Archive: Year: 2009

It was probably inevitable that the launch of the GOP's new website would involve a few bumps, but as Andy Barr reports for the Politico, the site's first day was pretty messy. Among the problems were the posting of administrator passwords, a list of GOP accomplishments that ended in 2004 and a “future leaders” section that was devoid of material. In addition, the site was inaccessible for much of the day. RNC new media director Todd Herman blamed heavy traffic, adding "Betas are about learning, and I promise that we are learning today,” he said. “We never meant for the site to ever be complete. It will never be complete.” Meanwhile, bloggers on the other side of the aisle were having a field...

Time for an update on the program for the PdF Europe Barcelona conference, which is coming into focus. We have a great group of speakers already confirmed (listed here) and expect to be adding several more, over the next few days and weeks. If you're on our email list you will be getting updates, but keep your eye here too. The purpose of this post to sketch out how the two days of the conference will flow, to give you a sense of topics and timing. Here's where our thinking stands. Day One of the conference (Friday, November 20) will mainly focus on how technology is changing politics in the sense of campaigns, elections, political media, and governance, but with...

State Department Social Media Staffer Suffers Sting-Ray Sting While Surfing: We're only bringing you this news so Nancy will have something to josh Jared Cohen about while they're in Mexico this week. More seriously, here's more details on that cool State Department initiative putting up to $5 million behind innovative social networking projects in the Middle East, via NextGov's Gautham Naugesh. CNN Reports: Social Networking Sites Slanted by Class. You heard it here first. Of the 41 Senators co-sponsoring legislation requiring electronic filing of their campaign finance records, only 7 do so voluntary, Sunlight's Real Time investigations team** points out. The transparency stand-outs are Russ Feingold, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Bernie Sanders, Rick Lugar, Pat Leahy, and John Cornyn. Send them some love. The...

Here's a cautionary tale in how not to manage your message in a networked media age, or rather, further evidence of John Gilmore's brilliant maxim, "The internet interprets censorship has damage and routes around it." Late Monday night in England, the Guardian posted a strange article reporting that it was being prevented from reporting on a question pending in Parliament. The only thing the Guardian could say was that the case involved Carter-Ruck, a prominent PR firm that specializes in working with global corporations. But that didn't stop the blogosphere, which immediately took affront at the assault on free speech. Within 24 hours the whole story was out in the open, to the chagrin of Carter-Ruck and the oil commodities...

With the help of Klout.com, a web service that analyzes Twitter usage and influence, I've been looking at the full list of Members of Congress using the tool, looking for potentially interesting relationships in the data. With about 125 House Members now using Twitter (roughly 2/3 Rs and 1/3 Ds), many of them on a daily basis, there's a rich data set to look at. I've uploaded Klout's rankings of the House Members to ManyEyes, so if you want to entertain yourself by finding out where your favorite congresstwitter rates, go ahead. But I also thought it might be interesting to see if there's a relationship between how well a Member is using Twitter, or just more basic metrics like...

Are you a virtual office worker? That's the topic of this week's PdF Network conference call, Thursday from 1-2pm EST. If you're like many people, the odds are that you--or someone you work with--are working from home or from a remote location, away from your employer's central office. According to the Telework Research Network, the number of Americans who worked from home or remotely at least one day per month for their employer rose from approximately 12.4 million in 2006 to 17.2 million in 2008. Five million employees work from home most of the time, another seven million do so at least once a month. And while we can't prove it with hard data, it's clear that for people who...

No, we're not making this up. That's just part of a late-night email message from Mayor James D. Kalb of Portsmouth, Ohio to blogger Robert Forrey, a retired English professor whose site, RiverVices seems to have gotten under Kalb's skin. In response to a public records request from Forrey for information about a controversial local park project, Kalb wrote: If there is anything else that I can do for you, which is required by law, don't hesitate to call my office. If it isn't required by law then don't bother asking, because I think that you're a worthless piece of s**t and I wouldn't p**s on you if you were on fire (my opinion). You're a poor, lonely, jealous, old man...

Yesterday, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced his "Connected City" initiative, rolling out a series of programs aimed at transforming how New Yorkers interact with and get services from city government. Building on his administration’s valuable 311 program, he promised to make government more accessible by translating city websites into six languages, distributing more information via Twitter (follow @311nyc) and social networking sites, enabling users to fine-tune their usage of NYC.gov around their personal information needs, and creating a free iPhone application allowing people to submit quality-of-life complaints to 311 directly from their phone. Speaking at the IBM SmarterCities Forum in Manhattan, he declared: Every day, new technological innovations help make information flow faster, systems work better and our lives a...

Are you in charge of your organization's email list? Do you wonder if your list is performing up to snuff? What's a good response rate? How is the financial crisis affecting the environment for online fundraising? This Thursday, October 1st, 1:00-2:00pm EST on the PdF Network conference call we'll be talking with two experts, Marc Ruben and Karen Matheson of M+R Strategic Services. They'll be sharing the results of their eNonprofit Benchmarks Study for 2009, done in tandem with NTEN. It's based on an analysis of online messaging, fundraising, and advocacy data from 32 leading nonprofit organizations. We'll cover topics like: * Current benchmarks for open, click-through, response and page conversion rates * How much...

The internet is full of beauty and ugliness. Most of the time, we prefer to focus on the positive here--the ways that people, using interactive communications technologies, are empowering themselves to open up politics, and the ways that organizations and institutions are also transforming how they work to be more open, participatory and accountable. But the net is also enhancing the power of humanity's dark side--terrorists, mafioso, phishers, spammers and haters are also benefiting from interactive communications networking. Let's not kid ourselves, the internet is a mirror of real life, or rather, it's now inseparable from real life. Like other media, it reflects and amplifies what it going on, but with one huge difference: it makes everything much more discoverable....