Archive: Year: 2006

Google any member of the New York State legislature and up comes a sponsored ad showing their grade on a "middle-class report card" put together by the liberal Drum Major Institute think-tank. It looks like this: This is a very smart move. Instead of hoping that potential supporters will find their way to Drum Major's home page, the institute is going where people are already searching for information and, for what I'm sure is a few pennies per click-through, offering to connect them to timely information. Who else is doing this? A quick run-through some popular topics yields these interesting links: "Iraq War"--Center for American Progress Stem cell research--The Steve Westly campaign for CA governor (odd that I got that result as I don't...

Just got a note from David Moore with this news: "The Democracy open-source video player has been downloaded over 150,000 times since its launch in mid-February, we have over 28,000 individuals signed up on our e-mail list for news and updates, and our websites are receiving steady traffic -- Videobomb.com, for example, is receiving over 10,000 hits a day on average, often much higher." Pretty cool....

The theme of Esther Dyson's annual PC Forum conference this year is "Erosion of Power: Users in Charge," but as I listened to this morning's panel on "Behavioral Targeting 2.0," I found myself wondering if there was an unintended double meaning in the word "users." Arvind Rajan, President and CEO of Grassroots Enterprise, talked about how his company has developed a thriving business generating grass-roots activity around issues being debated in Washington. He noted that their clients included the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association and the Republican National Committee, adding, "Most of our business has been corporations and trade associations seeking to influence what goes on in Washington." "We're never communicating with an individual who hasn't opted in," Rajan said. He...

Online social networks have taken off all over the United States, and indeed much of the wired world. Friendster, the granddaddy of the breed, says it has more than 24 million members, while its newer rival MySpace.com claims more than 50 million accounts. Eighty-five percent of the college students in America use Facebook.com. Tagged.com, which focuses on teens, has 2 million users. Bebo.com has tallied more than 21 million registered users worldwide in its first year, 4 million alone in England. In India, the web portal Rediff.com has more than 2 million users of its social network service. And in South Korea, a whopping 15 million people—one-third of the country’s population—belong to Cyworld (which literally means "relationship world"). While all these...

Live, from Politics Online at George Washington University, here are my semi-verbatim notes (i.e. these are not perfect direct quotes but my best paraphrasing) on a lively morning plenary called "The Changing Media Landscape," with David Weinberger, Dan Gillmor, Alex Jones and moderated by Chris Nolan. My random editorial comments are in italics. (I'd be blogging more from here but the wifi connection is really spotty.) Nolan: What's changed in the last year? -Weinberger: Editorial authority has shifted. Bloggers are recommendation engines, instead of a bunch of middle-aged white guys deciding what's important. We're constructing our own front pages more on what friends recommend to us. [Indeed.] -Jones: My opinion is different because I don't use the internet in the same way that...

I haven't quite made up my mind about AOL's so-called "e-mail tax," which Matt Stoller blogged about here earlier in the week (at my urging). On one hand, it's hard to accept paying a price for a service that costs AOL almost nothing to perform, i.e. delivering email to its customers. And a "pay-to-send" system will definitely create a two-tiered internet, where email senders who can't afford the email surcharge will inevitably experience a lower quality of service, and the vibrant democracy of voices online will likely become much more stratified. On the other hand, see what tech industry guru Esther Dyson has to say on her not-quite-a-blog (February 14, 2006 entry): People are acting as if it were evil to ask for...

Today, I'm pleased to unveil our new section of Campaign Website Reviews, which launches with a close look at Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign site by Michael Turk, former e-campaign director for Bush-Cheney 2004 and the RNC. Given that it may seem unusual to have a top Republican writing reviews of a top Democrat's campaign site, I want to offer a few words of explanation. First, Personal Democracy Forum is meant to be a non-partisan venue for sharing ideas and debating developments in the realm of tech-politics. It makes sense to involve people from all parts of the political spectrum in that conversation, as long as we all agree to NOT use this forum as one more place for partisanship. (God knows we...

The Washington Post has two must-read articles on the evolution of Internet use in China, starting with yesterday's feature on how a journalist's open letter criticizing pro-government editing practices at a top paper circulated to millions of readers despite attempts by official censors to block it, and continuing with today's story on the evolution of the Chinese Wikipedia. Here's the core of the story: Eleven years after young Chinese returning from graduate study in the United States persuaded the party to offer Internet access to the public, China is home to one of the largest, fastest-growing and most active populations of Internet users in the world, according to several surveys. With more than 111 million people connected to the Web, China ranks...

With Congress debating the future of the Internet, and major telecom companies speaking openly about discriminating against online content and service they don't control, people are raising their voices to make sure the Net's open nature is preserved. The advocacy group Free Press is sponsoring an open conference call for bloggers this Friday, Feb. 10 at 9:30am eastern. Speakers include Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, Mark Cooper of Consumer Federation of America, Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy and Ben Scott of Free Press. To join the call, dial 1-800-370-0906 and enter code 7028789. More info at www.netfreedomnow.org....

It looks like more Republican staffers than Democrats have their fingers caught in the cookie jar known as the Wikipedia. At least that's what this entry on the Wikipedia page shows for IP 143.231.249.141, which belongs to Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives and which is cited for "a large amount of vandalism." Rep. Marty Meehan (D-MA) was the first Congressman whose staff admitted cleaning up his Wikipedia entry--to remove an unflattering but true reference to his having broken a campaign pledge to step down after four terms--but he's hardly the only one. In no particular order, Wikipedia lists these Members' names and their reported infractions, along with several other politically-charged pages that were altered from House computers: ...