Archive: Year: 2009

Who are we? What are we thinking about or responding to or passionate about or interested in? On October 21, 2009, I gave a talk to NPR Weekend Edition and Digital staff, during their staff retreat. The topic was "Navigating the World Live Web." My goal was to look at how we can tell new kinds of stories from the intentional and unintentional data streams being created by millions of users of the internet. Or, to use Paul Simon's memorable phrase, "the way we look to us all." Here's the video: During the first part of the talk I explore how people "vote" with their attention around political candidates and themes, and look at tools for unearthing interesting trends in public...

Just over a week ago, Fox News host Glenn Beck announced that he would be rolling out a series of "educational conventions" to be held around the country starting in Orlando, Florida, next spring on March 27 at the UCF Arena. He told a crowd at The Villages retirement community in that "up on GlennBeck.com we've partnered with a company called Eventful" where people can vote for their area. The whole series is supposed to culminate on August 28 in Washington, DC, "at the feet of Abraham Lincoln" (a date and location that ought to make students of the civil rights movement wince). Since then, more than 37,800 people have gone onto Eventful to "demand" that Beck come to their...

Jeff Clark (@jeffclark)at Neoformix is doing amazing work with data visualization. Check out his Twitter "StreamGraph" tool, for example. It shows the usage over time for the words most highly associated with your search term. Here's a look at the latest 1000 tweets mentioning "Obama": I've highlighted the expanding thread mentioning Michael Moore's handle (@mmflint) since the film-maker has just posted an "open letter" to the president asking him to not escalate the war in Afghanistan, and people are clearly retweeting it like crazy. Clark's tool also works with Twitter lists. Here's the stream for @nytimes/staff, a list of 95 people created by the newspaper. Hmm, seems like everyone just wants to talk about Tiger Woods and football! (Keep in mind, this...

If you want to follow along with the Personal Democracy Forum Europe conference live by audio, we're pleased to be partnering with Civico, an internet radio station based in Birmingham, England, which will be streaming all the sessions over the next two days at http://www.civicolive.com/pdfeu. All the plenary sessions will be aired live, along with the main hall breakout sessions. The other breakouts will also be recorded and played later each day. In addition, all the sessions will be archived for later playback. So, if you want to follow along, just check the schedule here--Friday/Saturday and tune in (don't forget to factor in the time difference as we're in Barcelona, Spain). The Twitter hashtag to follow or chime in with is...

Our friends at SeeClickFix have some cool news to share today: The do-it-yourself civic platform is going multilingual. Citizens will soon be able to report non-emergency issues in their community to those accountable for the public space in 83 languages anywhere in the world using SeeClickFix on their PC or mobile phone. (And just in time for PdF Europe!) Co-founder Ben Berkowitz says, "The vision for SeeClickFix has always been to be international and universally accessible. While always geographically accessible SeeClickFix now has the infrastructure to support a web site in 83 languages. This will allow citizens to communicate with their government in the country's native language as well as in the citizen's first language if different. For the latter feature...

Yesterday, at a townhall meeting with Chinese students in Shaghai, President Obama had much praise for the Internet and its role in democracy, politics and society. Unfortunately, he prefaced his remarks with this statement: "Let me say that I have never used Twitter. I noticed that young people -- they're very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone." Thumbs too clumsy to type in things on the phone? Say what? Here's the rest of his remarks on the topic of the internet, which are much harder to argue with: I am a big believer in technology and I'm a big believer in openness when it comes to the...

We've been doing some housekeeping on our charts, and wanted to alert you to a few things. First, we've started tracking former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on our Facebook chart looking at likely 2012 presidential candidates. (Any national Republican who felt he or she had to weigh in on last week's special election for that upstate New York seat in Congress is at least thinking about running, we figure.) Let us know if there's anyone else you think we should be tracking. Second, we had a little hiccup with the Facebook tracking data a few weeks ago, when Facebook changed how it displays friend stats. So that bump you see for everyone around early October isn't a sign of a sudden...

There was a time when Barack Obama was the number one most followed personage on Twitter, back during the campaign season, but after getting elected his staff seemingly let the account go fallow, to be overtaken by celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Ellen Degeneres. Over August for example, at the height of the townhall battles, the account was only updated 24 times, less than one tweet a day, according to the Twitterholic tracker, despite his having more than 2 million followers at the time. But in the last week, President Obama's new media minions at Organizing for America have punched out 24 tweets, more than three a day. Natalie Foster, OFA's new media director, confirms the shift. In...

Tomorrow afternoon at 3:00pm EST, Special Envoy Scott Gration and Samantha Power, NSC Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs, are going to sit down at the White House with the leaders of the largest, most vocal advocacy groups on Darfur issue, Jerry Fowler of Save Darfur, and Layla Amjadi, the student director of STAND (the student-led division of the Genocide Intervention Network). Ho-hum, you might say, yet another behind-the-scenes meeting between administration officials and NGOs, what's new about that? Well, two things. First, the meeting is going to be streamed live onto the web on not only the White House and State Department websites (in the latter case on their Facebook page, where viewers can comment along in real-time), but also on...