Archive: Year: 2007

We recently received an email from the general counsel of Aristotle, one of the software-as-a-service companies featured in our online guide, complaining about our efforts, that arrived just as we sent out an email to our subscribers asking them to help update the survey data in the guide. We are reprinting his letter below, followed by our response. Feel free to join in the conversation in the comments thread. To: The Editors, Publishers and Founders of Personal Democracy Forum Re: Personal Democracy Forum’s Software-as-a-Service “User” Survey Date: February 27, 2007 Aristotle applauds Personal Democracy Forum’s advocacy of the software-as-a-service model for political and grassroots organizations of the future. ...

It took just a few hours, but at the moment it looks like the same grass-roots army that has been showing up online and on the streets for Barack Obama has also swung into gear on Eventful.com's new Politics page. Yesterday, I reported on the launch of the site, which aggregates news of upcoming political events around the country, and also enables anyone to post or join in a "demand" for a particular political figure to appear in their town or city. Hillary Clinton was leading by a landslide, 581 to 19 for Obama (and just 5 for John Edwards), but now the freshman Senator from Illinois has rocketed ahead. (In fact, the numbers keep rising as I type!) The explanation? Last...

Barack Obama may have more friends than Hillary Clinton on MySpace, but right now the Senator from New York has 30 times more people demanding that she do a political appearance in their city than the Senator from Illinois, according to Eventful.com. She's got 581 people who have used the site to post a "demand" for her, compared to just 19 for Obama. (John Edwards, for all his campaign's vaunted savvy about Web 2.0 and social networking sites, has just 5 people demanding he do an event in their town.) Below is a screen grab of the top five political figures currently in demand through the site. I expect these numbers to change rapidly as soon as the campaigns and their...

We're pleased to announce our newest feature: Technorati tracks, a series of dynamic charts that show how often bloggers are mentioning the presidential candidates over the last 30 and 90 days. The charts are broken down by party, and we've also included a third set showing how bloggers are also talking about prominent non-candidates like Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Wesley Clark and Michael Bloomberg. I have a couple of observations about what all this means. First, this is just the world live web in action. Bloggers are just people using a bit of software to share their thoughts with each other in real time. Technorati watches the ever growing worldwide blogosphere -- more than 60 million, with another 100,000 added every...

Steven Clift, who knows more than anyone I know about how countries around the world are experimenting with reinventing government in the electronic age, has a fascinating new post on his blog about a new service in England: the Prime Minister's office is inviting the public to petition him directly online. Right now, the top petition, with more than 1.4 million signatures, is urging Tony Blair to scrap a proposed vehicle tax. Clift adds: The service, commissioned by that office and implemented/hosted by mySociety.Org (see the Guardian’s in-depth profile on founder Tom Steinberg from January) is generating some major heat. Meaning, it is working. It is allowing millions of British citizens to express themselves directly to government in a way that...

One of the things I love about blogging and the web is that if you have a halfway decent idea and it gets noticed by a few sites that function like giant switching stations, very quickly all kinds of other good people pop up and get in touch with their own good ideas and content. So, in just the last day, since being tapped by both TechCrunch and TalkingPointsMemo, here are some of the cool sites and posts that I've encountered: --Blog the Campaign in 08, a group blog that subtitles itself, "How Social Media is changing the political landscape." A lot of discussion about blogging practices, triggered no doubt by the Edwards kerfluffle, but also a very useful run-down from...

It's time for some editorial housekeeping. Last night, I deleted a post by a new user, Hasan Jafri. He had signed up and innocently discovered that users had permission to blog and/or post stories with digg-like voting attached to them. These are two features that can be enabled on the Drupal platform that we use to run this site, but it was not our intention to run TechPresident as an open site where anyone can post at will. (Comments are open and will stay open as long as people behave.) So, I took the post down (it wasn't a bad one, by the way) and sent Jafri an apologetic email trying to explain. He rightly takes me to task here: No sooner...

What happened to Hillary Clinton's friends on MySpace.com? A day ago, she had about 22,000; now her site lists only 12,177. For a couple of hours today, if you tried to go to http://www.myspace.com/hillaryclinton2008, you saw this: Did one of Rupert Murdoch's minions trip a switch? (Hardly likely, as the mogul and the Senator are friends.) Did someone at the Clinton campaign decide they didn't like being second to Barack Obama? The good news is Clinton's page is up again, but clearly this can't be a happy day in Peter Daou's office. On Hillary's MySpace page, there's a message reading: For some reason Myspace deleted us recently. We are working to get back to 24,000 friends. Please re-add us send out a bulletin letting...

Welcome to our new group blog on how the presidential campaigns are using the web, and how the web is using them, TechPresident.com. This blog is an extension of Personal Democracy Forum, our online zine and annual conference on how technology is changing politics. Over there, we'll continue to cover all the ways the political arena is being reshaped by new tools and practices born on the web, while over here we're going to drill down on what the presidential campaigns are doing online, and vice-versa, how bottom-up initiatives launched by ordinary people, what we call voter-generated content, are going to impact the campaign. Compared to four years ago, when an email message from one campaign's then-obscure blogger (Mathew Gross, whose...

So far, on pure incoming blog posts as tracked by Technorati (disclosure, run by my little brother), Hillary Clinton is generating far more conversation online than John Edwards or Barack Obama. The chart below shows the track for the last thirty days, with a huge spike for Hillary around her announcement in late January, a smaller spike for Obama just before that, which was probably around his filing exploratory papers, and a lesser jump for Edwards in late December when he officially launched his campaign. Edwards also shows a recent boost, no doubt around all the controversy over his hiring two feminist bloggers with a paper trail that offended some rightwingers. This is a dynamic chart, so it should start...