Press Control Shift

Politics Faces Sweeping Change Via the Web

2006-04-09T21:34:00.000-07:00

The New York Times published a piece that acknowledged the many ways the web is changing politics.

However, the power of the offline consultants over this article is still clear in quotes such as this one:

And while the Internet is efficient at reaching supporters, who tend to visit and linger at political sites, it has proved to be much less effective at swaying voters who are not interested in politics. "The holy grail that everybody is looking for right now is how can you use the Internet for persuasion," Mr. Armstrong, the Warner campaign Internet adviser, said.

I would argue that the persuasive power of the web has been used in many instances, especially where the Man (or woman), Machine, Message and Moment have come together to generate a fundraising windfall.

Politics for the iPod Generation

2006-03-04T16:05:00.000-08:00

Politics is not just about words and ideas. For an upcoming generation that takes its music seriously, politics is also about the sounds.

Pat LaMarche, running for Governor in Maine, understands the importance of inviting the younger generation into her campaign. A local musician has agreed to hold a free concert that will support the Maine Clean Elections Fund, with some of those $5 Clean Elections checks possibly going toward the 2,500 $5 checks Pat will need to qualify as a Clean Elections candidate.

To make sure as many young people come to this concert as possible, Pat has created a page on her website that features not only pictures of the singer, Dave Wooley, but also snippets of his songs on an iPod-like music player.

It's not clear how effective this will be in generating fans at the concert or $5 checks for the Clean Elections Fund, but her strategy certainly gives younger supporters a reason to visit her website and send the URL to their friends.

WikiPolitics on Capitol Hill

2006-02-04T13:15:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post reports that the ability to anonymously revise entries in the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia has proved too tempting for partisans on Capitol Hill. Wikipedia has thrived as a community-based resource that has almost a million entries in English and millions in 119 other languages, from Norwegian to Nahuatl. It's too bad that political partisans in the United States don't have more restraint and cannot stop themselves from casting aspersions on opponents in their Wikipedia entries.

Bloggers Keep MSM's Feet to the Fire

2006-01-21T13:06:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post Ombudsman, Deborah Howell, tried to tell the world that the Abramoff pay-to-play scandal was a bipartisan scandal. Unfortunately, she was caught repeating GOP talking points and refused to acknowledge that she had her facts wrong.

According to Georgia10, a blogger over at DailyKos, the Washington Post received over 700 messages trying to correct the error. Rather than face the inquiries, the blog was shut down. Washington Post Executive Editor Jim Brady lamented that although "[t]ransparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture," his paper disabled the reader comments feature on its blog "after several comments containing personal attacks, profanity and hate speech were posted."

Later, the Post put 198 of the comments back up, saying it had "blocked" or "removed" others that were profane.

Unfortunately for Ms. Howell and the Post, alert bloggers had saved the messages before the blog was taken down. Still other bloggers noticed that when the Washington Post "restored" 198 of the deleted messages, at least 42 messages had been taken out. The fascinating thing is that almost none of the 42 messages the Washington Post removed contained profanity. Read them over and decide for yourself whether profanity was the issue.

Bloggers claim the 42 deleted messages contain mainly serious, well-researched and well-reasoned queries as to why Ms. Howell was not doing her job as an independent journalist. The Post was finally forced to admit that Howell had been wrong about the Abramoff scandal being bi-partisan.

This episode illustrates three things:

Get your facts straight.

When you make an error, get a correction out there right away.

Don't try to play "hide the evidence." It is too easy to find things on the Internet.

Evaluating Political Websites

2006-01-13T08:22:00.000-08:00

Evaluating political websites for effectiveness is now being done routinely. The current Canadian election season was just evaluated by Hillwatch, an Ottawa-based company. Their report finds that many of the campaign sites are merely static billboards that have not fully utilized the interactivity possible on the web.

Sounds like a good way to summarize the campaign websites found in the U.S. during 2004. Hopefully we all can do better in the 2006 campaign season!

Jib Jab and the Humor Quotient

2005-12-20T17:00:00.000-08:00

Humor has always been a good way to get a message across. It allows you to simplify your message and reach people who might not listen if all you want to do is send facts and figures their way.

Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, the owners and creators of JibJab.com, have been especially good at finding humor in politics. Their animated cartoon, "This Land," which lampooned both Bush and Kerry, was one of the hits of the 2004 campaign season.

Now they have released their latest take on the political scene, "2-0-5," which is a two minute spoof on the travails of President Bush during 2005. It is well worth the ad and two minutes of your time.

Despite their success, the Spiridellis brothers are still in search of revenue, selling "preroll video" ads (short ads for Ford cars, for example) that play before each online viewing of its animated productions. They took eight weeks to do "This Land," and refuse to compromise on the quality or integrity of their messages, so they are both still living in rental apartments.

How will these humorous messages affect Campaign 2006? Given the deep passion on all sides of the issues these days, and the deadly serious way many of us approach the current political scene, humor will probably serve as a leavening and galvanizing tool for campaign strategists who know how to utilize it effectively.

Until then, happy holidays, everyone!

Kazzoom it!

2005-12-12T07:06:00.000-08:00

There is always some new development on the World Wide Web, but a new search engine seems far-fetched, given the popularity and usability of Google.

However, a new "turbo-charged" search engine called Kazzoom has arrived which markets itself as being able to search beneath the surface of the web to get into archives and places that Yahoo and Google might not find.

I did a search on my own name and found the usual stuff I see if I do a Google search, but then I also saw a few things I had never seen: Danish website selling Winning Campaigns Online, an old piece I had written in 2000 for Schwabonline, and copies of my articles that had been posted on websites I never heard of.

Overall, the usability of Google still has me won over, but at least I know that there is a new tool out there in case I want even more on a topic.

Splogs Bring Spam to the Blogosphere

2005-11-05T05:58:00.000-08:00

The blogs set up by the students in Emi's "Politics and the New Media" class have not been used by many of the students since the class ended. However, they continue to have postings from visitors to their blogs. Here is a typical posting:

Hey, you have a great blog here! I'm definitely going to bookmark you!

I have a freshtraffic.com targeted traffic traffic unlimited site/blog. It pretty much covers freshtraffic.com targeted traffic traffic unlimited related stuff.

Come and check it out if you get time:-)

This entry is part of a phenomenon that is known as a "splog" — a combination of the words "spam" and "blog." These thinly disguised sales pitches make comments that are unrelated or marginally related to your previous blog entry, and then attempt to steer you to another blog or website to look at cell phones, porn, video games, or whatever else they are pushing.

As the Washington Post reported, this problem is making it hard for legitimate bloggers:

Ben Popken, keeper of a blog called TheSpunker, recently searched the Internet for Swiss army knives and found himself stymied by splogs. Every time he typed in the topic on a blog search engine, he kept pulling up a site that appeared to be a legitimate blog but was filled with links to other Web sites.

How to police these robot bloggers? Some blog vendors have started requiring verification before you can create a blog or write a comment on an existing blog. Ultimately, however, the need to maintain the openness of the blogosphere necessitates that they do more. As Anne P. Mitchell, president and chief executive of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy and a law professor at the Lincoln Law School of San Jose said:

"It's rarely worth the resources and time it takes to find [splogs]. [However,] from an ethical, moral, good Internet neighbor perspective,... if they have the ability to do so, they should do so."

Blogs Going Local

2005-10-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

Daily Kos, the progressive blogsite, had a fascinating diary today from the owners of a Pacific Northwest blog. These regional blog owners acknowledge their debt to the national focus of DailyKos, but also encourage the development of regional blogs.

Their new blog, Pacific Northwest Portal, has the following features:

It syndicates thirty of the region's finest progressive blogs — thirteen each from Washington and Oregon, and four from Idaho.

Provides a directory of ALL known progressive blogs throughout the region. In addition to the 30 syndicated blogs, there are 154 others listed in the Regional Blogs Directory, for a total of 184 progressive blogs.

Provides a directory of major media outlets, with almost two hundred links to local newspapers and television/radio stations.

It provides newsfeeds searching the mainstream media for political news.

It contains a listing of all the regional Air America stations on every single page.

It displays recent business and labor news, as well as traffic and weather information.

Another innovation is a Highlights page, which is divided into two major sections — Today in the Pacific Northwest, and National Blog Headlines.

If this concept of regional portals takes off, we will know that Tip O'Neill's adage about all politics being local is true on the Internet as well!

Folksonomy

2005-10-10T19:25:00.000-07:00

According to Wikipedia, a folksonomy is:

a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams and hierarchical organization. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population's conceptual model of the information.

The most popular political blog, Daily Kos, has just started going with this collaborative system of "tagging" blog diaries and comments, which will make it easier for people to find content that is useful for them.

In the past, the creator of a website could choose the keywords that were most meaningful for them, with educated guesses as to what those searching for the website would type into Google or other search engines. Now, with Folksonomy, everyone accessing the blog can add descriptive tags. I might tag a blog entry as "Valerie Plame" and "Joe Wilson," but you can add the tags "CIA," "Karl Rove," or "Scooter Libby" if you want to.

A recent article from Wired magazine offers these tips for tagging:

Use combinations of simple tags rather than inventing complex ones. For instance, use tags CIA, LEAK and INVESTIGATION, instead of CIA-LEAK-INVESTIGATION.

Use at least two tags for each item. More tags is better (up to a point).

Try to think of what tags people might use to search for something and use those. For example, PLAME, ROVE, FITZPATRICK, NOVAK, TREASON, OUTING, OPERATIVE might all be good tags for an entry on the Valerie Plame outing.

Try to re-use existing tags.

Keep it simple. Don't use tags that are redundant.

I guess as visitors start to add tags to your websites and blogs, you will see how others view your information and how it gets categorized in their minds. This sounds like the ultimate in feedback for writers, and a great way for politicos to see if their message is being received by their target audiences.

Take the survey!

2005-10-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

The Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet at George Washington University is conducting a survey of donors who contributed to presidential primary and general election candidates in the 2004 election. The institute is particularly interested in donors who contributed $400 or less, and donors who contributed over the Internet. The survey takes about 10-15 minutes to complete.

The Institute conducts cutting-edge research that analyzes how the Internet affects American politics, with the goal of improving democracy.

Please take a minute to assist in this worthy effort. You can click on the survey here: www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=865121395347.

Watch those blog entries!

2005-09-28T10:31:00.000-07:00

Today's Washington Post reminds us how important it is to have a senior staffer monitor and approve the information posted on a candidate website. In the NYC Mayoral race between Democrat Freddy Ferrer, Republican Mike Bloomberg, and other candidates, a posting on the Ferrer website said that he was a product of public schools when in fact he was a product of Catholic schools. This is no small issue in a city where Catholic school families want to vote for one of their own, and where the public schools also have staunch defenders.

[His spokesperson] maintained that Mr. Ferrer did not write the blog entry attributed to him.

"An item submitted by Freddy Ferrer was inaccurately edited regarding Freddy's education," Nick Baldick, the campaign manager, said in a statement. "We apologize for the mistake and have corrected the entry."

Yet even that explanation was not quite right. Jen Bluestein, a spokeswoman for the Ferrer campaign, said the candidate did not submit a written item but rather "passed on some ideas" to an aide, who then wrote three paragraphs and posted them in his name. The prose has a quality that could be confused with Mr. Ferrer's speaking style, but in whole it reads like a news release.

Asked why Mr. Ferrer was credited for words he did not write, Ms. Bluestein offered an everyone-does-it defense. "This happens in political campaigns all the time," she said. "In this case he called in some ideas, and someone got a little loose with the editing."

Another important issue raised by this dust-up: timing. The Bloomberg campaign noticed the error 23 days ago, but waited until Howard Dean was visiting to leak the fact to the press. This then led to many embarrassing questions during the Ferrer-Dean news conference yesterday.

Is there any ethical or other constraint on when an error like that can be revealed? Should there be?

Photo uploads

2005-09-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

The anti-war protest march held in Washington on September 24 involved an estimated 300,000 people and therefore 300,000 perspectives on the event.

In the past, newspapers put a few shots (or sometimes just one) that summarized the event for the many who could not attend. This, of course, introduced the biases of the photo editors, who were forced to summarize a massive event they often had not attended while working on tight deadlines.

Today, a paper such as the Washington Post starts with an online article which then contains links to a video and even a javascript link to a gallery of 20 photos.

While that is a wonderful way to give a greater variety of viewpoints, the Internet now allows EVERYONE to be a photojournalist. Sites that encourage photo uploads from cell phones and computers such as Flickr allow you to attach tags to your photos so that they can be searched. Photos also can be searched by "Most Recent" and "Most Interesting," which, in the case of the anti-war photos leads us to 30 pages of photos, 594 in all as of this writing).

What a wonderful way to make sure that a variety of viewpoints are seen and heard.

Blog Power

2005-09-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

Peter Daou, who pioneered some internet strategies for the Kerry 2004 campaign, has written a piece for Salon.com called The Triangle: Limits of Blog Power. One of his key observations:

[W]ithout the participation of the media and the political establishment, the netroots alone cannot generate the critical mass necessary to alter or create conventional wisdom. This is partly a factor of audience size, but it's also a matter, frankly, of trust and legitimacy. Despite the astronomical growth of the netroots (see Bowers and Stoller for hard numbers), and the slow and steady encroachment of bloggers on the hallowed turf of Washington's opinion-makers, it is still the Russerts and Broders and Gergens and Finemans, the WSJ, WaPo and NYT editorial pages, the cable nets, Stewart and Letterman and Leno, and senior elected officials, who play a pivotal role in shaping people's political views. That is not to say that blogs can't be the first to draw attention to an issue, as they often do, but the half-life of an online buzz can be measured in days and weeks, and even when a story has enough netroots momentum to float around for months, it will have little effect on the wider public discourse without the other sides of the triangle in place.

Ironically, while mentioning the limits of the power of the blogs, he also describes the extent of their power:

The triangle construct also explains rightwing bloggers' relentless attacks on the "MSM" and on anyone who contends that the media is conservative. In a nation dominated by shrill rightwing voices, with all branches of government in the hands of Republicans, and an ineffectual press corps, the "liberal media" myth is so absurd that it requires no rebuttal. But the right desperately needs to keep the media from doing what they did in the aftermath of Katrina: tell the unvarnished truth. They need to block the left from building the kind of triangle that Katrina generated, where outspoken left-leaning bloggers are joined by leading Democrats and reporters who have no choice but to describe the catastrophic results of Bush's dismal leadership. The result in Katrina's case is a major political crisis and a dramatic shift in public perceptions, a body blow to the long-standing conventional wisdom of Bush as a "resolute leader" and a protector.

Blogs are continuing to grow in power and scope as a grassroots news source, which can impact on mainstream journalists and politicians. Only time will tell if Daou's descriptions are accurate.

Politics to Go

2005-09-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

The Institute for Politics and Democracy on the Internet is sponsoring a conference tomorrow from 8:30AM to 1:00PM on Politics to Go: A Guide to Using Mobile Technology in Politics. It will be held in George Washington University's Media and Public Affairs Building, 805 21st Street, NW, Jack Morton Auditorium.

Here's how the conference organizers describe it:

Politics to Go connects sophisticated politicking with innovative mobile technology to produce more effective and efficient campaigning. Politics to Go will introduce some of the latest mobile technologies, examine their current uses and political successes, and consider future possibilities and challenges for implementing these new technologies into your next campaign.

The event's two panels will be comprised of visionaries, analysts and practical implementers who will address these topics and facilitate an open question-and-answer dialog with the audience. Whether you're a politician, campaign manager, activist, government staffer, concerned citizen, or fascinated with the possibilities of mobile technology, you don't want to miss this event and the release of The Politics to Go Handbook: A Guide to Using Mobile Technology in Politics.

If you can't make it, be sure to check out the Handbook and the list of resource organizations and agencies. The chapter addressing how websites can be made compatible with handheld technologies was written by Emilienne Ireland and Phil Tajitsu Nash.

Members of the press can get more info by emailing Lanny Cardow or calling (202) 994-3219.

See you there!

Wikis and Decentralized Action

2005-09-07T04:55:00.000-07:00

The Gulf Coast disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina and the ineffective leadership during the follow-up is being addressed by many top-down organizations such as the Red Cross and the Pentagon.

A good example of a bottom-up response that shows the potential of the internet to help grassroots campaigns is seen on the PeopleFinderVolunteer page at Wikipedia. This decentralized effort allows individuals with a few hours of time to be part of the massive data entry job of entering names of lost people or people seeking loved ones into a database.

The goals of the project were:

Enter unstructured data on refugees from forums across the web to the highest data quality standards possible with volunteers giving a little as one hour of their time.

Enter data from databases across the web into the central database via the PeopleFinder Interchange Format

Minimize duplicate records

Support other organizations in implementing the PeopleFinder Interchange Format

Make the central database avaliable to be searched

Use the Salesforce API to implement innovative technology solutions to the missing persons problem

Within a few days, the project was successful. Here are a few stats:

Within 24 hours of the storm, more than 15,000 records were entered into the database.

To date, over 85,000 records have been manually entered into the central repository. Great Work! All 85,000+ records were entered manually from forums and other sites by volunteers.

Over 2100 people have created accounts in the wiki, one can assume that a vast majority of these accounts correspond with active volunteers.

The data from scraped sites has been parsed into PFIF, but has not yet been entered into the database. We would prefer that other sites implement PFIF so that survivor data can be exchanged among sites.

Instead of having these 2,100 people sit at home unable to help, they were able to pitch in and provide a valuable service. To see the overall Wiki response to the hurricane, visit http://192.122.183.218/wiki/index.php/Main_Page.

Mayor's Blog is MIA (from Phil)

2005-08-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post reports that D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams has forgotten that a blog is not just a once-in-a-lifetime proposition.

On August 15th, Mayor Williams decided to "do a cannonball dive into the new world of blogs" by posting his first installment, Getting Started: What Button Do I Push?

Forty-four people posted comments on his blog over the next nine days, and the Mayor has posted only one follow-up blog entry. Summarizing the mood, one "bjones" said:

"Mr. Mayor: You really need to make some comments so we can know what your views are. How long do you think folks will stay tuned?"

While the Mayor is just getting his digital feet wet, D.C. Council member Jack Evans from Ward 2 has put together a spiffy website that includes an RSS feed, weekly podcast archive, and more.

Whether just getting started, like Mayor Williams, or at the cutting edge, like Councilman Evans, it is great to see elected officals using the latest online tools to stay in touch.

Using the web in D.C. Politics (from Phil)

2005-08-21T09:31:00.000-07:00

Instead of waiting for the D.C. political establishment to speak, a bunch of twenty-somethings launched www.runtonyrun.com to encourage current Mayor Tony Williams to announce that he will run for re-election.

While they plan to pass out flyers and do things offline as well, an article in the Washington Post said that the biggest issue facing the young politicos was whether to have a blog or a website.

Committee to Protect Bloggers (from Phil)

2005-08-16T20:27:00.000-07:00

In what looks like a blogosphere equivalent of Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Bloggers has set up shop. Its tools include petitions, a list of Endangered Bloggers, a way to "adopt a blog," and a list of resources.

Given the precarious nature of press freedom all over the globe, this looks like a worthwhile project. There are editors supervising the oversight of blogs in different countries, and one recent report on the State of the African Blogosphere included this insight:

There is no telling how many blogs there are in the African blogosphere. There are indications that some African countries have several hundreds of bloggers. The Kenyan, South African, and Egyptian webrings boast over 350 blogs each. However, some African countries do not to have blogs dedicated to them.

BlogAfrica, Global Voices, and My Africa are good in roads into the African blogosphere.

Many African bloggers do so at great personal risk. Since they write from countries whose leaders are intent on prohibiting public knowledge of their nefarious activities, some of Africa’s bloggers are forced underground.

Aside from helping to protect bloggers, this CPB blog looks like a good place to learn more about the state of civil liberties around the globe. Check it out!

How Big is the Web? (from Phil)

2005-08-15T20:12:00.000-07:00

Yahoo and Google have gotten into a scrape over the size of the Internet, which matters to companies whose reputations depend on being able to search it. As reported in the New York Times, the story started when

Yahoo announced at an Internet search engine conference in Santa Clara, Calif., that its search engine index — an accounting of the number of documents that can be located from its databases — had reached 19.2 billion. Because the number was more than twice as large as the number of documents (8.1 billion) currently reported by Google, Yahoo's fierce competitor and Silicon Valley neighbor, the announcement — actually a brief mention in a Yahoo company Web log — set off a spat.

It looks like Google's number is closer to the truth, based on a report by one neutral organization:

On Sunday, researchers at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications attempted to shed light on the debate by performing a large number of random searches on both indices. They ran a random sample of 10,012 queries and concluded that Google, on average, returned 166.9 percent more results than Yahoo. In only three percent of the cases did the Yahoo searches return more queries than Google. The group said the Yahoo index claim was suspicious.

However, it may be impossible to certifiably document the size of the Internet, because

Neither Yahoo nor Google makes public the software algorithms that underlie their collection methods. In fact, those details are closely guarded secrets.

Google's Copyrights (from Phil)

2005-08-14T13:58:00.000-07:00

Google, the Internet search engine company, had planned to scan all of the books in the Harvard, Michigan, and Stanford libraries to facilitate their being accessible on the Internet, until the Association of American Publishers cried foul.

The New York Times summarizes the key issues this way: copyrights, ad revenues, and control.

Google executives, on the other hand, view it this way:

[They view] the scanning project as a largely altruistic endeavor that will make it easier for people around the world to read the valuable — and often rare — material stockpiled in libraries.

In a related issue, "Google News" has triggered a copyright infringement suit from Agence France-Presse, which says that Google News's compiling and reposting the AFP stories on thousands of other websites is a form of copyright infringement.

Once again we are confronted with one of the key issues of the Internet age: how to make sure that the creators of content get paid a fair amount while also making sure that their work gets into the public domian in a timely fashion so that others can use and build on it.

Blog Weddings (from Phil)

2005-08-13T13:42:00.000-07:00

I guess everything else has moved to the Internet, so why not this? On August 5th, Kathleen and Eric in Texas fulfilled the witness requirement of their marriage process using fellow bloggers:

The state of Texas has a little known law governing "informal marriage." For a marriage to be legal, we must publicly declare that we consider each other as spouses and this fact be known to other residents of the state of Texas. We got our certificate this afternoon and have now fulfilled the requirements as there's bound to be a Texas resident or two amongst our joint readership. Feel free to witness our marriage here."

Legally speaking, either of them might be able to contest the marriage's legality in the future if no Texas-based person could vouch that they had "known" of this marriage. But let's not intrude on their bliss.

Instead, let's ponder the issue of how the Internet has allowed us to create communities where people feel like they know their fellow bloggers very well, even if they have not met them in person. Quite a phenomenon, I'd say.

Citizen Curators (from Phil)

2005-08-12T12:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's blog entry asked whether citizen journalism could devolve into sensationalism. If it is done in an organized and respectful way, however, capturing a variety of perspectives can be both interesting and significant.

The Tate Museum, an institution that houses over 500 years of British art and antiquities, has organized an Our Picture of Britain project, where 1,300 school-age children from 250 schools were asked to explore their local landscape over a three week period.

Nadia Arbach, e-learning curator at Tate, calls the project a success:

"The participating schools approached this project with unbounded creativity and enthusiasm. The collaboration was the most rewarding element — many teachers have commented that it was a brilliant opportunity for their students to learn about others in different parts of the country. One of the aims of this project was to use digital media to get people communicating with each other, and it has worked out so well that some schools have plans to continue their partnerships in the next school term."

Sounds like the best possible use of new media for school-age children, and perhaps for other age levels as well.

Citizen Journalism or Sensationalism? (from Phil)

2005-08-11T12:20:00.000-07:00

A new report on Politics Online looks at the recent London bombings and the "citizen journalist" response.

July’s London bombings provided one of the first examples of world news documented by unintentional journalists — bystanders and survivors who utilized camera phones and other wireless technology to document their experience. This was only the latest and most vivid example of the global trend of 'user generated content' (UGC) that is beginning to have a radical impact with the news media worldwide.

According to Pete Clifton of BBC News Interactive:

"We often get pictures from our readers, but never as many as this, and the quality was very high. And because people were on the scenes, they were obviously better than anything news agencies could offer."

On the other hand, not everyone saw the cell phone-generated pictures as positive. Freelance technology journalist Xeni Jardin said:

"It's like the behavior when you see with a car wreck on the highway. People stop and gawk. There's a sense that this is some sort of animal behavior that's not entirely compassionate or responsible."

I personally like the idea that there are others outside the mainstream media who are keeping their eyes and ears open as events unfold. At the same time, however, I can understand the privacy concerns and the fears that gawkers will vie for photos of victims that they can sell to the daily papers instead of offering aid during the critical first moments after a violent attack.

New technologies alone will not make us more compassionate and other-oriented human beings.

Progressive Blogosphere Report (from Phil)

2005-08-10T20:22:00.000-07:00

The New Politics Institute has issued Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere: A New Force in American Politics." Aside from analysis, it includes an Appendix on "How to Engage Bloggers In A Local Campaign" and an extensive list of left and right wing blogs.

It is another touchstone document on our way to universal blogging and Internet use.

Prosecuting spammers (from Phil)

2005-08-09T20:57:00.000-07:00

The Internet has become so huge that spammers can make huge profits by sending out their unsolicited messages, and most of them don't get caught. Occasionally, however, they do get the punishment they deserve.

According to today's Washington Post, here are the stats on just one company:

Richter (owner of OptInRealBig.com) was once ranked as the world's third-most prolific spammer. Microsoft said his business sent an estimated 38 billion spam messages per year. [NYS Attorney General] Spitzer has said he believed Richter was clearing millions of dollars in monthly profits from spam. [boldface added]

The private sector is doing something about this:

Microsoft has filed more than 135 anti-spam lawsuits worldwide in recent years, about 100 of them in the United States. All told, the company said it has won $838 million in judgments against spammers.

And NYS's A.G. Spitzer is using New York State's strong corporate prosecution laws to do the same. The question is, are our federal government prosecutors doing their fair share?

Wikimania - free the content! (from Phil)

2005-08-08T12:42:00.000-07:00

All things online eventually seem to come offline as well. The first-ever global meeting of some of the leaders of the Wikipedia movement got together in German recently, and decided that their collaborative approach to knowledge should continue to be expanded.

If you haven't been there before, take a minute to check out the Wikipedia and look not only at WHAT is covered but HOW it is covered. Imagine an encyclopedia where EVERYONE has a chance to add their piece of knowledge so that no one editor or group of editors can have the last word on everything.

Blogger Danny Schechter of MediaChannel.org says that:

Knowledge is said to be power and the "Wiki way" of sharing knowledge is very powerful. Perhaps its time for those who would change the world consider adopting the participatory process that the Wikipedians are using to great effect and with a measurable impact.

Among the goals the Wikipedians enunciated at their recent conference are the following:

Free the Encyclopedia

Free the Dictionary (An "ultimate wictionary" is underway)

Free the Curriculum

Free the Music

Free the Art

Free the File Formats

Free the Maps

Free the Product Identifiers

Free the TV Listings

And, last but not least:

Free the Media may be next, as the Wikimedia community decides what change-oriented goals to direct its energy and formidable intellectual firepower at.

Is this the wave of the future?

The web also is used for bad purposes (from Phil)

2005-08-07T21:09:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post is running a three-part series of articles on how terrorists are using the web just as much as people who want to find fellow cycling enthusiasts, participate in electoral politics, or read about Chinese dynastic history. You can find the Sunday and Monday installments online, and the final installment will be out on Tuesday.

The web is useful for showcasing information, persuading people to join a cause, and linking together disparate groups with common interests. Unfortunately, once the information and contacts are found online, they can be used for either good or for bad purposes offline.

10.4 posts per second (from Phil)

2005-08-06T20:50:00.000-07:00

Technorati, a Web site that indexes blogs, just released its semiannual "State of the Blogosphere" report. Posting volume has more than doubled from the start of 2005 to the end of July.

Nearly 80,000 new blogs are created every day, joining the more than 14 million already in existence. Contrary to the criticism of some who say that most blogs are simply shells started and then left unused after a few days, over fifty percent of all blogs are still active (hopefully including the blogs from this GSPM cohort!).

To get a sense of how immense this phenomenon is, check out this quote from the Technorati report:

After a brief dip last winter, the average rate of postings has grown steadily such that at the end of July 2005, there were about 900,000 posts created each day [on those 14 million blogs]. That's about 37,500 posts every hour, or 10.4 posts per second [emphasis added]. It peaked at just over 1.1 Million posts per day after the Live 8 concerts and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her resignation from the US Supreme Court.

Clearly there are a lot of people with a lot of things to say. Where does this leave the mainstream media?

It's those meddlesome bloggers again ...

2005-08-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

A Washington Post article mentioned the role of bloggers in the special election Tuesday in Ohio, in which Democrat and Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett came within 4,000 votes of upsetting Republican Jean Schmidt in a staunchly Republican district. According to the story,

liberal bloggers said they helped raise $500,000 for Hackett, the bulk of his $750,000 campaign funds. "We raised a ton of money for Hackett," said Bob Brigham of the Swing State Project site, who served as "coordinator of the liberal blogosphere" for the Hackett campaign.

Brigham criticized the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) for not giving Hackett early financial support. "They came in late, and it makes them look irrelevant in everyone's eyes," he said.

DCCC Executive Director John Lapp issued a statement defending the committee. Saying the DCCC would like to fund every House race, he said: "Resources are not infinite. That is why MyDD, the Daily Kos, and the larger blogosphere are so important. You are critical in the effort to expand the playing field well above and beyond the 30 or 40 districts typically in play."

What would happen if socially moderate or fiscally conservative Republican bloggers began to press their agendas in the same way?

Can I put a river on my bookshelf?

2005-08-04T10:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I finished archiving the blogs and comments you produced during our class. Thanks very much to all of you for leaving them up until I was able to do that. (I am still resetting some of the links in the archived copies; they should be fully accessible in a few days).

Feel free to take your blogs down now, if you wish, although I encourage you to carry on blogging in the heroic manner of British Boy in DC. In that spirit, Phil and I will be continuing this blog. Among other things, we plan to post additional information on some of the topics that we discussed only briefly in class.

I turned in your grades last Friday, and now that I have finished archiving, I am happy to send you individual comments on your blog if you send me an email requesting that I do so.

Although I finished reading your blogs and comments last week, I am at last enjoying the opportunity of following up on all your references and outside links. There's a lot of good material there — thanks for your insights and hard work. Feel free to contact Phil or myself anytime about your coursework or other projects in the future.

Thank you all for putting so much thought and effort into this class. From the perspective of a teacher, this set of blogs is one big fascinating conversation, allowing me to get to know each of you individually — which normally doesn't happen in a large class.

Case in point: Delablogger, who rarely spoke at all during lectures, produced a blog that her fellow students voted as best of the class. Imagine what we all would have missed if she had not written her blog and we had not read it. The same is true of all the class blogs, really, because every student revealed far more of their thoughts and ideas in their writing than during class discussion.

I was educated in the pre-Internet era, and that has given me some old habits that die hard. One of them is a deeply ingrained desire to preserve permanent records of information and ideas — at least in the areas that most interest me.

The MINERVA Web Preservation Project is a expression of that impulse, although it is also a reminder that the web is really an immense river, and not something that can easily be "archived." While I am grateful that the MINERVA project is preserving what it can, it is nonetheless frustrating that website archives tend to be fragmentary and incomplete, like books with pages torn and missing.

When I was your age, information, ideas, and data were painstakingly collected and stored, like drops of water in a rain barrel. But information is no longer received as a gentle rain. It is a vast torrent. If I attempt to preserve even a tiny sample of this immense river, what will I accomplish? Will the stale water carefully sealed in my jar resemble the original in any way?

While corporations fret that digital media allow us to make exact copies of intellectual products cheaply and easily, die-hard archivists such as myself fret that there is really no way to make any adequate record — much less an exact copy — of this free-flowing ocean of ideas.

Microsoft's Patents (from Phil)

2005-08-03T17:31:00.000-07:00

Last week, historian Randall Stross asked Why Bill Gates Wants 3,000 New Patents, and came up with answers that will not be a surprise to students in the "Politics and the New Media" class.

Microsoft is on track to apply for 60 new patents a week, or 3000 per year (I guess that means two weeks off for holidays). Among the processes that Microsoft wants to patent is something very arcane, technical and obscure: adding and removing white space in a document.

Randall Stross recommends rejecting Microsoft's 3,368 pending applications, and tossing out the 3,955 patents it already has been issued. He and many patent experts feel that granting patents to any but the most pathbreaking software innovations will stifle innovation and hurt the entire software industry. He reminds us that

All software published in the United States is protected by strong copyright and trademark protection. Microsoft Excel, for example, cannot be copied, nor can its association with Microsoft be removed. But a patent goes well beyond this. It protects even the underlying concepts from being used by others — for 20 years. [boldface added]

As recently as the 1970's, software developers relied solely upon copyrights and trademarks to protect their work. This turned out rather well for Microsoft. Had Dan Bricklin, the creator of VisiCalc, the spreadsheet that gave people a reason to buy a personal computer, obtained a patent covering the program in 1979, Microsoft would not have been able to bring out Excel until 1999. Nor would Word or PowerPoint have appeared if the companies that had brought out predecessors obtained patent protection for their programs.

The obvious next question is, if patents are available to Microsoft, why didn't inventors such as Mr. Bricklin file for patents for their products?

According to Randall Stross:

Patents for software alone were not an option then [in 1979]. [Bricklin] consulted a patent attorney who said that the application would have to present the software within a machine and that the odds were long that the ploy would succeed. The courts regarded software as merely a collection of mathematical algorithms, tiny revelations of nature's secrets — not as an invention, and thus not patentable.

The legal environment changed not because of new legislation, but by accident. One important ruling here and another there, and without anyone fully realizing it, a new intellectual-property reality had evolved by the end of the 1980's. Now software could enjoy the extraordinary protection of a patent, protection so powerful that Thomas Jefferson believed that it should be granted in only a few select cases.

Back in 1999, Professor Lawrence Lessig warned us that

Washington is obsessed with intellectual-property rights. It lives under the mistaken idea that stronger IP [intellectual property protections] always means a stronger economy. No doubt it means larger campaign contributions, but whether it means a better market is a tougher question.

If Microsoft and other industry "whales" are going to keep slurping more than their fair share of the programming "krill" that nourishes the entire software ecosystem, we may be looking at a digital world that stagnates and does not meet its fullest potential.

The World is Your Classroom (from Phil)

2005-07-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-07-25T04:24:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-23T17:03:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-23T15:47:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-07-23T14:38:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-21T22:02:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-07-19T23:07:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-18T22:31:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-07-17T21:36:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-07-16T20:09:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-07-15T22:01:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-07-14T05:17:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-07-11T17:38:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-07-08T20:52:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-07T21:53:00.000-07:00

London tonight

Bloggers of Color (from Phil)

2005-07-07T20:39:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-07-06T21:24:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-07-05T13:53:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-07-04T20:21:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-01T20:46:00.000-07:00

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?

Why (most of) Congress doesn't blog

2005-06-30T21:51:00.000-07:00

In Molly Chapman Norton's article on Congressional blogs, she notes that "The few pseudo-blogs that are written by members of Congress are taking the first baby steps towards being a part of the real blogosphere." The problem with blogs, from the perspective of the staffers she interviewed, was that:

the difficulty in maintaining spin on a true blog was a hindrance. One staffer, who chose to remain anonymous, said most congressional offices could not incorporate a blog because it was simply too difficult to spin.

In the article, Michael Cornfield lists some good practical reasons why Members of Congress have not yet embraced blogging as a communication tool.

Nevertheless, a few enterprising representatives, such as Rick Tancredo (R-CO) and John Conyers (D-MI), have used blogging successfully. In fact, Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) believes that blogs "will be the primary means of communication with the people that you serve," and affirms, "Bottom line — blogs rule."

Do you agree with this point of view, or do you think that blogs are too unpredictable to be widely used as a communications tool for Members of Congress?

Do-it-yourself narrowcasting

2005-06-29T12:54:00.000-07:00

Now you can narrowcast your own neighbors, and they can narrowcast you right back. Yes, there's a website, Claritas, that lets you enter a zip code and see which "consumer segments" dominate that neighborhood:

This exciting feature allows you to select from a number of lifestyle segmentation systems that classify people by demographic and behavioral characteristics into "Clusters."

For my neighborhood, it was eerily accurate. How about yours? Run the segmentation look-up tool, and post a comment here to let us know if it was accurate for you, too.

Honoring our three featured bloggers

2005-06-28T22:14:00.000-07:00

It has come to my attention that three of our bloggers have risen like shooting stars high into the firmament of the blogosphere:

Stuck in the Middle with Blue
Outside Damage
Right Blog

Here is a modest tribute in their honor.

Update on the Bloomberg campaign

2005-06-27T22:33:00.000-07:00

The New York Times article, "Spending More, Major Refines Voter Strategy, describes how Bloomberg is using rivers of cash to develop sophisticated voter lists suitable for narrowcasting.

Mr. Bloomberg's campaign has already spent more than $15 million, more than three times the amount spent by his four Democratic rivals combined. . . [including over] more than $5 million on his voter database, which is being developed by his pollster, Doug Schoen, a former adviser to Mr. Clinton. That amount is roughly as much as Mr. Bush's campaign spent for a national voter list last year.

Mr. Cunningham said Mr. Bloomberg's 2001 campaign used a voter list that was sophisticated by the standards of the time, but technology has improved. "It's the difference between going from X-ray machines to M.R.I.'s," Mr. Cunningham said.

Mr. Cunningham would not share specifics about what personal information the list includes, but Jerry Skurnick, whose company, Prime New York, collects voter data, said the possibilities were nearly endless.

Note that although the Bloomberg campaign is led mainly by seasoned Democratic consultants, it is modeled on the Bush campaign's GOTV strategy, and aims to use new technology to power a tightly-disciplined ground operation:

The volunteer effort mirrors Mr. Bush's campaign, which set out to build a huge network of supporters to counter the Democrats' traditional organizational muscle in getting voters to the polls.

We will compare the narrowcasting strategies of recent campaigns in tomorrow's class.

Monday's Open Thread

2005-06-27T02:55:00.000-07:00

Post your comments and questions.

You can also provide links to any class blog entries that you think are especially worthwhile. (How about some suggestions?)

Another kind of synergy

2005-06-26T23:59:00.000-07:00

After reading the Text Reader post on Hegemon, I have been thinking about the advantages of making all books available in digital-text format, and becoming more aware of how few are.

You can get audio-only versions of many books, and that is good. But it is rare to find digital text versions that allow you to listen and read at the same time by using a text reader such as ReadPlease. This is an important distinction, because an audio-only version of a book has certain disadvantages for the user — it's harder to go back and re-read passages, for example. Likewise, if you are using an audio-only version, it's harder to read rapidly.

By contrast, if you are using a text reader, you can set the audio to speak at high speed as you skim the text with your eyes. The combined input of visual and audio cues is better than either one alone. That's synergy.

Why aren't more books available in digital-text format? Lawrence Lessig addresses this question in Free Culture, his unforgettable keynote speech at the 2002 Open Source Conference. I'll be playing it for you in class on week 9 or 10. If you want a sneak preview and have a high-speed connection, go ahead. Believe it or not, this lecture on copyright law will knock your socks off.

By the way, you can download a digital-text version of our book, Winning Campaigns Online (PDF: 2.3 Mb, zipped: 1.5 Mb). This is the digital file the book was printed from. Of course, I would not be at liberty to provide this to you if Phil and I had ceded control of our book to a publisher. We're glad we didn't.

Saturday's Open Thread

2005-06-25T00:06:00.000-07:00

Post your comments and questions. You can also provide links to any class blog entries that you think are especially worthwhile.

Offline-online synergy in the Dean campaign

2005-06-24T23:55:00.000-07:00

As I look more closely at how technology was used to build ground operations in the 2004 campaigns, the most interesting comparisons seem to be between Bush and Dean.

In a November 2003 article, The Marketing of a President, Edward Cone describes the synergistic approach of Dean's director of Internet organizing, Zephyr Teachout, who took the view that:

. . the campaign is not about the Internet. Online tools are a way to get people to act — to meet in the physical world, to put up flyers and posters, write letters and checks, speak to other people face to face. And ultimately, to get out and vote.

Arguably, that quote could apply equally well to the Bush campaign's effective use of offline-online synergy during 2004. Yet in the matter of "message discipline," the two campaigns took very different approaches:

. . . the lesson of Dean's campaign is that the Web is not for micromanagers. With the Internet, an effective campaign creates a community that will on its own begin to market your product for you. Properly done, you won't be able — or want — to control it. . . "There was a remarkable reaction to the fact that he was running," says Teachout. "We had way too much e-mail to deal with, so we had to empower people in the states, let volunteers handle the e-mail in Oregon. It was very unorthodox."

So the campaign rushed to push away control. "When you build an organization in 17 states, with no money, you give away power as fast as you can," says Teachout of those cash-strapped early days. "We had to let them have control, let them help the campaign how they wanted to help the campaign."

Was the Dean campaign's willingness to "spread the ownership of the campaign" its greatest strength, its undoing, or both?

Two closing observations: the Dean campaign reportedly was influenced by The Cluetrain Manifesto, co-authored by Doc Searles and David Weinberger, whom you may remember from World of Ends.

The second item is strangely familiar:

The weblog must be updated several times a day for maximum impact, and there are hundreds of fresh comments to read. It means running flat out. "You can get to this later today, after you sleep," Gross tells one of the programmers seated in the next cubicle. "Forget sleeping," grunts the programmer.

Thursday's Open Thread

2005-06-23T21:58:00.000-07:00

Post your comments and questions. You can also provide links to any class blog entries that you think are especially worthwhile.

At about 5:30pm, I sent you all an email update with information about your Strategic Plans. If any of you did not receive it, please let me know.

A few new articles for next week

2005-06-22T21:23:00.000-07:00

Note that I have added a 30-minute radio broadcast and a few short online readings for next week. To compensate, I moved the Vaidhyanathan readings from "required reading" to "optional".

I think you will be particularly interested in comparing the radio broadcast to the information presented in some of the articles. You will hear some of the same things being said, but with very different implications.

Your question about the strategic plans

2005-06-22T20:58:00.000-07:00

Separight asked:

Did you say that you were going to distribute revised requirements for the strategic plan, as well as push back the deadline for the draft presentation?

My response: Yes, I will be emailing you the revised Strategic Plan requirements tomorrow.

Drafts will be turned in (not presented) at the week 7 class on July 5.

As I mentioned in class last Tuesday, our next class (week 6) will focus on volunteer mobilization, GOTV, and synergy between the Internet and ground operations. You will need to think about those topics as you work on your strategic plan.

Note that I have added a 30-minute radio broadcast and a few short online readings for next week. To compensate, I moved the Vaidhyanathan readings from the required to the recommended list.

Recommended blog for Wednesday June 22

2005-06-22T15:04:00.000-07:00

You have recommended "Meet One of the 50 Hottest Bachelors: A Blogger! on Big Block of Cheese.

In her nomination DelaBlogger explains that the post "is an interesting look at how blogs are becoming mainstream and a part of popular culture." While you are on the Big Block of Cheese site, have a look at today's post on what people actually remember about news stories: Is it all Worth It?

Recommended blog for Tuesday June 21

2005-06-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

You have recommended Viral Marketing and the Power of Panties on Meet Justin. (This blog was nominated by Idealist).

Justin describes how "Eyebeam, a non-profit center for art and technology . . . organized the "Contagious Media Showdown" in which contestants were given a month to see how many people they could attract to their site using viral marketing."

One reader commented:

If those numbers weren't enough, I can attest to having received two of those three sites from friends' websites and e-mail.

The Crying While Eating site, in particular, has earned its viral success. . . To summarize, crude or otherwise wacky humor is a surefire way to become a viral success. Now, how do you parlay that into a race for Ohio Supreme Court.

Emi's Caveat
While humor can sometimes encourage people to forward a political message to friends, humor is not the only — or necessarily the best — viral marketing strategy. Humor, by nature, is volatile. Polical humor can backfire. Here's another example. That said, enjoy the post.

Your question about reading

2005-06-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

On Monday's Open Thread, jd posted a comment:

I have a question. I can think of three types of posts that are encouraged by you in our class.

1) Posts on the reading
2) Class discussion posts
3) Posts with further research on the topic but not on the reading

What should our balance of these be? Our class participation grade is partly based on blogs about class discussion. Do these count even if the discussion wasn't about the reading? You encouraged a student in class tonight to blog on the program he uses to hear text being read, does this count?

Should we do 4 [blogs] a week on the reading and any class discussion or research beyond are extra credit? Should we do a majority of posts on the reading but a few on the other two? Please clarify. Thanks!

These are all good questions. You can do as many blogs as you like. As long as you meet the basic requirement of four blogs per week that respond to the reading, you can get extra credit for any additional blogs as long as they are directly related to topics discussed in the readings OR the class. Note that the requirement for being on-topic gets more lenient after you have met your basic requirement.

Look — it's a matter of common sense. How can I justify giving you an "A" in the class if I can't be sure you ever did the reading? I cannot give you credit for life experience.

When you become campaign professionals, you must be able to consider the campaign from the point of view of the voter. You must ask yourselves, what can we do inspire the voter to support this campaign? And how can we make it easy for them to do so?

Take this approach with me, your professor. I am the voter you must persuade. You are already halfway there. I am very much inspired by your work so far. If you give me direct evidence that you have done the course reading and thought about it, you make it easy for me to give you my full support.

It's not rocket science. If there are no exams, there must be some system of establishing that you didn't sail through the course without ever cracking a book. I want to give you my vote. Make your blogs user-friendly for someone who must assign grades for academic credit (that's me).

Keep in mind that it is EASY to refer to the readings if you have actually done them. For instance, you mentioned this example in your question: "You encouraged a student in class tonight to blog on the program he uses to hear text being read, does this count?" Yes, it would count if he framed his comments, for example, in the context of class readings on website usability. He could say:

I noticed in our class readings on website usability (Neilsen, Flanders, and Gahran), none of them even mention the importance of creating standards compliant websites that are able to reach more people — including the roughly one-fifth of Americans who have some form of disability. This is a serious oversight, in my opinion.

According to the National Organization on Disability, this represents "an untapped market worth over $220 billion in collective spending power."

While not all disabilities interfere with a person's ability to use the Internet, many do — vision and hearing are the most common forms of disability. What campaign can afford to disregard even 10 or 15 percent of potential voters?

Instead of posting 100 photographs of himself on his website, why doesn't Neilsen mention accessibility issues in his Top 10 Mistakes or his Usability 101?

Although he didn't mention accessibility in the articles we read for class, he did report in another article that when you design websites to be accessible for the disabled, non-disabled users also find it easier to use.

Notice that this post, although it discusses a topic that was not even mentioned in the class readings, shows that the author is thoroughly familiar with the required readings. Bingo! I can vote for that!

If anyone still has any questions about this, send me an email right away. I want your final grades to be the high grades you have earned so far.

Course requirements going forward

2005-06-22T08:44:00.000-07:00

Congratulations on exceeding expectations
In the past four weeks, to my amazement, you have exceeded the course requirements for written assignments by nearly 800 percent. You were required to write one short paragraph a day, and so I planned to receive one or two pages a week from each of you.

Instead, you are writing 8-10 pages each week on average. Each week I am receiving almost 300 pages of thoughtful, analytical, and well-written work, in addition to another 70 or so pages of revised assignments. I can read and provide detailed feedback each week on 35-50 pages of work, but not 370.

Likewise, from the student's point of view, 80-100 pages of written work is too much for a 10-week course.

Blog four times a week
Because your written output has exceeded my expectations by nearly 800 percent, we must modify the requirements for this course. Instead of writing one blog entry each day, you are now required to write 4 blog entries and 4 comments on class blogs per week. (The requirement to post on one outside blog per week is unchanged).

One blog each week chosen for grading
Each week, I will choose one of your four entries to grade, and the grade you receive on that entry will be your blog writing grade for the week. If your work for the week is not uniformly high-quality, I will choose your weakest entry for grading, and you will have a chance to revise it after receiving feedback.

TIP: You can avoid the extra work of revisions by writing four strong entries each week. That way you'll simply get an "A" for the week and you're done.

Reference to readings is necessary
Please note that you must demonstrate mastery of required readings in every post. Because this class has no exams, you must demonstrate in your blog writing exactly what you have learned in this course.

In the remaining weeks, please don't force me to deduct points for off-topic posts. If you stay on-topic and maintain the high standards you have shown thus far, I can justify a final grade of "A". If I can't prove that you have read and thought about the required readings, I can't justify an "A", even if your work is otherwise excellent.

Reflecting the quality and volume of your written output during the past four weeks, my gradebook currently shows most of the class with "A" and "A+" grades. I want the final grades to be as good as what I see now. I can't do it on a whim — I must have written evidence that only you can provide. Please help me out.

Keep up the great work!

Note: You may still use each of your "Get Out of Blogging" cards once.

Update Wednesday 6:29pm
I've posted my responses to some of your questions.

Monday's Open Thread

2005-06-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

Post your comments and questions. You can also provide links to any class blog entries that you think are especially worthwhile.

Recommended blog for Monday June 20

2005-06-20T11:18:00.000-07:00

Thanks to El Jorge, who went to the polls and voted, we have a winner for today: DelaBlogger's A Day Off, posted on The Femocrat.

This example of courageous investigation and analysis — of journalism in the community interest — is an inspiring case study of the power of blogs to hold our leaders accountable.

Put these in your wallet

2005-06-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

Kathie Legg pointed out that everyone is very busy with midterms this week. Phil suggested you all be given a few days off. That seems fair; everyone has been doing an outstanding job. So here are your passes. You can use them now or anytime during the course (but 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.

For this pass,
use this code.

Good luck on your exams!

Recommended blog for Sunday June 19

2005-06-19T22:08:00.000-07:00

You have recommended My About Face With Subscription Interface on Advise and Consent.

The author points out that "You might have the greatest product ever, but if you can't get people in the door, you'll never sell your product. A successful subscription interface allows you to attract customers and 'sell' your candidate and his/her message. The first step is to get them in the door." One reader commented:

"I completely agree. Several times i have found myself interested in subscribing to several websites, but then I have to confront their subscription interface and I cannot deal with it. They should be simple, they should not waste your time as many of them do. Overall, subscription interfaces should not scare users away."

Also noteworthy
Though not officially nominated, apparently this blog was also judged to be excellent by a discerning jury of peers: A Day Off.

Sunday's Open Thread

2005-06-19T16:09:00.000-07:00

Post your comments and questions. You can also provide links to any class blog entries that you think are especially worthwhile.

New one-page required reading for Tuesday

2005-06-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

I just ran across this and decided it's too essential to put in the "Optional Reading" section. If you don't read this in time for our next class, it's OK, because we will discuss it.

Amy Gahran provides some compelling arguments in her short article, Why Webfeeds (RSS) Beat E-Mail Newsletters, starting with the simple fact that they are SPAM-proof.

Case in point: our own JD describes his personal experience of having his newsletters blocked in Avoiding the Spam Filter:

"So I signed up for several political newsletters from campaigns I am doing projects on. After receiving nothing from any of them I went into my spam filter. Presto, newsletter after newsletter sitting unread in the equivalent of my trash bin (I use gmail)."

Mike D provided some good comments on RSS pros and cons for campaigns in his RSS Feed Newsletters post.

Of course, webfeeds also have disadvantages, and some critics have claimed that RSS is not ready for prime-time. In any case, until new computers are shipped with pre-installed feed-reader capability, webfeeds will accessible only to the small percentage of users who bother to download and install a reader.

But it seems clear that every political website — no matter how small — should provide a webfeed link, in addition to the traditional newsletter subscription link.

Palmieri made me do it

2005-06-19T08:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went out to dinner with Phil and friends, planning to post around midnight as usual. But then the most jaw-dropping jazz performance I ever heard blasted me into a state of blissed-out forgetfulness.

We saw Latin jazz legend Eddie Palmieri at Blues Alley in Georgetown. Catch the last show tonight if you can. Donald Harrison is on alto sax and Brian Lynch on trumpet. They were on fire last night. The band also includes Jose Claussell on timbales, Jose Santiago on bass, and Johnny Rivero on congas.

Maybe you can get a discount: "One-Half admission for Students and Congressional Staff with a valid ID Sunday–Thursday 10:00 pm shows." Apparently that option is not available via online ticketing, so you may need to call the club (202-337-4141) for details.

Will post on-topic later today, after I shake myself out of this trance.

By the way, this means that students are required to post one less blog during the remaining weeks: 62 instead of the original 63, as DelaBlogger very astutely noted.

Open thread: nominate your favorite for today

2005-06-17T16:27:00.000-07:00

I ran across a comment El Jorge made a while back in response to The Starbucks Effect, a witty post on A Schwartzenegger Republican. El Jorge said:

"Great post... If we had recommended posts, I would highly recommend this to the entire class."

Politiae made a similar suggestion on her blog. So I've decided to post an open thread each day for any comments you care to post on any topic.

Feel free to nominate your favorite classmate's blog diary for the day.
(Um... please don't nominate your own blog.) If you'd like to suggest a more original icon, please do. (Perhaps this powerful image of unfettered free speech?)

Dean's fundraising bats

2005-06-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

Dimmy's post about Howard Dean's fundraising bats prompted me to go into my digital attic and show you this item from my collection of baseball memorabilia.

Thinking about the subscriber's experience

2005-06-16T23:56:00.000-07:00

I have posted some screenshots of campaign websites from the 2004 presidential race.

They show some of the web pages that users encountered when they subscribed to campaign newsletters or signed up to volunteer.

Have a look at the screenshots and think about what each interface reveals about the campaign.

Sneezing with fire

2005-06-15T22:18:00.000-07:00

When I read about this it reminded me of Seth Godin's marketing strategy of using "powerful sneezers" to spread an idea virus.

Business Week's May 23 cover story, Earthly Empires, describes the pyromarketing strategy used to promote California megachurch pastor Rick Warren's 2002 book, The Purpose-Driven Life, which has become the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time, with more than 23 million copies sold.

Greg Steilstra, a Christian communications company exec and the marketing director for Purpose-Driven Life, advocates starting a "marketing fire" by focusing the marketing budget on the "driest tinder." Although some Christian evangelicals have criticized the ethics of the way the book was marketed, Steilstra himself is busy marketing his pyromarketing techniques in a forthcoming book.

Here are the powerpoint and accompanying text of a presentation he recently delivered at the WOMMA Summit. (That's the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, in case you were hesitant to ask.) An excerpt:

"Mass advertising's effectiveness, however, has been deteriorating since reaching its heyday in the late 1960's. Today, much of it inundates and annoys disinterested people with irrelevant messages . . . The increase in ads as a "solution" for their decreased effectiveness has actually worsened the problem. The resulting deluge of advertising has saturated the market, but it hasn't improved results. The opposite is true. The rising tide of advertising has fostered a growing resistance and negativity among those it targets . . . A recent Yankelovich survey found that sixty-five percent of Americans feel 'constantly [b]ombarded with too much marketing and advertising.'"

What does this mean for the future of Internet ads in politics? Is Internet advertising a waste of budget, or is it effective?

One last dance

2005-06-14T20:52:00.000-07:00

I know I said today in class that we need to leave the topic of blogs behind and focus on other aspects of new media. But Phil just told me about this post on MyDD, and I wanted to get your feedback.

The author claims that the right side of the blogosphere is choking off the growth of new talent by not allowing users to comment or post diaries on its most popular blogs:

"Of the twenty-four liberal blogs in the top quintile, Dailykos, TPM Cafe, Smirking Chimp, Metafilter, BooMan Tribune, MyDD, and Dembloggers are full-fledged community sites where members cannot only comment, but they can also post diaries / articles / polls. By comparison, there are no community sites among the top twenty-four conservative blogs. None, zip, zero, nada."

Another post on Kos is discussing the same topic.

When I set up the list of public discussion blogs for our class assignments, I did notice the top right-leaning blogs, such as Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, and Powerline, did not allow comments from the public, much less diaries. I also noted that the DNC has a blog, but not the RNC. Little Green Footballs used to be a community site, but apparently has shut down registration, which means members of the public can no longer sign up to comment. I wrote the editor to ask about this a few weeks ago, but have as yet received no reply.

What do you make of this, if anything?

General Comments on Blogs

2005-06-13T21:43:00.000-07:00

After several days spent reading and commenting on your blogs, I have only a few left to grade. Any of you who have not yet received detailed feedback will receive it in the next day or so.

In any case, you are all doing extraordinarily well with your daily writing and analysis. I have made some suggestions to each of you, and we will look at examples of good blog entries during class tomorrow.

Phil will be discussing your strategic plans and answering any questions you may have on that project.

These blogs are so interesting to read. In addition to the blogs themselves, many of you have linked to excellent supporting source materials that I hadn't yet seen. Several times today I have printed things out and handed them to Phil, saying, "Look at this!" It has been a learning experience for us. Thanks again for all your dedicated efforts!

GauRag asks for input from class gurus

2005-06-12T22:43:00.000-07:00

He writes:

"I've managed to talk my supervisors into starting a blog for Progressive Majority. Currently, our WA and WI state offices blog about state issues and candidates, and we'd like to set up a blog at our DC Headquarters that syndicates in from the state offices. Anyone know of a good way to set this up with Blogger? The first task is getting posts from the blog to the PM website... and I'm not familiar enough with XML or RSS feeds to set this up. Help (gaurag at gwu dot edu) would be greatly appreciated :) "

If you have some good ideas, let's hear about them in class.

The Death Knell of Rooftop Sunbathing

2005-06-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

Last week on Blue State of Mind, dcae's "Big Brother is Watching" mentioned Google's new satellite map tool. I finally got around to checking it out today. Here's a detail from a satellite photo showing our classroom at 805 21st Street NW:

To see the surrounding neighborhood, go to the Google map.

If you want to input the street addresses of some other campus buildings, refer to GWU's interactive campus map.

And stop picking your nose, please.

e-Repression

2005-06-10T20:32:00.000-07:00

I came across a fascinating but deeply troubling report on Internet censorship in China released two months ago by the OpenNet Initiative, which is a collaborative effort by the University of Toronto, Harvard, and University of Cambridge:

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. . . Filtering takes place primarily at the backbone level of China's network, though individual Internet service providers also implement their own blocking. Our research confirmed claims that major Chinese search engines filter content by keyword and remove certain search results from their lists. Similarly, major Chinese Web log ("blog") service providers either prevent posts with certain keywords or edit the posts to remove them. (p. 3)

If the Chinese have figured out a way to do this so effectively, presumably comparable systems of Internet censorship can be imposed by other governments that may be deeply hostile to criticism from the media and the public. Could such censorship happen in America? Why or why not?

On a lighter note, it is interesting to note which information sources the Chinese censors view as threats to their propaganda machine:

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, ONI found that most major American media sites, such as CNN, MSNBC, and ABC, are generally available in China (though the BBC remains blocked).

Thank God that at least the Beeb is on their enemies list!

More online resources for strategic plans

2005-06-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

Phil found these on the Washington Post website:

The Virginia Voter's Guide, and Race to Richmond, the Post's blog on the Virginia governor's race.

Formatting tips for online communications

2005-06-09T11:11:00.000-07:00

I will link to this in the "Tips" section and add to it from time to time.

Check spelling.
Break up long paragraphs into shorter ones.
Make headlines easy to scan. As with newspaper headlines, shorten your title, if possible, to get it to fit on one line. If it must wrap, be sure you don't leave one solitary orphan word on the second line.
Use underlines only for links. Otherwise readers will click on your underlined text and wonder why the link is broken.

If you want a book title to appear underlined, you can make the title a link to a review of the book or a place where readers can obtain it.

Peer-to-peer problem-solving

2005-06-09T10:46:00.000-07:00

If you are scratching your head over an annoying code problem, Kathie Legg of Kathie's Politech has graciously offered to look at your code and try to help. She wrote me this just before I distributed the email list to the class on Tuesday:

My classmate . . . had an error in their code for their last post. I offered to help them with that (I am good at finding errors) but they seem to have taken down the blog post. Can you just make sure they know I don't mind helping them fix it and they did not have to take it down?

When I asked whether she wanted to offer her help to other classmates, as well, she replied:

Feel free to let them know. I LOVE looking at code!

Local boy makes good

2005-06-09T07:39:00.000-07:00

Earlier today, our own Justin Cole (meet justin) had the No. 1 of the top five most commented-on political posts at Blogcritics.org. It's still at No. 3 as I write.

11:15 AM: Uh ... correction. Justin now has TWO articles in the TWO top spots. What did he have for breakfast?

See for yourself.

Why is this a big deal? Knowing how to get "earned media" on the blogs can be a very useful skill. Blogcritics.org is among the top 25 of all weblogs ranked by traffic, with an average of over 15,800 visitors a day. Great job, Justin! (Presumably the traffic on Justin's own blog spiked today.)

Note that the traffic ranking stats are via SiteMeter. While the free version of SiteMeter provides only a few basic kinds of information, its widespread use allows apples-to-apples ranking among sites. So no matter what else you may happen to use for your traffic data, it's probably a good idea to use SiteMeter as well, especially since it's free. more

P.S. When you write a top recommended post on certain blogs — such as those with highest "ecosystem ranking" (incoming links from other blogs), you can assume that your post has been read by at least some people on the Hill. When we talk to Sr. Legislative Asst. Joel Segal during Class 7 (New Media on Capitol Hill), let's ask him which ones he regularly checks. more about ecosystem ranking

Flirting as online collective action

2005-06-08T17:06:00.000-07:00

If you liked "Read You Me" posted today on Kathie's Politech, you may also be interested in this interview of cyberculture chronicler Howard Rheingold: "Is That a Computer in Your Pants?" In a free-wheeling discussion of modes of online collective action, he mentions gaming, riots, elections, political demonstrations — and flirting:

"Hundreds of thousands of young people in Brazil have a group called Blah! that they use to flirt with. You get a screen name, which protects your real identity. You get a profile, which describes who you are. And you can search for profiles and send them messages. They can reply to you through their handle or through their real identity, or they can block communications from you. It's almost entirely about flirting, and it's mostly young people, and it's popular — 400,000 people joined it in the first three months it was in operation. They have face-to-face parties with people standing around texting each other, looking around to see if the people who are texting are the ones they’re talking to."

There's a lot of other interesting stuff online about MoSoSo and flirting, such as this Wired News story: MoSoSos Not So So-So.

Peer-to-peer research

2005-06-08T15:38:00.000-07:00

SEPARight of Right Blog asked me to pass on this information:

I'm having a hard time finding websites with polling information for the VA Governor race. I finally found this. It shows polls in March, April, and May. March and May have demographic breakdowns. They were done by Survey USA. I don't know polling, so I'm not sure if they're credible. This is only for Kilgore, Kaine, and Potts. Fitch is not included.

Can you pass this on to whomever has these three candidates?

Survey USA also has results for many other cities in the US.

If you find information that might help your classmates, why not post it on your blog? Strategic Plan background research is certainly on-topic, and it's a good way to increase classmates' interest in your blog.

You might also post a list of specific information you are looking for. That way, classmates may be able to return the favor.

Google Search is now working on my blog

2005-06-08T15:24:00.000-07:00

Search is also working on iammeblog. I tested a few of the other blogs and did not find any that were search-enabled yet.

If you haven't done so already, you may want to submit your blog URL to Google to speed things up.

I also linked to your blogs from a little static page on my server. Sometimes spiders don't index everything on dynamic pages.

Go ahead and post comments on all blogs

2005-06-07T10:43:00.000-07:00

Starting now (Wednesday 7:38 AM) you can post comments on all class blogs without having to send me links to them in your weekly reports.

From now on, your weekly reports will contain only your name, your link(s) to your public blog comment(s), and your screenname used for those comments. No more links to comments in class blogs.

A few blogs are not yet sending auto-emails, but I will collect comments manually from those blogs until kinks are worked out.

Be sure to do this now (please)

2005-06-07T07:22:00.000-07:00

Make life easier for everybody by setting up your blog to report blog entries and comments to me automatically via email.

Everybody must do it before it will work as a reporting system. It's easy and should take you two minutes or less.

Once everybody sets it up, no one will have to send me links to their comments EVER AGAIN!

If it's not set up today, then people will still have to send me their links next week. Let's not go there.

Here's how you can do your part.

Using Blogger's spellcheck

2005-06-06T14:48:00.000-07:00

A good blog, like any good publication, is well-edited. I have been seeing some otherwise great blogs that have spelling errors. When that happens, I will ask you to correct the errors before I grade the work. So you will save us both time if you edit your work before you post it.

Blogger's spellcheck is easy to use. When you are ready to publish your blog entry, simply click the spellcheck button. Here's a screenshot.

Tech note: Certain browsers do not support Blogger's spellcheck:

Spell check does not work in Safari. We recommend using Mozilla Firefox for Mac users.

In the Camino browser, text cannot be entered into the posting field. We will be making some changes to handle this browser better.

In recent versions of Mozilla browsers, the image upload and spell-check windows may be blocked as popups. You can fix this by changing your preferences to allow popups from blogger.com and www.blogger.com.

How to spellcheck your comments
Here's some helpful advice posted on Stuck in the Middle with Blue:

"I know you can use the spell check function whenever creating a post on blogger, but the same option isn't available when posting a comment. . . [I] did an online search for spell checkers and came up with Spellcheck.net. No registration, no downloads, just cut and paste. It identifies misspelled words and gives you a drop down box to correct them, up to 5000 words."

Other Post Editor Tools
To learn about other features in the Post Editor, see "All About the Post Editor" in Blogger Help.

Please confirm project assignments

2005-06-06T01:18:00.000-07:00

I have posted the project assignments for the Strategic Plan.

Please let me know if this information is not correct.

Some of you have asked about the format for submitting the draft Objectives document that is due on Tuesday, June 6th. Please bring a printout and turn it in at class on Tuesday.

See you then.

A way to automate reporting and backups

2005-06-06T00:16:00.000-07:00

Automatic reporting
I had an idea and I think it will work. If it does, it will make things much easier for all of us. Every week the only thing you would need to send me is the link(s) to your comments on public discussion blogs. Everything within Blogger would reach me automatically.

To set this up, I'd like each of you to configure your blogs to automatically send me an email containing any blog entries or comments that are posted on your blog. I'll explain how below.

Automatic backups
Another major benefit of this system is that your work would be protected from accidental loss or deletion. I would have a copy of everything via email.

You may remember that during our last class, we discussed ways to make backup copies of your work. One of you suggested that we could simply set our blogs to do daily archiving. But I looked into the issue today, and apparently the archives are simply a way of organizing the presentation of what is currently in the database, and not a method of creating a separate backup copy of the data that would survive if the blog itself — or even part of it — were somehow deleted.

Although it's very unlikely that your blog would be deleted accidentally or otherwise lost, "unlikely" is not good enough. You need a way to create backups easily.

How to set it up (it's easy)

Log into Blogger Dashboard, and on the Settings Tab, click Email, and enter this email address in the BlogSend Address field: blogbackup@nashinteractive.com

This will automatically send me an email whenever you post an entry on your blog.

If you want to see screenshots, here's the Blogger Help page. (To send emails to both your address and mine, refer to the footnote about Google Groups.)
Next, on the Settings Tab, click Comments, and enter the same email address in the Comment Notification Address field: blogbackup@nashinteractive.com

This sends me an email whenever anyone posts a comment to your blog. (more info.)

Please set this up as soon as possible an send me an email when you're done so I can test it. Thanks!

Note: For tomorrow's report, you still need to manually send links via email. As soon as everyone adds the blogbackup address to their blogs, we should be able to do it automatically.

Your blogs are getting noticed

2005-06-05T21:22:00.000-07:00

I received an email alerting me to this blog featuring your work, Blogging to Make the Grade. Mark Coffey writes:

What will really be interesting will be seeing if any of the blogs keep alive after the class ends...let's hope so

Fun with statistics

2005-06-05T17:17:00.000-07:00

Honest. See for yourself.

I've added SiteMeter statistics reporting to both this blog and the AskEmi blog. Just scroll to the bottom of the right-hand column of links on any page and click on this icon:

You'll see the real-time traffic statistics for the site.

The AskEmi site is using the free version. You can put it on your blogs if you'd like. I am using the paid version on this site so you can become familiar with a more granular level of stats reporting.

Note that normally you would not have this level of detail posted publicly on your site for everyone to see. This is an exception because I want you all to have access to it. When you are managing Internet operations you should consult your stats reports as often as you can.

Please submit your blog URL to Google right away

2005-06-05T12:58:00.000-07:00

I am testing various methods of streamlining the process of tracking your work using search tools and so on, so that you won't have to manually send me links to everything you do. One problem I've discovered is that the Search field in the Blogger Navbar at the top of all our blogs apparently is not working yet.

It ought to be. If you go to this blogger site, the Google Search works.

I'm assuming the problem is that we all need to tell Google that we exist. Blogger online help claims that by default blogs "will be automatically indexed by search engines such as Google," but apparently "by default" takes longer than two weeks. Sometimes you can speed things up by submitting a site to Google yourself, so let's do that.

Submit your blog URL to Google
I just did this for my blogs. Please do so for yours right away. It takes about 15 seconds. Just fill in this short form on the Google website. For example:

Optional: Easy ways to promote your blog
These tips are excellent. You can ignore the first three paragraphs of hot air and go straight to the section titled "Blogger Application Settings."

Format for Monday's weekly report

2005-06-04T18:51:00.000-07:00

I created a page showing the format you should use and explaining how you can capture the comment permalinks so that I can locate your comments.

Please use this format when you send me your email report each Monday. For your reference, I have added a link to this format page in a new section I have added under the blogroll called "About the Assignments."

In addition, when you have time, kindly resend your report from last week using this format. The reason I am requesting this is that in many cases I was unable to locate your comments, either because the link didn't work, or because the link was to the blog home page and I could not locate your comment, or because the link was to a public blog post page with dozens of comments and I had no idea which one was yours because you were using a screenname different from your Blogger screenname.

Of course, you had no specific instructions on how to submit your weekly report until now. If you have difficulty capturing your comment permalinks, please let me know. Thanks for working with me to streamline this process; you are all becoming so prolific that it is truly a challenge to keep up with your writing output. Congratulations!