online crusade to distribute the magic code used to crack hi-def video disks, you’ve missed a fascinating example of distributed, uncoordinated citizen action to make a political point. In other words, civil disobedience, Web 2.0-style!
It started back in February, when a someone cracked movie-playing software and extracted the short string of numbers used in the encryption scheme for Blu-ray and HD DVD discs. With this code and the right equipment, you can break into and copy hi-def video disks with wild abandon. The hacker posted the code online, and it quickly spread through tech-oriented blogs and news sites such as Slashdot and Digg. Cease-and-desist letters were sure to follow and did, but Digg faced a reader revolt when it pulled stories featuring the code and made headlines when it backed down before the (unruly, unwashed) mob.
Now, the dam has broken, the genie is out of the bottle, the horses have left the barnyard and the cliches are tripping over each other in their eagerness to describe the significance of what we’ve just seen. The fun part is the vast range of ways people have managed to work the code into online presentations that’ll be quite hard to track down and squash with a Google text search, ranging from the song above (listen for the nice bass part at the end), which has been mashed-up with lots of video presentations, to some interestingly weird still imagery. And, it seems that this initial hack has encouraged the devious to look for other ways to break hi-def’s copy protection, at least one of which may be unbeatable. Power to the people, baby — it’s damn hard for censorship to survive in a world where millions of us have very tall rooftops from which to shout. And, if your business model depends on being able to control the physical copies of a digital file, you might want to think about some other ways to make money off of human creativity.
See also: Oh Nine, Eff Nine: Strategic Mnemonic and Protest Song for a New Medium
– cpd
2 comments May 4th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
[Update: My dad just reminded me that he had essentially the same idea as MapLight...about 11 years ago. Always ahead of your time, eh? Wait until I tell these kids about your open-source machine tool project — that'll blow some minds.]
“Coming soon to a blog near you: Ajax widgets that track the effects of campaign contributions on congressional votes.” A few days ago, Wired News published a great look at the potential of data mashups to give people new chances to keep tabs on elected officials and on the influence of industries and interest groups. The article focuses on one particular application called MapLight, which tracks the influence of money on California politics and which is about to go national in partnership with OpenSecrets.org:
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Add comment May 3rd, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
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