The World is Your Classroom (from Phil)

If anyone needed a reminder that the whole world is watching any time you post a blog entry, a member of our class posted the following comment and got a reply.......from the author of the book himself!

Here is the original post on the blog "Mediated Preference":

The internet is not a library!

Vaidhyanathan makes some statements about culture, but I just don't agree with the characterization of culture. Perhaps he is just a bit more optimistic and focused than I.

I can't accept culture as something that seems as if it organized upon anarchy. Why? It lacks rejection of a certain principle that I feel is of the utmost importance. One of this and that (and even the other thing). I agree with Vaidhyanathan in the desire for cultural openness, fluidity, and openness, this anti-imperialist impulse has been accepted for years (until the Bush Doctrine).

The need for a pluralist view of cultures and values is, I feel, essential to open societies. Culture acts as an organizing principle for people. The culture to which one belongs determines rights and wrongs. What is due and what is owed. Herder said that culture offers a "center of gravity" which may now be, for us, civic republicanism in governance.

Here is the reply by Prof. Vaidhyanathan himself:

Hey, thanks for those insights.

I think it's important to suspend our usual perjorative notions of anarchy when considering how culture works. Anarchy is organization. It's just a particular kind of democratic organization. It's corruptable and riggable, as culture is.

I look forward to more comments on my book!

It is great to know that someone as internationally famous as Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of many books and articles, including Anarchist in the Library, is reading our student blogs and taking the time to comment. Welcome, Prof. Vaidhyanathan, and congratulations, "Mediated Preference"!

Benefits and Risks (from Phil)

I remember typing term papers in the 1960s and 70s on typewriters like some of those you see in the glass cases on the ground floor of the GSPM building. Back then, we used "WhiteOut" to correct mistakes and carbon paper to make extra copies. Today, I write with the assistance of word processors and laserjet printers.

When I first started writing newspaper stories in the 1970s, I had to go to the library to look up background material and to find the latest issues of current magazines and newspapers. After I finished writing my stories, I had to call them in to my editor and read them so that she could re-type them. If we were on a tight deadline, I would run the story over to her house or, in a later development, use a fax machine to send over a copy. Today, I do almost all of my research online, and send my articles in with the touch of a button on my computer.

New technologies obviously have had a big impact on my life, and they probably will have a comparably big impact on your future endeavors, whether in politics or in any other field.

The best way to stay current with these new technologies is to do what each of you has been doing for the last ten weeks: stretch a bit to get yourself up to the cutting edge, and then remain there by creating a network of colleagues who can share the task of constantly reinventing yourself in the context of technological change.

While we have been emphasizing the positive aspects of these technological changes, we would be remiss if we did not also remind you that the great power of technological innovation also carries some risks. The loss of privacy that we have discussed does not have to come at the hands of an over-intrusive government or data-mining corporate empire. It also can happen through something as simple as leaving a memory stick, laptop, or Blackberry in the cab as you race for your flight at Dulles.

According to surveys discussed in the Washington Post, "160,000 portable devices are left in [Chicago] taxicabs every year," and "37 percent of smart-phone users store confidential business data on their phones" while "only 40 percent of those surveyed worked at companies that have corporate policies about wireless security."

Password protection is important, and the ability to remotely destroy the data on your cell phone if it is lost sounds like a good idea. These safeguards, however, are just physical reminders of the bigger issue we all should be confronting as we embark on our careers as political technologists: How will technology be used? By whom? For what cause? And with what safeguards?

Is Prof. Lessig right when he predicts that "Powerful conglomerates are swiftly using both law and technology to 'tame' the Internet, transforming it from an open forum for ideas into nothing more than cable television on speed?"

Have a good summer, and thanks for a great semester!

This cost me over $80,000

I tried telling you in class. I wrote you emails individually. I posted it in the requirements. But no luck.

I can't believe I am sitting here grading end-of-term work that has not been spellchecked. In the future, when you are professionals responsible for producing online communications, you will lose credibility if your work contains typos that a simple spellcheck could correct.

How can I get you to run spellcheck? I've almost run out of ideas. I finally decided to fork out big bucks for a celebrity endorsement. I sincerely hope this investment pays off.

We are running out of time. Please run spellcheck on your work ASAP if you have not already done so. I WILL dock for spelling errors that an online spellchecker would catch.

The final lap

I've done an initial survey of all blog work to identify students who have not yet posted the minimum number of required blogs (41 blogs minus 5 passes = 36 total). Most of you are in great shape.

There are 6 of you, however, who still need to post one or two more blogs ASAP to meet the requirement. In addition, there are a few of you who are missing more than one or two blogs. For those of you who are behind, Phil will be sending you emails individually tonight (Saturday July 23) to let you know your status re: missing assignments.

My plan is to finish grading your work this weekend and email you on Monday with the results. That will give you time to do any final corrections before I submit the grade.

Keep in mind that if you have exactly 36 blogs, you need to get 3 points on all of them to get an A on your blog work. If you have a few additional on-topic blogs (beyond the 36 minimum), those points will be added to your total blog points, which is then divided by 36. However, if all 36 of your blogs are excellent, you won't need any extra points.

A Lesson From History (from Phil)

In The Movies are Born a Child of the Phonograph, movie historian Mark Ulano noted that:

The 1870's and 1880's experienced dramatic development of technologies that were converging to make film sound possible. Conceptually, sound recording and the ability to photograph and reproduce motion pictures began intersecting at the very beginning. Since recording technology was born approximately 14 years before motion pictures, it naturally lead the way.

He quotes Edward W. Kellog, who wrote the following in the June 1955 volume of the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Television Engineers:

Edison invented the motion pictures as a supplement to his phonograph, in the belief that sound plus a moving picture would provide better entertainment than sound alone. But in a short time the movies proved to be good enough entertainment without sound. It has been said that although the motion picture and the phonograph were intended to be partners, they grew up separately. And it might be added that the motion picture held the phonograph in such low esteem that for years it would not speak. Throughout the long history of efforts to add sound, the success of the silent movie was the great obstacle to commercialization of talking pictures.

As this course draws to a close, I hope you will take away a few concepts and apply them to your lives as political technologists. Technological change is happening at a rapid pace. Not all changes are for the better. And we who value democracy must make sure that we harness the best of this new technology to empower and educate people while limiting the use of technology that can abridge freedoms or undermine democracy.

I mention the evolution of radio and moving pictures a century ago as an example of how we cannot foresee the consequences of every new technological development as it comes onto the market. We have discussed websites, blogs, email, micropayments, online video, podcasts, and many other innovations, but who can predict how these will be applied and what new ones are going to be developed? Sometimes the best you can do is to keep up with the broad trends, and dig into the specifics as your job requires it.

Today's Washington Post discusses the good and bad aspects of podcasts, and ends with an important reminder:

The most promising part about the podcast business is that, unlike radio, it has infinite room for anybody; there isn't a fixed set of channels that can be bought up by the big media conglomerates. Podcasting may be a mess, but at least it's a mess that everybody has the same access to.

Yes, the class is drawing to a close, but your education in applying technology to politics is a lifelong endeavor. Keep on blogging, keep on learning, and keep on keeping democracy and the Internet available to everyone!

Class photo from last week

Thought you'd enjoy this. Phil and I hope your final week is going well.

Click on the thumbnail below. When the image loads, use the horizontal scrollbar to see the rest of the photo.

Back by Popular Demand

Here are two extra passes for exam week.
You can use each pass only once:

To use this pass, create an empty blog entry, give it a title, and paste this code into it.

 

For this pass,
use this code.

Good luck on your exams!

 

FBI Monitored Protester Websites (from Phil)

In two recent posts I explored the implications of China restricting web access to its citizens and a private company restricting access to emails.

The Washington Post now is reporting another troubling development: the FBI conducting political surveillance on the websites of the ACLU and Greenpeace — domestic civil rights and civil liberties groups lawfully exercising their Constitutional rights to assemble and speak.

"It's increasingly clear that the government is involved in political surveillance of organizations that are involved in nothing more than lawful First Amendment activities," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "It raises very serious questions about whether the FBI is back to its old tricks."

A Sept. 4, 2003, document addressed to the FBI counterterrorism unit described plans by a group calling itself RNC Not Welcome to "disrupt" the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. It also described Internet postings from an umbrella organization known as United for Peace and Justice, which was coordinating worldwide protests against the convention.

"It's one thing to monitor protests and protest organizers, but quite another thing to refer them to your counterterrorism unit," said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice.

Pulling together some of the threads of the class, we have seen that there exist digital divides based on race, gender, class, geography, disability status, and age. Based on these latest revelations about the FBI, we can add political affiliation to this list. While the FBI denies that they are monitoring law-abiding citizens based on politics, how do we know? How can anyone know? And if we find they are subjecting us to political surveillance, what is the remedy?

Because the FBI is a public entity, certain oversight laws do apply to them. Comcast is a private sector actor, however, and so unless new regulations are enacted, there is little we can do if they arbitrarily decide to not deliver certain customer emails based on political content.

A Penny for Your Thoughts

Micropayments are a growing trend in online commerce. Until recently, the most ardent proponents of micropayment systems were web prognosticators (such as Jakob Neilsen) and struggling online artists (such as Scott McCloud). For years, they were soundly rebuked for their supposedly naive and impractical assumptions about the nature of online commerce (1998, 2003).

Meanwhile, as lesser carnivores argued about feasibility, it appears that the Tyrannosaurs finally caught a whiff of fresh meat, and are already claiming it for themselves.

Micropayment systems are fascinating, because they are an economic model that could make it easy and convenient for virtually anyone to sell services online, comparable to the way blogs allow virtually anyone to publish online. Such systems could evolve to cut out middlemen and take advantage of lowered production and distribution costs. This would allow drastic price reduction — perhaps the return of the dime novel is now impossible.

But will the established content production and distribution moguls — in publishing, media, and entertainment — simply allow the little guys to push them to the margins? How will this transformation play out, and how will it impact political fundraising?

Blogging is All-American (from Phil)

David Von Drehle of the Washington Post has written an entertaining and enlightening piece on blogs in today's Washington Post.

His hook is to bring together two women with blogs, one on the left and one on the right, and follow them around as they visit the sites in Washington. Not surprisingly, they are very opinionated and have different viewpoints on almost every issue.

Embedded in this story, however, are historical insights such as these:

Blogging is an old craft recently made new by technology. Which is only fair, because it was technology that quieted the bloggers of old. Mass "mainstream" media arose thanks to the original wireless — the radio. Before that, cities supported a wide variety of newspapers, each with a distinctive niche and bias. Then television came along on a broadcast band so narrow that only a handful of stations were licensed in each city.

These stations were quickly tied together into networks by the already dominant figures of radio — David Sarnoff of NBC (which spawned ABC) and William Paley of CBS. These networks immediately felt pressure to serve huge national audiences, so they moved to eliminate sources of controversy and signs of personality from their reports. As the evening broadcasts killed off afternoon newspapers from coast to coast, a.m. papers adopted the same goal of impersonal, unbiased, reporting for their ever-broader readership. Thus, an idea that would have struck Zenger, or Greeley or the young Hearst as madness — the notion of "objective" journalism — became the paramount goal of America's editors.

A generation after these changes were completed, the whole thing is shaky. Paley's edifice, CBS, can be discombobulated by a blog called Little Green Footballs. That's the site that smelled something fishy about purported National Guard memos deployed by anchorman Dan Rather. Technology no longer favors the big guys; the limits of the broadcast band are irrelevant in the age of cable and the Internet. And the once fat and happy morning papers are being forced to relearn the virtues of speed and verve.

In Von Drehle's view, the authors of the Federalist Papers, Bill of Rights, Free Soil newspapers, and thousands of other political tracts were paleo-bloggers. For example:

John Peter Zenger, the original hero of American journalism, was essentially a blogger. In the 1730s, he used his New York Weekly Journal to criticize the governor. Arrested and charged with libel, Zenger gloated over his acquittal in the distinctively personal voice of the blogo-sphere: "The jury returned in Ten Minutes," he wrote on the Journal's front page, "and found me Not Guilty."

This historical perspective is important, because some in the mainstream media want us to believe that their "objective" enterprise is the norm, and we swarms of blog-assisted opinionated individuals are an aberration. Well, it just ain't so.

As Von Drehle notes in his conclusion:

So, when we note that it's pretty ugly sometimes in the blogosphere, and when we observe that this country always seems to be arguing about something, it's worth adding that even the sharpest divisions tend to smooth out under the steady current of time. The culture of argument may not be ideal, but it's ours, and it beats certain alternatives. The roisterous, partisan, often mean-spirited world of the political blogs is not threatening America; for better and for worse, this is America.

[Lawrence Lessig, author of The Future of Ideas, also examines new technology in the light of our cultural history. In the next class, we will discuss his notion of "free culture" and how our shared culture is threatened as copyright restrictions expand beyond all historical precedent.]

Comcast and AfterDowningStreet (from Phil)

Here's a disturbing follow-up to the post I made yesterday describing how China limits content that its citizens can access via the Internet. Today, activists at www.afterdowningstreet.org allege that Comcast Cable company was preventing anyone using its email services from receiving an email with "www.afterdowningstreet.org" in the body of the email.

In an article posted at www.commondreams.org, David Swanson says that only after extensive testing were he and his colleagues able to locate the source of the problem, notify Comcast and its filtering company, threaten Comcast with bad publicity when they did not move fast enough, and finally move ahead with the political organizing that is the reason for being of this website (which seeks to draw attention to the Downing Street Minutes and to lobby Congress to open an investigation into whether the President has committed impeachable offenses).

According to Mr. Swanson:

Comcast effectively censors discussion of particular political topics, and impedes the ability of people to associate with each other, with absolutely no compulsion to explain itself. There is no due process. A phrase or web address is tried and convicted in absentia and without the knowledge of those involved.

This state of affairs means that anyone who wants to stifle public and quasi-private discussion of a topic can quite easily do so by generating numerous spam complaints [against a website such as www.afterdowningstreet.org]. The victims of the complaints will not be notified, made aware of the accusations against them, or provided an opportunity to defend themselves. And if the complaints prove bogus, there will be absolutely no penalty for having made them.

And this won't affect only small-time information sources. If the New York Times or CNN attempts to send people Email with a forbidden phrase, it won't reach Comcast customers or customers of any ISP using the same or similar filtering program.

As People-link.org, the company hosting the AfterDowningstreet.org website said in a public statement:

Perhaps the worst part of this development is that Comcast has been reportedly doing this without the knowledge of the managers of this website or anyone affiliated with this campaign. In fact, no Comcast customer has received any indication that email to him or her containing this url was blocked.

China and the Internet (from Phil)

Be sure to read the article by Zittrain and Palfrey on Internet Filtering in China in 2004-2005: A Country Study. It is a chilling reminder about what could happen here if government agencies are allowed to control what you can and cannot see when you surf the Web:

China's Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world. Compared to similar efforts in other states, China's filtering regime is pervasive, sophisticated, and effective. It comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control. It involves numerous state agencies and thousands of public and private personnel. It censors content transmitted through multiple methods, including Web pages, Web logs, on-line discussion forums, university bulletin board systems, and e-mail messages. Our testing found efforts to prevent access to a wide range of sensitive materials, from pornography to religious material to political dissent.

What is blocked?

[We] sought to determine the degree to which China filters sites on topics that the Chinese government finds sensitive, and found that the state does so extensively. Chinese citizens seeking access to Web sites containing content related to Taiwanese and Tibetan independence, Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama, the Tiananmen Square incident, opposition political parties, or a variety of anti-Communist movements will frequently find themselves blocked. Despite conventional wisdom, though, [we] found that most major American media sites, such as CNN, MSNBC, and ABC, are generally available in China (though the BBC remains blocked). Moreover, most sites we tested in our global list's human rights and anonymizer categories are accessible as well. While it is difficult to describe this widespread filtering with precision, our research documents a system that imposes strong controls on its citizens' ability to view and to publish Internet content.

I guess this corroborates the view by some of us in this country that the U.S. news media is more entertainment than news. {:-)

How does the news get filtered or blocked?

Unlike the filtering systems in many other countries, China's filtering regime appears to be carried out at various control points and also to be dynamic, changing along a variety of axes over time. This combination of factors leads to a great deal of supposition as to how and why China filters the Internet. These complexities also make it very difficult to render a clear and accurate picture of Internet filtering in China at any given moment.

To read more on this topic, visit the website of Human Rights in China, one of the U.S.-based groups mentioned in the Zittrain and Palfrey article. They have an especially useful section on Technology and Human Rights.

More on Blogs (from Phil)

The Washington Post continues to remind us that political blogs are having an impact on Virginia's political races.

The Post also has a good cautionary piece on how writing too much online can cost you your job or disrupt your life in other ways if you don't think though the ramifications of what you are posting in a public space.

Some also speculate that more scandalous blog entries — especially those about partying and dating exploits — will have ramifications down the road.

"I would bet that in the 2016 election, somebody's Facebook entry will come back to bite them," Steve Jones, head of the communications department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says, referring to thefacebook.com, a networking site for college students and alumni that is something of a cross between a yearbook and a blog.

The second Post article also reminds us that the students in this class are in the top tenth when it comes to having their own blogs:

More traditional blog sites — which allow easy creation of a Web site with text, photos and often music — include Xanga, LiveJournal and MySpace. And they've gotten more popular in recent years, especially among the younger set.

Surveys completed in recent months by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that nearly a fifth of teens who have access to the Web have their own blogs. And 38 percent of teens say they read other people's blogs.

By comparison, about a tenth of adults have their own blogs and a quarter say they read other people's online journals.

Congratulations!

Jerry Kang's "Cyber-race" (from Phil)

UCLA Law Professor Jerry Kang wrote a fascinating article a few years ago in the Harvard Law Review (Volume 113, page 1131, 2000), where he takes us to a place BEYOND the "digital divide" questions we will be exploring tomorrow night. Instead of just asking who has access to computer technology, Prof. Kang asks:

Can cyberspace change the way that race functions in American society?

Here is the abstract from the article:

Professor Jerry Kang starts his analysis with a social-cognitive account of American racial mechanics that centers the role of racial schemas. These schemas consist of racial categories, rules of racial mapping that place individuals into these categories, and racial meanings associated with each category. He argues that cyberspace can disrupt racial schemas because it alters the architecture of both identity presentation (enabling racial anonymity and pseudonymity) and social interaction (enabling increased interracial interactions). Thus, cyberspace presents society with three design options: abolition, which challenges racial mapping by promoting racial anonymity; integration, which reforms racial meanings by promoting interracial social interaction; and transmutation, which disrupts the very notion of fixed racial categories by promoting racial pseudonymity (or "cyber-passing"). After analyzing each option's merits, Professor Kang concludes that society need not adopt a single, uniform design strategy for all of cyberspace. Instead, society can embrace a policy of digital diversification, which explicitly zones different cyber spaces according to different racial environments. For example, most market places could be zoned abolition, whereas most social spaces could be zoned integration. By encouraging a diversified policy portfolio, society can exploit synergies created by flexible zoning while avoiding policy lock-in. Although cyberspace is no panacea for the racial conflicts and inequality that persist, it offers new possibilities for furthering racial justice that should not be wasted.

We have a lot to cover in class, with Prof. Carol Darr discussing "The Influentials;" a video on how a blind, deaf, and quadriplegic student use their computers; and then a discussion of the many ways we are digitally-divided. Whether or not we get to Jerry Kang's analysis, however, be sure to read it and think about how new media can do more than address the political issues that are the focus of this class.

Racism and the Digital Divide (from Phil)

Prof. Paul Gorski of Hamline University addresses what he calls the "Three Dimensions of Racism and the Digital Divide in Education" on his website at the Multicultural Pavilion.

The digital divide is understood too often as simple gaps in rates of physical access to computer and Internet technology. In order to work effectively to dismantle the digital divide, we must understand it first and foremost as a symptom of larger forms of oppression, power, and privilege.

The racial digital divide is a symptom of systemic racism. This is why attempts to solve it simply by adding more computers and Internet access to classrooms and other public places has not worked. The dismantling of the racial digital divide must include, at the very least, an examination of three dimensions of the divide within a larger framework of systemic racism: gaps in physical access, gaps in pedagogical access, and gaps in cultural access.

Here are examples Prof. Gorski uses to illustrate his points:

I. Gaps in Physical Access

Classrooms in schools in which 50 percent or more of the student population are students of color are less likely than classrooms in other schools to have Internet access. By 2001, about 80 percent of the former and 90 percent of the latter had Internet access (NCES, 2002).

II. Gaps in Pedagogical Access

Teachers in schools in which 50 percent or more of the students are People of Color are less likely to have received training in use of the Internet (70 percent compared to 85 percent) and are less likely to have assistance in use of the Internet (65 percent compared to 80 percent) than their colleagues at schools with lower populations of Students of Color (NCES, 2002).

III. Gaps in Cultural Access

Latino men, ages 25-54, spend on average 28 percent less time on the Internet than the average man in that age group. African American men spend 32 percent less time on the Internet than the average (CyberAtlas, 2002).

As graduates of the GSPM, you will be running campaigns and using technology to help legislators become more effective. How will issues of disproportionately less access to the Internet and new media tools in some communities affect your work?

Imagine

London tonight

Bloggers of Color (from Phil)

On May 11 of this year, Christabel Nsiah-Buadi wrote a provocative piece in the online version of New York's Amsterdam News. Here are a few quotes from the article, entitled Bloggers of Color Underrepresented by Mainstream Media:

Some people say that the bloggers who appear on TV and radio are the best of the crop and choose not to question the lack of diversity. They justify this theory by claiming that blogging is democratic in nature — people can publish what they like and people can read what they like. So the best writers will naturally gain more prominence.

But surely not all the best bloggers are white and male? When asked why there is so little diversity, members of the bloggers network www.brownbloggers.com agreed that the lack of non-white representation was the result of a lack of media control and because, as one respondent put it, "White America thinks that what brown bloggers write about doesn’t apply to them...."

But [others] concede that another reason for the poor representation of blogger-pundits of color in the mainstream media might be because there really are fewer career bloggers of color right now. [One expert] cites less money, time and access to technology as a few reasons for this, and says communities of color need to empower their technically savvy grassroots movements if we want to have a voice in the future.

My own sense, after more than 25 years of civil rights work and many years of online advocacy work, is that the answer is always more complicated than either "racist exclusion" on the one hand or "blame the victim" on the other. Less time, money, and access to resources are definitely part of the problem in poorer communities (which, unfortunately, overlap with browner communities in this country). But I also have seen instances where self-defeating behaviors have made websites for women and people of color less effective than they could be.

We will explore these and similar questions in class next week. If you are so inclined, please explore these questions here or on your own blogs.

Strategically Planning for Influentials (from Phil)

Keller and Berry's Book, The Influentials, describes eleven ways they could spot an "influential" — that one-in-ten person who convinces others to vote, buy, visit, and otherwise get going. You can also find this list on page 6 of the Putting Online Influentials To Work For Your Campaign by Carol Darr and Julie Barko of IPDI.

A person qualifies as an "influential" if they participated in even three of these activities in the last year:
• Attended a public meeting on town or school affairs.
• Wrote or called a politician at the local, state or national level.
• Served on a committee for some local organization.
• Served as an officer for some club or organization.
• Attended a political rally, speech or organized protest of any kind.
• Wrote a letter to the editor or called a live radio or TV show to express their opinions.
• Were active members of any group that tries to influence public policy or government.
• Made a speech.
• Worked for a political party.
• Wrote an article for a magazine or newspaper.
• Held or ran for political

Prof. Darr will be coming to class next week to tell us more about the Influentials, but, even before hearing her talk, you should be taking Influentials into consideration in your Strategic Planning Memo. Please share your thoughts here or on your blogs.

Blogs and Virginia Politics (from Phil)

Who says real life and the classroom don't overlap once in a while? The Washington Post has a feature story today on how blogs are affecting the Virginia electoral season.

Especially funny was how a blog was set up called "NotLarrySabato," which is "a dig at the frequency with which Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, appears in mainstream media." Completing the online-offline synergy we cherish in this class, Prof. Sabato even went on the blog to make a posting. It doesn't get better than that!

Virginia's electoral season is also starting to make the mainstream blogs, as in this Virginia election news roundup on DailyKos. Let us know if there are other resources so we can post them and help your classmates as they complete their Strategic Plan Memos.

Strategic Plan Memo Requirements (from Phil)

The requirements for your Strategic Plan Memo have been sent to each of you via email. Please check your email inbox. If you have questions, please drop us a note.

For tomorrow's class, you will both send via email and bring a hard copy of your 1-2 page analysis of the online activities that were done well or poorly by your assigned campaign or organization. Also, be prepared for an interesting discussion, as Professor Johnson will be there to discuss the use of new media on Capitol Hill, and Joel Segal of Rep. Conyers's office will describe how his work has changed over the years as new media tools have become available.

Hope you had a good holiday weekend. See you in class!

Phil's thoughts on Congressional Blogs

The Congressional Management Foundation has just released a new report on "How Congress Uses Blogs." Be sure to check it out before Prof. Johnson speaks to our class next Tuesday.

Among the highlights are five types of blogs that are being used by our legislators:

• The Travel blog, useful for officials making international trips


• The Blow-by-blow blog, which provides up-to-date details on specific legislative fights


• The Personal blog, which tells constituents what is going on in Washington or in the district


• The Third-party blog, which allows legislators to reach an audience via websites such as DailyKos without having to host their own blogs


• The Team blog, which allows an entire party or delegation to reach a home state audience.

Are there any other types of blogs you have seen in your interactions with Congress or state legislators?