Archive: Year: 2007

Save the date of May 18, folks, and make your plans to be in New York City, because this year the fourth annual Personal Democracy Forum is going to be our biggest and best conference yet. The theme this year is "The Flattening of Politics"--how the distance is rapidly disappearing between the people at the top and bottom of campaigns, political media and voter activism. Through the course of a day of keynote speeches and conversations, demos, panels and workshops, we'll tackle these questions: *How is voter-generated content changing election campaigns? *Why should advocacy groups adapt to the connected age? *What new technology tools and practices are on the horizon? *How are new technologies democratizing the political process? *Which political leaders "get it"? Yes, we're borrowing a...

Yes, it's true, the site does look a bit different! (Hey, all you RSS subscribers, come take a look!) A big thanks to everyone who worked on the site redesign: Josh Levy, our associate editor, who has sweated every tweak; Katherine Dillon and Kate Thompson of the design firm DillonThompson, who gave us our template; and Adam Mordecai, Aaron Welch, Neil Drumm and the other good folks at Advomatic who got under the hood and made it work. Our goal with this design was to make the most dynamic part of the site, the PDF blog, more visible, and to add a new section of premium content focused on company reviews. While we were at it, we cleaned up the top navigation...

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is releasing another of its ongoing reports tracking Americans' use of the internet today (and someone leaked us an advance copy), and this report contains some really important news: * More than 60 million people (31% of all Americans online) say they were online during the 2006 campaign to get information about candidates and/or exchange views via email. They call this growing group "campaign internet users." This group trends young (duh); wealthy; well-educated; and somewhat more white than of color (33% of white Americans vs 23% of blacks and Hispanics). * People with broadband connections at home (now 45% of the overall adult population, compared to 3% in 2000) are far more likely to use...

I've been collecting string about Avaaz.org for a while now, but after I queried founders Ricken Patel and Tom Perriello (of ResPublica) and Paul Hilder, and they begged off on a pre-launch interview, I figured there was no hurry. But their site is now live (thanks Ruby for pinging me on that), so here's a first take. Avaaz.org is using "The World in Action" as its tagline, and the first clue that this aims to be something different is the site, which comes in English, French, Korean, Chinese, Spanish and Portugese. The English version, however, is clearly NOT aimed at us Americans: it's got a photo of Tony Blair that reads "Even he is pulling out/Block the escalation in Iraq," and...

Jerome Armstrong started a pretty interesting thread over on MyDD by asking "What emerging technology or web-based practice do you think will have the biggest impact in 2008?" Among the answers coming in from participants (many of whom are at the beating heart of the netroots phenomenon): -OpenID (coming soon at netroots.com, Jerome notes) -Video blogging where commentary can be added into news clips (I think Viddler may be a useful tool in that regard, by making it possible to tag specific times on a video) -BlogTalkRadio -local blogs (helped by platforms like Soapblox). -cellphones -Skype -free municipal Wifi -widgets Matt Stoller responds by arguing that technology by itself doesn't matter; what does is the "interaction of technology and politics." He adds, "The innovation comes from the unification of...

Matthew Hurst has been producing some really cool computer-generated maps of the interconnections in the blogosphere, and his latest image is a beauty. He's centered it on DailyKos (the bright white dot in the center) and says that the dense area of interlinked sites below it represents the "socio/political community" while the less densely populated but also highly interlinked area in the northeast quadrant of the image represents the heart of the "technical blogosphere" with uber-blog BoingBoing as the brightest node there. Hurst doesn't give any details about his data, but what I find surprising about this picture is how much bigger the political wing of the blogosphere is compared to the techies. No matter, this one is going straight into...

So it turns out I was wrong to say yesterday that Lisa Williams' plan for her useful new site Placeblogger.com included "selling ads across its whole network of sites." That prompted queries from some curious bloggers who bristled at the possibility that Placeblogger was going to try to make money off their free content, without their participation or renumeration. I thought I had heard Lisa describe this approach last summer at Dan Gillmor's "unconference" on citizen journalism that took place the day after Wikimania at Harvard, but I guess I didn't listen carefully enough. So let me correct the record and offer these amplifications directly from Lisa: I read your blog entry yesterday, and I remember being a little surprised by...

If all politics is local, then locally-focused blogs are obviously important to anyone engaged in politics. But since the internet doesn't come with zipcodes attached to urls, it's not obvious how to discover these nodes of conversation and community? How to find blogs that are local hubs? Here are seven easy (and free) steps you can take: 1. Look up your location (town, city, state) in Placeblogger.com, a spanking new directory of 650 "hyper-local" bloggers built by former journalist and blogger Lisa Williams (of H2Otown), with advisory help from Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor. (Full disclosure: I'm fans of all three.) Since the site is new, the coverage is still choppy (Williams only has two blogs for Baltimore, for example,...