Archive: Year: 2004

This post from a diary on the DailyKos site (and the many comments added by readers) is the most interesting post-mortem I have yet read on the Democrats' failure to win the election. Susan, the post's author (no last name given), was one of the Dean campaign's California state house party coordinators, and in the course of being evaluated for a similar top position in the Kerry campaign, she was told, " "To be blunt, this is a fat-cat top-down campaign. The campaign staff doesn't really get grassroots." She then supplies chapter and verse on how the Kerry campaign indeed failed to get grassroots organizing, and then, for good measure, argues that the reliance on 527s also badly damaged the Democratic effort...

Sometime today, tonight or tomorrow, a piece of software or a blog or perhaps a high-tech device like a camera phone or a text message that goes viral is going to make a difference in this oh-so-close election, and those of us in the political, technology and journalism worlds are going to rush to make a big deal of it. And rightfully so. When Andrew Shapiro called Greg Simon, Al Gore's deputy chief-of-staff, late on the night of Election 2000, and fed him the numbers that he was reading off of the Florida Secretary of State's website--which differed dramatically from the networks' premature decision to declare the state for Bush--he stopped the Bush victory train in its tracks. Simon was...

On the surface it appears that the latest Bin Laden video has had little effect on the presidential contest. But I've noticed a swelling chorus on rightwing sites pointing to a purported re-translation of a key passage on the tape that supposedly has the al-Qaeda head specifically threatening to attack any American state that votes for Bush. Here's the translation of Bin Laden's conclusion, from the Washington Post: "I tell you in all truth that your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qa'ida. No, your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn't play with our security, has automatically guaranteed its own security." [my emphasis] And here it is from MEMRI, the Middle East Media...

Video Vote Vigil is asking for volunteer videographers to send them video of disturbances outside polling locations on Election Day. Jon Lebkowsky writes that they aren't quite set up to accept content yet, but volunteers who are willing to take their cameras to the polls can sign up now to be notified when registration and uploads are implemented. "We're hoping a bunch of citizens with cameras will discourage efforts to intimidate voters, but if not, we'll have video and photo records which we'll place online as close to realtime as possible." They're especially looking for people who know how to make digital video, edit to within 10MB, and upload. This is another emerging example of citizen's media in action, and specifically...

Guess what? Internet users don't insulate themselves in information echo chambers. "Wired Americans are more aware than non-internet users of all kinds of arguments, even those that challenge their preferred candidates and issue positions." That's the news from a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, done in tandem with the University of Michigan School of Information. My first reaction was to say, "Big deal," since Internet users tend to have higher education levels than the general population, and that would explain at least some of their interest in different points of view. But Pew compared groups with similar demographic characteristics and still found a variation. In other words, Cass Sunstein is wrong. Millions of people aren't using the...