Archive: Year: 2007

John Edwards has issued a strong statement in support of net neutrality today, writing a letter to the FCC stating that the issue "goes to the heart and soul of democracy." He writes: If you do not guarantee net neutrality, the Internet could go the way of network television and commercial radio - with just a few loud voices and no room for the grassroots and small entrepreneurs. Our country is already divided enough between the haves and have-nots. Where we go to school, where (and if) we get health care, whether we can retire with dignity - we have big divides in all of these areas in this country. While we work to create one America, we...

I'm glad that TechPresident blogger David All posted the "I've Got a Crush...

Longtime PdF readers may remember that for a while we had a page on the site that showed which Members of Congress were most being talked about in the blogosphere, a ranking system that was built for us by Aaron Swartz, using incoming links to their official congressional web sites as one metric, and using blog posts referencing their names as a second metric. We called it "HotPols," but ultimately we took it down because we weren't happy with either metric: too many posts were being counted that referred to people with the same name as a Member (take Adam Smith as once obvious example) and not enough bloggers were bothering to link to the Members' web pages for that...

[Yesterday, I spent an hour on the phone with Joe Green, co-founder of Project Agape, a still-partially-in-stealth start-up that is developing political social networking tools and platforms. It launched with a major new application built for Facebook Platform, called Causes. In the interview, Green talks about what he learned from his first experiment in building an online social network tuned around politics (See my March 2006 PdF article "Essembly.com: Finally, a Friendster for Politics"), his theories of online organizing, new features that Causes is going to roll out, tools Project Agape is building for MySpace and elsewhere, how to deal with privacy concerns, and how Causes differs from Change.org.] MS: How does Project Agape connect to your first effort in political...

Ben Katz of CompleteCampaigns.com writes with a really good question: How much should lower-level political candidates try to adopt the multi-faceted internet strategies of the presidential campaigns? Here's his email: I've been enjoying reading your updates on TechPresident about how Presidential campaigns are using web 2.0 tools such as MySpace, YouTube and Digg. And while I find these very exciting for the Presidential campaigns, I keep coming back to the same question: How does this impact the rest of politics? Do these tools have any impact on the 1,000 congressional campaigns, 5,000 legislative races or approximately 500,000 local campaigns? Does it make sense for a legislative campaign to setup a MySpace page, when the Presidential candidates are only averaging about 5 friends...

I'm not sure how far we should take this analogy, but Ron Paul is to the Republicans of 2008 as Howard Dean was to the Democrats of 2004: the one candidate speaking out prominently against the war when his colleagues were silent or supportive. Since politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, we shouldn't be surprised that he's starting to take off online. A week ago, Robert Smith of NPR did an interview with me on what he called the "fringe candidates"--specifically Paul and former Senator Mike Gravel--and how and why the internet might be helping their candidacies. Most of the interview of course didn't end up on air, but I was pretty satisfied with the two sound-bites from me that did...

Our "2008 Web Video Odyssey," which was produced by the good folks at PoliticsTV, is up on YouTube:...

The Web on the Candidates * Left and right are buzzing about Republican candidate Ron Paul's surprising showings online. He's been the most popular candidate on MySpace since before anyone was paying attention to the friends-chase there, a reflection of the disproportionate number of libertarians among techies online. More recently, he's been at the top of Technorati's most searched terms, and he's also big on Digg. But now these online forays are starting to earn Paul some unusual attention from the mainstream media. For example, he led the live text-messaging poll held by Fox after last night's candidate debate, to the apparent surprise of Sean Hannity. Fox's final results show Paul in a close second to former Massachusetts Governor...

The ongoing collision of technology and politics opened another chapter today with this morning's announcement by MySpace.com that it will be hosting a presidential "Town Hall" series on college campuses this fall featuring nearly all of the major presidential candidates. Viewers will be able to submit questions by MySpace instant messenger and watch live via a MySpace webcast. Participating candidates include Brownback, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Giuliani, Hunter, McCain, Obama, Paul, Richardson, Romney and Thompson. “This won’t be the stale debate format with one moderator getting canned answers to the same old questions,” said Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, in a press release (I'll link to it when it's up). “Our users will have the chance to get direct answers to the...

We're thrilled to announce that Google CEO Eric Schmidt will be keynoting this year's Personal Democracy Forum, joining New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in a one-on-one conversation on the flattening of politics. The full schedule of the day's speakers and panels is also up for viewing, along with the details on this year's first PdF unconference. If you are already registered to come, take few minutes to join in the conference social network (powered by Confabb), where you can create your own profile, add your picture, check off the sessions you're thinking of attending, upload notes, review sessions and speakers, and connect with your fellow attendees. If you're not already registered, this is THE year to come! (He said, ever so modestly...