Archive: Year: 2006

Want to know exactly how the federal government spends your money, or which contractors get the bulk of government deals, or what percentage of those contracts are bid competitively? Or, would you like to find out how much your Member of Congress is worth, or how many Members own stock in specific companies? Feel like checking out who's taken the most trips sponsored by private groups? Three new databases, one built by OMB Watch and two built by the Center for Responsive Politics, have just gone live, and judging by the intense press interest in the launch, I think there's going to be a lot of new and interesting stories appearing soon. (Full disclosure: I am a consultant to the Sunlight...

Do you want to blow the whistle on some kind of wrong-doing, but you can't afford the risk of being exposed? Here is the best, most up-to-date guide on how to protect the secrecy of your identity online, written by Ethan Zuckerman, one of my favorite geek-activists. It doesn't require a high degree of technical sophistication, and Zuckerman provides many helpful pointers to make sure you don't leave a traceable digital trail. Bookmark this one; you never know when you might need it. Technorati Tags: Ethan Zuckerman, privacy, whistleblowing...

Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was in Britain, giving a speech before the Conservative Party's annual conference, and he also made some news in an interview with the Financial Times where he talked about the internet's impact on politics. A lot of what he said made sense, though it wasn't particularly new, including: ** "Many of the politicians don't actually understand the phenomenon of the internet very well. It's partly because of their age . . . often what they learn about the internet they learn from their staffs and their children." Tell it, Eric! ** "If television created this generation of politicians, what will the internet do to the next generation of politicians?" Yes, good question indeed. ** "The internet has largely filled...

Just read it. It's terrific....

It's a relief, after all the heavy-breathing nonsense from pundits like David Brooks about Markos Moulitsas as some kind of "kingmaker" and Lee Siegel about "blogofascism," to read a smart essay on the way that the "netroots" are changing politics--or actually on how the emergence of the "networked public sphere," to use Yochai Benkler's signature phrase, is starting to transform political debate and open the system to non-elites. Henry Farrell, writing in the Boston Review, says this about the progressive bloggers who have emerged as a new force in Democratic circles: What they are is an example of how the Internet can foster new ways of conducting argument and building social cooperation among diverse groups and individuals. In other words, they...

First, watch the "Free Hugs" video on YouTube. Now, ponder what this might teach us about politics, the internet and the zeitgeist. Some background is in order. A year ago, Juan Mann was just an odd guy standing in the Pitt Street Mall in Sydney, Australia offering "free hugs" to passing strangers. One of the people he hugged was Shimon Moore, the lead singer of the Sick Puppies. They became friends, and one day Moore decided to borrow a video camera showing Mann doing his thing. As the "free hug" campaign started to spread, the city council tried to ban it, even attempting to impose a huge liability insurance requirement on him for offering free hugs in public. So Mann and...

Some are calling it "salary porn," and apparently the desire to peek is so strong that this site crashed on its first day of operation, yesterday. But something like Legistorm, which bills itself as "the Web's only source for congressional staff salaries," was definitely bound to happen. By culling publicly available information, the site has made it incredibly easy to discover how much every one of the thousands of Hill staff made in the past budget year. The site was built by Jock Friedly, a former reporter for The Hill who now runs a suite of sites that collect and disseminate government information, like Storming Media (which specializes in Pentagon reports) and Energy Storm (science citations). "I think this will add a...

That's the question some political bloggers who are African-American are asking about this photo of a meeting former President Bill Clinton had with fifteen political bloggers at his Harlem office this past Tuesday. Terrance Heath, a blogger who works for EchoDitto, first raised the issue in a gentle way on his site, The Republic of T. Liza Sabater sharpens the questions on her site, Culture Kitchen. She writes: What does it mean though that there are 20 bloggers invited to this lunch and not one is black or latino? What does it mean for this group of bloggers to be patting themselves on the backs for being with Clinton when they are all in Harlem and not one of them is a...

Scott Chacon's baby is just born and still a modest project, but go check out There Oughta Be A Law.org, "a website for people to work together to create online bills that they think should be laws." Chacon, who ran a very idealistic and visionary campaign in the Democratic primary to challenge Rep. Richard Pombo last year, is a very talented programmer with lots of good ideas. This one could take off. I played with it for a bit and found the interface delightfully fluid and simple. It's easy to post an idea for a law, share bills with friends, sign on to sponsor other people's bills, suggest a change in a bill's title or text, and--if you're the author of...

The Center for Democracy and Technology has put together a handy online guide for anyone involved in electoral politics online called, appropriately, the NetDemocracy Guide. It's an outgrowth of the fight between political bloggers and the Federal Election Commission, which began when the FEC hinted at drastic new regulations that would have unnecessarily curtailed much web-based political speech a little over a year ago, and culminated earlier this year with the agency essentially deciding to leave most unpaid and low-cost online politicking untouched. The guide does a solid job of explaining the differences between "uncompensated internet activity" that is specifically exempt from regulation, and the kinds of "public communication" that can trigger reporting requirements and conceivably may also count as contributions...