Archive: Year: 2009

This Thursday, the PdF Network conference call will feature an in-depth conversation with Jacob Colker on the topic of "Mobile Volunteers: How to Harness Microvolunteering for Your Cause." Click here to RSVP. Colker is the co-founder and CTO of the Extraordinaries, an amazing nonprofit start-up that is in the middle of building a dynamic platform that is enabling all kinds of good causes to tap into the unused free time of potential volunteers with mobile phones. This is the cutting edge of a larger trend that many people call "crowd-sourcing," but microvolunteering is more structured and aimed at producing social benefits. As I wrote a few weeks ago, While they're still mostly under the radar, there's enough going on now, in...

We're pleased to announce that renowned British author and thinker Charles Leadbeater is joining PdF Europe as a lead keynoter at our inaugural conference in Barcelona. We've also confirmed several other additions to our already exciting and diverse group of speakers (details below). As a result of this last minute news, we've decided to extend the conference early-bird registration discount through midnight tomorrow night (Tuesday, October 20th). You can still register now at the rate of 200 Euros (150 for students). After Tuesday, the registration fee will rise to 250 Euros (200 for students). Details and registration information here. Leadbeater was an adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and has done extensive work on the rise of the knowledge driven...

Should a city manager be on Facebook? Social media goes local government. Is it time for a discussion of "The Shortfalls of Government 2.0"? Some Governingpeople think so, and they're planning a workshop for early next year. This is a big deal: mySociety.org partners with the Open Society Institute to launch a call for proposals for similar citizen-centric sites for Central and Eastern Europe. For geeks only: The technology behind the new GOP.com website. Key quote: "The site is dog slow." Takes 83 seconds to fully load, compared to the Democrats.org site's 4 seconds. Conservative YouTube star Joel Pollak, who challenged Rep. Barney Frank in public, is now hoping to join him in Congress. He might want to take a balloon ride first, to...

Back in January, we updated our list of the fifty top political blogs, using one simple metric: # of incoming links as measured by the blog search engine Technorati. Well, the good folks at Technorati (yes, the company founded by my smarter little brother) have just rolled out a wholesale site redesign, along with some changes in how they track and rank blogs. The biggest change, for our purposes, is that they're no longer basing that metric on the past six months of blogospheric data. As they explain on their company blog: Because most searches are looking for items less than a month old, we’re going to narrow that window in a similar way. In the past, because the data window...

Yesterday's post about a new study by Marc Ross, Christine Steineman and Chris Lisi ranking more than a hundred Washington organizations based on how many social media tools they are using is spawning an interesting conversation. Critics like Matt Browner-Hamlin, the SEIU's deputy director of new media, and Michael Cornfield, a political scientist and longtime analyst of online politics, have chimed in to dismiss the study's import, arguing that simply counting the presence of social media tools being deployed by an organization means little, or nothing. It's how you use those tools to engage the public that matters, they argue. Adding flesh to that argument, Ken Deutsch of Morningside Analytics did a quick look to see if groups that ranked high...

Today is Blog Action Day, and it looks like a huge number--nearly 10,000--have signed up to post on climate action issues. Most notable in that list, beyond all the usual enviro sites: Prime Minister Gordon Brown's blog, and the official Google blog. Notably missing from that list (at least as of midday): The White House blog and the Environmental Protection Agency's blog. UPDATE: The White House blog joins in with a post this evening from Heather Zichal, Deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, at 6:36pm. Better late than never. But the EPA is still AWOL. Our pal Todd Ziegler of the Bivings Group offers his detailed critique of the new GOP.com site. It's good, bad and ugly. How to follow...

Marc Ross, Christine Stineman, and Chris Lisi of 2ndSix, Tribe Effect and Chris Lisi Communications have just published a very interesting report looking at how 102 big Washington-based trade associations and advocacy groups are--or aren't--making use of an array of 14 core social media tools and platforms. The results shouldn't surprise anyone; it's still pretty obvious that a year after Barack Obama's electoral victory, most inside-the-Beltway still have a very cautious and traditional attitude towards social media. But the individual breakdown by organization and the thoroughness of the research (which covers a ten week span ending October 2, 2009) ought to serve as a wake-up call for many groups. Because the results are pathetic: "75 of the organizations reviewed [are...

James "I videoblogged Ron Paul from my college dorm" Kotecki showers praise on NJ gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie's online campaign. While GOP online ad maven Eric Frenchman explains why NJ independent gubernatorial candidate Chris Daggett is AWOL online. TechRepublican.com gives the new GOP.com website a mixed review. Marc Ambinder and Obama new media maven Joe Rospars are both less forgiving of the GOP site launch. Says Rospars, "You know your web program is in trouble when your site can't even handle the traffic bump from people making fun of your web program." Over on CitizenTube, "Gotcha politics hits Wisconsin." What is it with these midwestern Mayors? Heads up: Our friends at the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet are holding an event on October...

The last time I saw political bloggers across the spectrum agreeing about anything, it was in opposition to some overly restrictive notions emanating from the Federal Elections Commission about regulating political speech online. And we know how that story ended, with the FEC doing an about-face (and for good reason). Now the same alignment seems to be forming in response to proposed regulations from the Federal Trade Commission, which wants to police bloggers--but not traditional media outlets--who post testimonials, endorsements or reviews of products. For example, a blogger who wrote a review of a book would somehow be required to post whether or not he had received a free copy from the book's publisher--a requirement that has never been expected...

The civic software movement took another leap forward this past week with the announcement by SeeClickFix that the site now covers more than 25,000 towns and cities across the U.S., along with 8,000 discrete neighborhoods. SeeClickFix describes itself as "a tool to help communities help themselves." Users can report local issues that need addressing, and see what other users are reporting, while local officials can track and prioritize issues of concern to their residents and use the site to receive email and RSS alerts on issues reported by their constituents. While SeeClickFix is still early in its development, you can easily see all kinds of promising uses. For example, HeatWatchNYC has just started using it to drive attention to landlords that...