Archive: Year: 2006

What do the following sites have in common? Spread Firefox, Good Storm, Jim Hightower, Jerry Brown, ACLU TV, Our Media, a grassroots media site; Congressman Barney Frank, New York State Senate Democrats and the SEIU#039s Purple Ocean Campaign. ALL of these sites use Drupal - an open-source software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website - at extremely low costs. The NYC user community of Drupal will host a two day educational/training session on May 13 & 14. For Saturday and Sunday, DrupalCamp NYC will have sessions for all types of users - from introductory sessions for first time users - advanced users who want a better...

Wondering what we'll be covering at Personal Democracy Forum next May 15? We've got more details to share here. One major feature of the day: a series of breakout sessions that cover all the "how to" questions you may have, including: -To blog or not to blog: Should your campaign or advocacy organization adopt a blogging strategy, and if so, how to do it right. -How to win friends and influence people in the blogosphere. -Fundraising best practices: How to turn supporters into donors. -Merging online and offline organizing: How to use your list to grow your field operation and vice versa. -Why your website is probably obsolete (and how to fix it): Our panel of expert designers will gladly critique your site, if you...

The headline writer at the New York Times knows more than Adam Nagourney, for in an article titled "Internet Injects Sweeping Change Into U.S. Politics," a statement that is indeed true, we learn almost nothing about how politics is actually changing. Instead, we get a look at how the parties and various campaigns are trying out all kinds of new-fangled tools and tricks, mostly aimed at moving their own messages. The "sweeping change," after all, that we're experiencing, has very little to do with "Democrats and Republicans ...

That's the question posed by my pal and colleague David Donnelly, in this oped on Cnet. The company that has redefined free access to information seems to have decided that it has to pay-to-play for access just like everybody else, and is hiring some high-level lobbyists with very close connections to the Republican leadership on the Hill. David thinks they ought to push for a more webby approach to advocacy, especially as causes like net neutrality, which Google is very concerned about, certainly lend themselves to a more people-centric approach. (Full disclosure: I do some consulting work for Public Campaign Action Fund, Donnelly's organization.)...

I've been going to David Isenberg's annual conference for the last two years, first when it was known as WTF (an acronym that meant everything from "When's the Future?" to "Wireless Trumps Fiber" and "Watching Telcos Fail"), and then F2C. This year's event promises to be his best yet, not just because he'll have live music by Joe Craven (why don't more conferences include musical interludes?) and tons of free wifi, but because he's brought together just about every key person involved in the "net neutrality" fight, which, as Doc Searls pointed out here a few months back, is all about the heart and soul of the internet as we know it. The F2C list of speakers includes: former FCC chairman...

It's possible that this is a brilliant reverse-marketing move aimed at getting lots of bloggers to pass around an online video (and don't forget, pictures do speak louder than words), but right now my guess is that Chevy Tahoe isn't all that happy that they're not screening the ads that people are submitting to their "Apprentice" contest....

But do blogs dig Bush? Actually that question didn't come up, but apparently even the notoriously uninterested-in-the-media occupant of the Oval Office recognizes the power of the blogosphere. Thanks to Wizbang for the quote, which came in response to a question about how to get the "good news" about Iraq out to more Americans. Bush said: One of the things that we have to value is that that we do have a media, free media that's able to do what they want to do and I - you ask me to say something in front of all the camera here [laughter]. Help over there will ya? I just got to keep talking and word of mouth, there's blogs, there's internet, there's...

The debate over charging bulk email senders continues today with a strong op-ed piece by Esther Dyson in the New York Times that implicitly attacks all the arguments of the DearAOL.com coalition. The issue was discussed during an open roundtable earlier this week at PC Forum, where Richard Gingras of Goodmail was given a chance to hold forth for a half hour. I have to correct Dave Winer, who I have a lot of respect for, who just posted something on his blog about this. During the discussion at PC Forum, when Winer got the mike and asked for arguments against Goodmail, three were raised. (Not "no one did," Dave.) One came from Elliott Noss, CEO of Tucows, who argued that...

PC Forum always features some new companies with cool products, and this year's winner for me was Bitty.com. It's so simple you have to wonder why no one thought of this before. As they put it, "Bitty is the little browser that goes on any Web page, it's like Picture-in-Picture for the Web." Plus it's free. Need I say more? pcforum06...

I'm a big fan of the online social networking phenomenon, as you can probably tell from my adjoining article about Essembly.com. But before it fades from memory (and jet-lag will do that to you) I wanted to add one comment about the final session at PC Forum, which was about the future of the social networking explosion. The panelists were Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.com, and newcomer Helen Cheng of Seriosity (which is still in stealth mode but is looking at applying the lessons of online gaming to improving remote team collaboration in the business setting). Much of the conversation was focused on understanding how these sites have grown and parsing how younger people use social networking tools...