Archive: Year: 2008

It's late and it's Yom Kippur, so I'm going to be brief: Go read all of Zack Exley's detailed field report on "The New Organizers, Part 1: Obama's neighborhood teams and the power of inclusion and respect." Exley, one of the country's consummate NEW political organizers, who started out as a labor organizer and then got in early on internet-powered organizing first with his satirical GWBush.com, followed by stints with MoveOn.org, the Dean campaign and the Kerry campaigns, has written a powerful and convincing depiction of the people-powered, hyper-networked engine purring away under Obama's hood. Here's the key nut grafs (which he buries deep in the piece): We saw glimpses of the potential for this kind of organizing campaign in MoveOn's...

Did anyone use MySpace's MyDebates page, the "official online companion to the Presidential Debates"? Alas, not too many. And it looks like only four questions of the millions submitted online were asked by Tom Brokaw, the event's moderator. That, plus the pre-agreed rules that prevented the studio audience from asking follow-up questions or even showing emotion, made the "townhall" style presidential debate more like a wax museum animatronic replica of a townhall. What a shame. For some reason, this screenshot from MySpace's homepage captures the disconnect for me....

Are we going down the tubes, or can we use the tubes to save us from ourselves? When I'm not distracted by the latest news, that's what I'm trying to think about these days. Here are some unfinished thoughts on the topic...

This is an absolute first and frankly it's f---ing brilliant. The California Democratic Party has a giant electronic billboard up somewhere near a Los Angeles-area rally that Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin is doing today that is displaying live text-message questions people are sending in. On top of that, the whole thing is streaming live back onto the web using UStream.tv. Check it out: The CA Dems website says: "To submit a question for our electronic billboard, text the keyword ASK then the question to the number 69866. For example, send to 69866: ASK You said you'd run a respectful campaign on the issues, what happened? Keep your questions under 160 characters including spaces and remember to keep them family friendly since we're showing...

Monday afternoon, I happened to turn the TV on just as the House of Representatives was voting on the $700 billion Bush-Paulson-Pelosi bailout bill. Watching the split-screen coverage of traders on the floor of the U.S. Stock Exchange as they stared, transfixed, waiting to see if the public, through its representatives in Washington, was going to save their skins, was exhilarating. And then, when the bill went down to defeat, and the market went back to plunging, I was thrilled. Here's why: I'm tired of living in a de facto plutocracy. I also believe we are on the verge of a revolution in participation in government, powered by new technology that is making it possible for many more of us to...

Joi Ito's HeckleBot is going global tonight. That is, assuming Twitter doesn't crash. And if Twitter holds up under the traffic of most of its estimated three million users all chattering at once, we're all going to be participating in the birth of something new. You can call it the Global Brain or the Hive Mind, but the Machine that is Us/Using Us (to use Michael Wesch's brilliant phrase) is going up a level tonight, and media and democracy in America will never be the same. Let me explain. In early 2004, I was in San Diego for the "Digital Democracy Teach-In," a one-day event preceding the annual ETech confab, put on by internet publisher Tim O'Reilly (who was soon to...

Whoever is scripting Ralph Nader's recent forays into web video deserves an Oscar. Say whatever you want about Nader's politics, ego or stubbornness, you have to admit this stuff is good. I covered Nader closely in 2000 (and have several chapters on him in my book Spoiling for a Fight: Third Parties in America), and I recall how hard his staffers pushed him to do more media aimed at pop culture. One ad in particular, a parody of a Monster.com commercial, where a bunch of kids talked about their downsized visions of their future ("when I grow up, I want to be middle management") got all kinds of resistance from Nader, despite his staff's sense that it would play well....

Ever wanted to be able to show someone exactly how a "meme" moves across the web in real-time? Anthony Hamelle of Linkfluence has posted a video doing exactly that. He zeroes in on two political videos that made a big splash at the height of summer: the McCain campaign's successful viral attack on Barack Obama as a "Celeb," which compared him to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in the wake of his European tour and scored well over a million views; and Paris Hilton's snarky response, which ultimately overtook McCain with something over three million views. Hamelle is working with the same map of the US political blogosphere that he demo-ed this June at PdF, but in this video you can...

How long will it be before someone mashes Gov. Sarah Palin's latest interview with Katie Couric together with Miss Teen South Carolina? Watch: Watch CBS Videos Online and In the meantime, there's this wacky production of "Head of Skate," the Disney movie that Matt Damon summoned into being...

If the world could vote in the U.S. election, who would win? The Economist magazine has come up with an intriguing way for its readers worldwide to join in, by creating a "Global Electoral College" that assigns votes to each country based on its population size. As of now, more than 11,000 people have voted and as you can see from the graphic below, Obama is crushing McCain, which is somewhat surprising given the somewhat conservative bent of Economist readers, who are quite upscale. From the press release: As in America, each country has been allocated a minimum of three electoral-college votes with an extra vote allocated for every 700,000 or so of population. With over 6.5 billion people now enfranchised, the...