Archive: Year: 2005

While Congress and the blogosphere debates the legality of President Bush's executive orders putting the National Security Agency in the business of tapping American citizens communications without a court warrant, the tech site ArsTechnica offers an intriguing theory about the underlying technology being used by the NSA, and a possible explanation for the government's reluctance to use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court process for their wiretaps. Extrapolating from various public statements indicating that new technology was involved, ArsTechnica writer Hannibal surmises that It is entirely possible that the NSA technology at issue here is some kind of high-volume, automated voice recognition and pattern matching system. Now, I don't at all believe that all international calls are or could be...

If you're one of the many people playing with podcasts, then you must read Erik Marcus's helpful and detailed post on how his show was "podjacked" and what to do to protect yourself. What happened to Erik--a third-party created an alternate RSS feed to his podcasts, without his permission, and thus became the gatekeeper to his front-door on lots of big podcast aggregators, including iTunes--could happen to you....

If you’re a typical fan of Flickr, the community photo-sharing site that was recently bought by Yahoo, then you are undoubtedly already familiar with Flickr’s tagging system, which allows anyone who uploads a photo to the site to add his or her own topical notations to each photo. One of the site’s best features is its main tags page, where not only can you see some of the hottest tags in the last few days (snowday and lennon being two example), but you can also browse the site’s most popular tags, which are arranged in a “tag cloud” that shows each word (beach, birthday, cameraphone, japan, me, vacation) and indicates its relative popularity by the word’s type size. Click on...

I'm just digging into the USC Annenberg Digital Future Project's 123-page report, "Surveying the digital Future," which comes out tomorrow, but here are a few highlights that caught my eye: -The political affiliations of Internet users are significantly to the left of non-users. 32% of Internet users identify as somewhat or very liberal, compared to 25% of non-users. Likewise, while 40% of non-users identify as somewhat or very conservative, 36% of net users do so. -The percentage of Internet users who agree with the statement that "by using the Internet, people like you can better understand politics" has gone up from 52% in 2003 to more than 60% today. -Likewise, the percentage of net users who agree that using the Internet can help...

In "Roger Simon's Little Black Dress," Chris Nolan puts her finger on what seems to be wrong with Open Pajamas Media, or whatever they're calling it these days. Steve Urquhart has dropped out of the Utah Senate race. I hope it wasn't the profile we did of his tech-oriented campaign! Keep an eye on Pete Ashdown's challenge to Orrin Hatch from the Democratic side; he's the owner of the state's biggest Internet service provider and he's running an innovative net-savvy campaign. Good reading: Mike Meckler of Red-State.com (not to be confused with RedState.org) has done a series of fascinating pieces on Sherrod Brown, Jerome Armstrong and growohio.org. A cautionary tale....

I would love to read an in-depth piece on how Robert Greenwald and Walmart are each using the web to conduct the most interesting political campaign since the 2004 election, complete with war-rooms and viral marketing, and even online duels between the two sides over the movie's pre-release trailer. (Here's the company's take, at its site WalMartFacts.com, and Greenwald & Co.'s ju-jitsu remix of the company's attack video). If you want to write that piece, let me know. In the meantime, check out these notes from the field, and feel free to add your own: From Iofilm: Greenwald's web site has become a model for self-distribution practices in the internet era. The web site is the distribution equivalent of a swiss army...

There's been a lot of buzz of late about what the big telecom mergers just approved by the FCC (Verizon-MCI and AT&T-SBC), combined with recent FCC rulings giving broadband providers a lot more monopoly powers, might do to the innovative and freewheeling nature of the Internet. The single best piece of analysis I've seen so far was by David Coursey, a columnist for eWeek.com. He starts with SBC CEO Ed Whitacre's comments on BusinessWeek's website, which poured fuel on the fire: BW: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others? Whitacre: "How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like...

I've posted a long post-mortem of the Rasiej campaign for NYC Public Advocate over on my personal blog, micah.sifry.com. As I worked on that campaign while on leave from PDF, I thought it best to post the essay there rather than here, even though I'm sure there are plenty of lessons in it for anyone interested in how technology is (and isn't) changing politics....

"This now sets up the showdown of ideas that I think we've all craved." --Markos Moulitsas, DailyKos.com, 12:46pm, 10.31.05 "The battle we have all been waiting for is finally upon us." --Leon H., Redstate.org, 1:45pm, 10.31.05 StopAlito.com bounces to SavetheCourt.org, a project of People for the American Way. ConfirmAlito.com is taken, but so far no one is using it. BlockAlito.com is available. On Technorati, there are 36 posts matching "Confirm...

Here's a new take on the age-old problem of political gerrymandering, where incumbent politicians choose their voters before their voters choose them: What if we could re-draw political boundaries based on our own natural affiliations to nearby cultural centers and regions instead? That, in part, is the ingenious germ of inspiration behind CommonCensus.org, a project of Michael Baldwin, a 25-year-old English teacher and former political science student living in Brazil. His site asks visitors to input their home address, and then walks them through twelve screens asking what nearby towns and cities they have the strongest affiliation with. As a bonus, he's also inviting people to identify what sports teams they are most loyal to. The result so far is a multicolored...