Archive: Year: 2008

I'm at Harvard today and tomorrow attending the Berkman Center's 10th anniversary, and boy is this is an idea-rich environment. If you want to peek in on the proceedings, there are lots of ways to join in: You can watch Steve Garfield's live video streams on Qik.com, you can log into the IRC back-channel at irc.freenode.net/berkman, and there's a lot of blogging, twittering and flickring happening, all grouped around the tag "Berkmanat10". I highly recommend checking it out. Right now Jonathan Zittrain is giving a tour-de-force keynote on the endangered structure of the Internet. I started reading his book, "The Future of the Internet, And How to Stop It" on the plane ride up to Boston, and can already say it's must-reading....

Here's an even more more updated peek at the emerging program for this year's fifth annual Personal Democracy Forum, which is coming up this June 23-24 in New York City. (I'm marking the latest updates with the word NEW next to them.) We're pretty excited about the line-up that's taking shape (and the fact that this is the first year we're expanding to two days). Plus we think that this year's event is going to be a seminal moment in defining the Internet's impact in opening up not only politics, but also governance (i.e., all the important stuff that happens after the election is over). "Rebooting the System" is our overall theme, and we'll be delving deep into how internet-driven...

Here's a peek at the emerging program for this year's fifth annual Personal Democracy Forum, which is coming up this June 23-24 in New York City. We're pretty excited about the line-up that's taking shape (and the fact that this is the first year we're expanding to two days). Plus we think that this year's event is going to be a seminal moment in defining the Internet's impact in opening up not only politics, but also governance (i.e., all the important stuff that happens after the election is over). "Rebooting the System" is our overall theme, and we'll be delving deep into how internet-driven mass participation is transforming everything from political media and message-making to fundraising and field organizing, along...

I'm in a breakout session at the New Democratic Network's daylong conference on "New Tools, New Audiences," listening to Vijay Ravindran, the CTO of Catalist, talk about web 2.0 and its development of an "Enhanced Voter File." As usual, these are my rushed notes, and at best a good paraphrase of what was said, not direct quotation. The traditional voter file, which is collected by state bodies, is just name, contact info and party registration, and past voter behavior. The enhanced voter file, something that Democrats, Republicans and sometimes other organizations build and maintain, contains commercial data, census data, historical information about your behavior, and specialized data (like lifestyle choices). (Vijay notes, later in the Q&A, that this kind of data is...

A leading indicator? Hillary Clinton's MySpace page is down .2% in the last week: Traffic to her website seems to be crashing, too: Meanwhile, the interwebs are having a fun Friday afternoon playing with this idea from Jason Kottke called "When Obama Wins":...

As the dust settles on the Democratic primary fight, I think more people are going to be turning their attention to understanding the significance of the new kind of political machine the Obama campaign has been building. Matt Stoller, one of my favorite netroots writers, has a great stab in this direction over on OpenLeft with a post he titled "Obama's Consolidation of the Party." I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions about Obama's dominating and remaking the Democratic Party, but there's surely huge potential in their blending of top-down message discipline, net-centric outreach, Alinsky-UFW-Ganz-inspired field work, Camp Obama trainings, Obama Organizing Fellows, and a new 50-state voter registration effort. Whether Obama wins or loses in the...

I spent most of last night watching the Democratic election returns roll in, with the TV tuned to MSNBC but the sound turned down low, and my laptop in my hands, watching for live reaction and commentary on the event as it unfolded. Twitter, which has now become the web's virtual water-cooler, was my main guide, but while it was fun and entertaining to read and trade snarky and occasionally smart asides with the likes of Andy Carvin of NPR (@acarvin), Robert Scoble (@scobleizer), Dave Winer (@davewiner), Amy Gahran (@agahran), Ruby Sinrich (@ruby), John Dickerson of Slate (@jdickerson), Patrick Ruffini (@patrickruffini), Steve Garfield (@stevegarfield), Beth Kanter (@kanter), Joe Trippi (@joetrippi), Craig Newmark (@craignewmark), Garrett Graff (@vermontgmg), Ranjit Mathoda (@mathoda), David...

Some quick takes on the three campaigns' ups and downs in YouTube-land: * Live by the shot-glass, die by the rest-stop coffee machine? Hillary Clinton may have impressed working-class voters last week in Pennsylvania by hoisting a brew, but after a photo opportunity at a gas station in South Bend, Indiana, she was caught by MSNBC struggling to figure out how to get the coffee machine to make her some cappuccino. Shades of the first President Bush's first encounter with a supermarket checkout scanner? I'm not sure who added the teasing soundtrack, but this snippet could be on its way to internet notoriety, with 14,000 views in just the first two hours since its posting. (Hat tip to Americablog.) UPDATE: This video...

I spent a few minutes in the future last night, having a late dinner at an Italian restaurant in Santa Monica with Robert Scoble of FastCompany.tv and Loic le Meur of the start-up Seesmic. Both of them are tech pioneers who are working in the emerging world of the world live web. And when they say live, they don't mean simply the part of the web that gets updated often, otherwise known as the blogosphere and the news-sphere. They mean the direct streaming of live events onto the web, along with live feedback from audiences that are highly networked. You are far more likely to encounter Scoble and le Meur on Twitter, the instantaneous community messaging system, than you are to...

Will soundbite politics win out over soundblast politics? That's the question that was on my mind as I flew out to Los Angeles yesterday evening to do a couple of talks today and tomorrow at the USC Annenberg School and at the Economics of Social Media conference. As we crossed over the center of the country, I watched Rev. Jeremiah Wright's speech before the Detroit NAACP as it was played live on CNN and thought to myself, "Well, there wasn't that much that was controversial about his speech, it was mainly a paean to diversity and respecting each other's differences." But as soon as Wright's long speech ended, I could see the soundbite machine gearing up on CNN, as the...