Archive: Year: 2006

Not only did John Edwards's 2008 campaign team break new ground online with his use of mobile shortcode (see Justin Oberman's blog post below), they've been busy all over the web. They put the obligatory video up on YouTube, and they managed to get A-list tech blogger Robert Scoble to cover his announcement, an unusual pairing to say the least. (Which didn't hurt since his own blog went down today, which my spies say was the doing of tech vendor Plus Three.) But if you want to count bang for the buck I would have to put at the top of the list Edwards's appearance live-blogging on DailyKos, where, if you took the time to scroll through the comments you'd learn...

Of all the figures on the national political scene, there is only one person who I think we can genuinely say is participating in the blogosphere, as opposed to just using it: Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of Senator John Edwards, the once- and, it appears, future-Presidential candidate. Elizabeth, who spoke at the PDF annual conference this past May, has been online for a decade, though mostly reading and commenting on blogs anonymously. But in the last year or so, she has been popping up on various blogs, including the Huffington Post, OrangePolitics, and ArchPundit, in her own name, and writing in a voice that is unmistakably her own. Whatever you may think of her and her husband's politics and ambitions, she...

What made you laugh this year? Here's the best William F. Buckley parody video I've ever seen: It is by my brother-in-law, I have to admit...

That's the scoop from Technology Daily's Aliya Sternstein, who reports that the House has notified Members that "secure blog software is now available for those who choose to maintain online journals." Sternstein doesn't say what software the House Administration Committee actually approved, though a spokeswoman told her that Members can use other blog tools if they meet House security standards. She also reports that Members are expected to comply with the same regulations pertaining to franked mail. My favorite detail from her article: "While blogs are not yet widespread on federal Web sites, the CIA uses more than 1,000 internal blogs, and Montgomery County, Md., hosts a blog for the Division of Solid Waste." And indeed the Division of Solid Waste...

When I first heard about the interactive website Second Life, I thought "I don't even have time for my first life, let alone time to create a second one." And so far, I haven't made much time for it, judging that until Linden Labs makes the interface easier to use, it wasn't going to grab that many denizens beyond some digerati and perhaps some folks with too much time on their hands. But I have noticed lots of political hackers, and even some hacks, playing in this new space. One-time presidential candidate Mark Warner did an event in Second Life; the RootsCamp community has been holding a regular weekly meeting there; and Reuters have even set up a bureau with...

More like, now you see it, now you don't. It appears that about two days ago (judging by Technorati's link history), Tom Delay turned his old campaign url, TomDeLay.com, into a blog, and Sunday made his first post: Welcome to TomDeLay.com and thank you for visiting my new blog. Over the course of my political life I have learned many things, one of which is that not all good ideas come from Washington, D.C.. In fact I think that most of the best ideas come from concerned citizens from all over The United States. Unfortunately, many D.C. insiders are simply incapable of looking outside the capital beltway for fresh opinions and new approaches that might otherwise help our nation. I have created this...

The giant social networking hub MySpace was in the news yesterday for announcing that it will soon be scouring its 100 million-plus member pages for known child molesters, using existing databases to match them not just by their names, but also by their physical descriptions, include details such as age, hair color, height, scars and tattoos. If that doesn't make you wonder about possible cases of mistaken identity and other forms of creepy overkill, check out this story from blogger Scott Henson. Apparently, the warrantless tactics that some prosecutors are now using to pull information off of MySpace pages to track sex offenders are now spreading to much lower level crimes. Henson discovered a thread on the Texas District and County...

Do you think the "bloggers vs journalists" fight is over, as Jeff Jarvis exclaimed to me at a panel we were on together last week at the Museum of Television and Radio? I argued with Jeff then that it was far from over, and to prove my point I can point you to today's New York Times Week in Review, which has a giant 3/4 page charticle by Danny Glover of National Journal titled "New on the Web: Politics as Usual." To my knowledge, Glover's piece is the first time the Times has looked so closely at the new phenomenon of blogging and tackled the question of blogger ethics, so -- even if we wish this debate were over -- it...

This morning's hot story on the internet and politics comes from across the pond in England, where the BBC reports that Tony Blair's departing chief strategy adviser Matthew Taylor says the web is producing a "crisis" in how politicians and citizens relate to each other. Speaking at a local conference on e-democracy, Taylor added: The internet has immense potential but we face a real problem if the main way in which that potential expresses itself is through allowing citizens to participate in a shrill discourse of demands. If you look at the way in which citizens are using technology and the way that is growing up, there are worrying signs that that is the case. What is the big breakthrough, in terms...

If you want to get an insider's view on how one underfunded Democratic congressional candidate beat the insiders' handpicked contender and then went on to beat her Republican incumbent opponent, check out this diary on Daily Kos. Its author, who worked with Carol Shea-Porter as the second person besides the campaign manager hired on the campaign, writes that they "had a unique, and as history will note, a brilliant strategy to build a massive grass roots network. It was based on the book "The Tipping Point' by Malcome [sic] Gladwell, which is not a book about politics but about how trends spread through culture." And it's clear from his account that there several tipping points to Shea-Porter's campaign. Probably most important:...