Archive: Year: 2005

House Speaker Dennis Hastert has a blog. Now, if only he had a personality. It's nice to see politicians dipping their pinky toes into the blogosphere, I guess. And Hastert (or, more likely, his ghostwriter) does try to show that he gets it. He writes, "The internet is changing the way we share information. My office has been talking a lot about some of the conversations going on in blogosphere. So I thought, hey, I should start one and give you unfiltered updates on Capitol Hill." But for this politician, "sharing information" really just means "a new way for us to get our message out." As my friend David Weinberger once memorably shouted,"I am a citizen and a voter. I flee from 'message.'...

Yesterday, I got one of those occasional e-mails that MoveOn.org sends out to its list, entitled "Help Set MoveOn's Course." It read: "Dear MoveOn member, MoveOn works for the same reason democracy does: when lots of people work together, they generate great ideas and accomplish great goals. That's why we need your help. To get direction from our members, we have set up an online forum. There, you can share your ideas and goals for MoveOn and our nation. Comments are read and rated by other members and the best ideas float to the top. These help set MoveOn's course. Take a few moments today to contribute to the Great Goals forum. Even if there's nothing on your mind, come read what others are saying...

Ezra, Matthew, Sam, Mark and Garance. Jonah, John, Larry, Jonathan, Cliff, Iain, Tim, Roger, Warren, Andrew, Mark, Ramesh, Rich, Byron, and Kathryn. Daniel (all by his lonesome). Kevin (another lonely boy). David, John, Peter, Marc and Katrina. Respectively, those are the names you'll find on the blogs of The American Prospect, The National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Monthly, and The Nation. Now the New Republic joins the fraternity with its blog, The Plank. Written by Michael, Franklin and Jason. Thirty writers. Three of them are women. It's 2005, right?...

Pajamas Media, a new multi-author political blog venture that is due to go live in November, pulled back its peignoir a little yesterday, announcing an all-star slumber party of mostly right-leaning scribblers. Following in the slippers of the Huffington Post, this is the next big play by (mostly) political journalists and bloggers to aggregate their individual audiences into something of greater interest to advertisers. It will be fun to see if it succeeds, but it's hard to see how it will. Some of the political blogosphere's most well-known names are involved, including Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, screenwriter Roger Simon, The Volokh Conspiracy's Eugene Volokh, La Shawn Barber, Dean Esmay of Dean's World, and Little Green Footballs' Charles Johnson. So the site...

Hello, I must be returning. Actually, the main purpose of this post is to congratulate Chris Nolan on the launch of Spot-On, her new experiment in stand-alone journalism, and to thank her for holding down the fort for me here at PDF while I went off to dwell in the trenches of Andrew's campaign for NYC Public Advocate. I'm working on a detailed post-mortem of that campaign, a version of which I'm planning to share publicly, and looking forward to getting back into the thick of things here. I also want to give a big shout-out to Hart Hooton, our general manager; Kate Kaye, our associate editor; and Jen Vento, our webmaster. They've been busy developing some new features and design...

Noticed something interesting about Technorati's "top searches this hour" list: ever since the New York Times started its "TimesSelect" program and hid all its opinion columnists behind their paywall, the names of their columnists, and sometimes the titles of their columns, have been clogging up the top ten. Today, six of the top ten searches, in fact, are on Times' columnists names, and a seventh is on the title of Maureen Dowd's latest column, "Dancing in the Dark." The Times has made a big mistake in taking their most popular content out of the conversation, and the network is routing around the error. People are turning to bloggers, figuring they'll find the gist or the text of their favorite columnists in...

Dear readers, subscribers and friends of Personal Democracy Forum: First, thanks to all of you--speakers, moderators, sponsors, exhibitors, and participants-- who made this Monday's second annual forum a resounding success! I want to especially thank my colleagues Dawn Barber, Elizabeth Caputo, Hart Hooton, Kate Kaye, Jen Vento, Isabel Walcott and most of all Anthony Russamano for all their unbelievably hard work! We've all been taking a little bit of a breather since Monday, but will soon be sending out an evaluation survey for everyone who attended, since we want to learn from you what you liked, what could have been better, and how to make next year's forum even more valuable. Now a bit of internal PDF news: As of this week,...

Some of you have perhaps already heard that Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, has decided to run for Public Advocate of New York City. A big part of his motivation is to try to put into practice a lot of the ideas and tools that folks at PDF have been talking about. Needless to say, this is very exciting news for those of us involved in PDF, as well as his larger circle of friends, associates and practitioners interested in the personal-democracy revolution. In the interests of full disclosure, here are some particulars: -While Andrew has not yet made a formal campaign announcement, his website AdvocatesforRasiej went live this past Wednesday. For more details on his campaign, go...