e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Newt Gingrich Moves to Silicon Valley, Misses the Online Point

Newt Gingrich is moving to Silicon Valley! At least, part of his American Solutions organization is: the nonprofit is setting up a “technology headquarters” near the Stanford Linear Accelerator (e.politics is jealous — we want a death ray in our backyard, too). An American Solutions blogger touts the value of being so close to the perpetual nursery of new technology:

“We’ve established an office in Silicon Valley because we want to be in the middle of innovation and entrepreneurship and gain firsthand knowledge of the latest technological developments that will continue to change online politics. In short, we want to utilize new technologies that will help us communicate and organize more effectively — before it becomes a trend.”

Um, yeah. Newt, let’s you and me go grab a drink sometime and chat about the distributed nature of online communications.

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Add comment February 27th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

On the Unintended Consequences of Google Alerts and Pro Wrestling

I now know more about the career of a certain WWE wrestler than I ever expected. You see, we (almost) share a name, since I am Colin Delany and he is Colin Delaney, and our lives are fundamentally intertwined online.

To keep track of what you kids are saying behind my back, I have a Google Alert set up on my name and its most common misspelling (along with alerts on “online politics,” “epolitics” and the names of reporters who frequently write about this stuff). For the first year or so, no problem at all — “Colin Delany” is not exactly a common name, so almost all of the alert messages were on-target. But sometime in the past year, young “Colin Delaney” has become a rising star in the WWE universe, and the high volume of writing about him online is filling my inbox with quotes like this: “Colin Delaney is the epitome of a man with a dream who will stop at nothing to achieve it.”

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4 comments February 27th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us