Wired’s Sarah Lai Stirland picked up on a revealing micro-scandal a couple of days ago: Obama supporter Lawrence Lessig has been getting beaten up on Redstate.com and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show over a video he’s used as a mashup example in presentations. The crime? The clip depicts a somewhat swishy Jesus singing “I Will Survive” before a dramatic run-in with a bus proves otherwise (note that the RedState author immediately jumps to the conclusion that this Jesus is gay — musical numbers are always a dead giveaway).
Jake Tapper’s smoke detector goes off at ABC News. “That fact simply highlights a growing narcissistic disease within the campaign press corps in which members increasingly see themselves as central players in the unfolding political production. Specifically, with regard to the Democratic primary, the press clearly views itself as the third candidate on the stage.”
NetSquared has been holding a little contest of late to promote the use of data mashups as tools for the betterment of life and society, and the 21 finalists might give you a few ideas about how an advocacy or communications campaign can use mashups to make information accessible to people who aren’t total data nerds.
Many of the finalists use mapping layers, such as a project devoted to the preservation of linguistic diversity and another that tracks threatened houses in New Orleans, while others involve social networking tools, video or rss feeds. Bonus: Cisco’s a sponsor, and the 21 projects will share a $100,000 grant. Pretty cool stuff all around — for those of us who aren’t numbers or software people, it can be hard to envision exactly HOW data can tell a story, so being able to see concrete examples is a help.
Greetings from New Orleans and the Nonprofit Technology Conference, where e.politics is bearing up nobly under the strain of going to fantastic cities and hanging out with bright and interesting people. Rough life, I know
As a takeaway for the participants in our online advocacy panel on Friday, below are a ton of articles on various aspects of the question of spreading a message and working to change politics and policy online.
Yay, Super Tuesday, the most wonderful time of the year. The following Hits will be updated throughout the day. See also yesterday’s list.
Update: Just got a Drudge Siren email alert, and apparently Obama is “large” in the exit polls. It’s gonna be an interesting night; I’m off to the parties.
Update:Primary Jam. Excellent WSJ interactive guide to this year’s primary election pile-up, and a good demonstration of how to present information with technology.
Facebook Used to Mobilize Against FARC. “In Colombia, a Facebook page dedicated to protesting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, that country’s largest rebel group, is helping organize thousands of people in cities around the world for demonstrations.”
Lots of Super Tuesday cell phone sounds at RingTones08.
Friday Fun comes a day early this week, with a terrific video mashup courtesy of the CamPain2008 YouTube channel. Excellent work! It doesn’t tell us much about the political world, but that does nothing to detract from a standalone piece of genius.
Well, let me take back what I just wrote, because this video DOES tell us something significant about the political world: that it’s no longer an isolated part of our discourse, standing apart from the other endeavors with which we distract or enlighten ourselves. Politics is a part of pop culture, so a guy like Barack Obama can become a pop culture icon. Of course, you’ve got to have the right je nais se quois je ne sais quoi — can you imagine a similar piece featuring Chris Dodd or Tom Tancredo? Sure, but only with a healthy dose of irony. Via How The World Works.
A friend told me that the song is called “Chori Chori Gori Se” and it’s a love song. So, I guess it’s a take off on the Obama Girl video.
And…
A friend found a Chori Chori video with English subtitles. This song has a
lot of versions, remixes etc. It’s also in an english movie called the
Guru.
Two new sites popped up today that take very different yet effective approaches to advocacy. First, the serious side: the new CARMA.org site (Carbon Monitoring for Action) defaults to showing you the worst power plants in the world from a global warming perspective, but it’ll also let you find your own power provider and take a look at their plants’ emissions. Because the folks behind the site (the Center for Global Development) used a Google Maps interface, you can easily drill down to each plant and pop up data about how much power and pollution it puts out. Start adding those numbers up and it gets frightening fast.
Next up: satire, the highest art form, as the folks behind the Predatory Lending Association have figured out. Want to know the advantages of predatory lending over indentured servitude? Find out here! Need racial profiling tools? Try these! Quite clever — note the Military Loan Finder map application on the site front page that hooks you up with payday loan establishments clustered near military bases. The nice thing from an advocacy point of view is that both the hard-data and humor/satire approach can work if they’re done right. In these two cases, I think they were.
Update: After I finished this article, my NET intern Alicia LaPorte bombarded me with emails about the End Mountaintop Removal site, which also has great map features, video and a Willie Nelson song (can’t hardly beat that). It’s now her most favoritest advocacy site of all time.
The Sunlight Foundation has just put Google Earth to an excellent advocacy purpose: letting us follow the (budgetary) money. As the Foundation’s Gabriela Schneider writes:
Mashing up Google Earth and with the companies, universities and nonprofit recipients of earmarks in the House Defense Appropriations bill (available from Sunlight and Taxpayers for Common Sense on EarmarkWatch.org), citizens can get a bird’s eye view of where members of Congress are shipping our defense dollars, and zoom in close on recipients. Each plotted earmark links to a corresponding page on http://EarmarkWatch.org so you can investigate the earmark to determine whether it addresses pressing needs, favors political contributors or is simply pure pork. You can search for earmarks by city, state or zip code.
Now, Google Earth’s just about the most fun online tool to play with (Zoom in! Zoom out! Zoom in! Zoom out! Repeat as necessary), but this is a good example of the serious uses to which it can be put. Earmarks are those little “extras” that congressmembers slip into appropriations bills and are the eternal bane of budget hawks. Since they’re outside the normal budgetary process, publicity is often their worst enemy, and Google Earth really lets you see how they’re distributed in a way that text alone can’t. Let’s look at an example, courtesy of a couple of screen-captures and some Photoshop magic:
Here’s an interesting little feature that the Biden campaign has just started using — a tool that can combine several video clips into a single embed, even if they originate on different video hosting sites. Instead of displaying just one clip at a time, a Searchles channel embed creates an array of videos from which people can choose. Most significantly, once the content is embedded in a page, it will automatically update as new videos are added to the channel. This creates a widget-like way to actively push new content out to supporters’ sites, which makes a Searchles channel much more than just a video mashup tool.
The Searchles site is a hybrid — it combines elements of search engines, Digg, Del.icio.us and social networking sites (Searchles = search circles, get it?) to help refine the information that people receive. The video channel feature that Biden’s folks are using is a relatively new addition: the Searchles guys saw that no one else was aggregating video content in this way and decided to give it a shot. The result seems as though it should be useful for any campaign or organization trying to push content out to supporters or to any series of sites that would be a pain to update one-at-a-time. One important detail: a Searchle channel will take video from outside websites including YouTube, Google video and blip.tv.
One of Biden’s channels is below, and you can also see it embedded on his own site. Note that this isn’t Biden’s first video innovation — I’m still a fan of the concept behind his Head2Head site.
To see all of Biden’s Searchles channels, follow this link. A handy little tool — video podcasters might want to give it a shot.
Guest article! Troy Schneider makes the point that new tools let advocacy groups create sophisticated online information presentations, the kind of data- and graphics-rich applications that news organizations have employed to really make a point jump out at a reader. Troy should know of what he speaks: he’s been around the online political world since the halcyon days of PoliticsNow (ah, the mid-90s…) before jumping over to National Journal, where he served as Editor at NationalJournal.com and as Managing Director for Electronic Publishing at the parent Atlantic Media Company. Nowadays, he’s New Media Editor at the New America Foundation, where he’s putting these ideas into practice. Pull you up a chair and hear what he has to say:
Why Think Tanks and Nonprofits Should Be Thinking Like (New Media) Newsrooms
Earlier this year, the topic of media outlets bringing programmers into the newsroom generated some interesting discussion (from Tim O’Reilly, Mark Glaser, and others). As O’Reilly put it, “the various jobs of journalism — gathering news, exercising editorial judgment, and presenting the story — can all be augmented by programming. In the new world of network-enabled information gathering and dissemination, programming is as critical a skill as writing and photography.”
In addition to launching a public policy blog, Google is also staffing up its Washington lobbying operation, according to Frank Davies at the San Jose Mercury News. The company is focusing on defending its actions in China, using the regulatory system to “encourage” rivals such as Microsoft to make changes in business practices, defending its acquisition of companies such as DoubleClick from anti-trust accusations, and working to open government information to searches.
Google’s also working directly with Congressional offices to help them use the company’s tools, a development previewed at Google VP Elliott Schrage’s presentation at this year’s Politics Online conference. And its employees are contributing strategically to candidates:
As presidential candidates make the high-visibility pilgrimage to the “Googleplex” in Mountain View, contributions from Google employees quietly help boost the campaigns of congressional candidates. Early donations are important to give “momentum” to candidates who support “an open Internet,” company lobbyist Jamie Brown explained.
With a new K Street office, new Republican lobbyists on retainer to balance the company’s traditional tilt toward Democrats, and an expanded portfolio of issues, Google’s getting into political advocacy in a big way. If you were at Politics Online or the Personal Democracy Forum conference this year, you definitely saw some of the results — Google’s brand was everywhere. One thing they’re not doing, though, as Micah Sifrey points out, is leveraging their huge customer base. But that may only be a matter of time.
In a brilliant combination of technologies, Amnesty International is mixing regularly updated commercial satellite reconnaissance imagery with the web to crowdsource the monitoring of twelve selected villages in the Darfur region of Sudan.
The organization’s new Eyes on Darfur site collects recent satellite imagery of at-risk villages with detailed reports of the threats each faces. The photos will be updated every few days, allowing policymakers, journalists and the public to keep watch on villages in close-to-real time. The photos have good enough resolution to show vehicles, buildings, walls, vegetation — or massed soldiers. Another section of the site has archived photos of damaged or destroyed villages, along with slideshows of damage, video of atrocities and text reports on what happened. And of course, the site encourages visitors to take action by contacting government officials (though as my friend Burt Edwards pointed out when I showed the site to him, emails to the Sudanese president are probably not so effective).
The presentation is overall very impressive — one of the better uses of Flash to create a rich media environment I’ve seen. A hell of a job, and I hope it gets seen widely. The first military reconnaissance satellite launched just shy of 50 years ago; its designers could never have guessed that ordinary citizens from around the world would be using its descendents to try to save villages in a remote region of Africa.
Amateur charge infuriates blogosphere. “Millions and millions of exuberant monkeys … are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity” (e.politics is proud to be doing its part).
A Monday night segment on viral video on NPR’s Marketplace got me thinking: are we really ready for the sheer volume of political video that’s going to be unleashed over the next 18 months? Think about it: when the presidential campaigns are joined by senatorial, congressional, gubernatorial, state legislative, mayoral, etc etc etc, campaigns, all down to the level of local school board candidates, everybody just step back — this thing’s going to get huge. Add in the video clips created by media outlets, interest groups and citizens, and the amount of political video available is going to be mind-boggling — we have to assume that the number of clips related to the ‘08 elections will rise into the millions or tens of millions.
So, what happens in that kind of world? As political video becomes a mass commodity, what trends of the wider video world will it follow — i.e., will all candidates have to become unbearably cute kittens? (Might be a particularly hard stretch for John McCain.) Some predictions: (more…)
