Archive: Year: 2010

The Washington Post says that the old Democratic Party circuit of intimate high-dollar fundraising events in the palatial apartments of a tight circle of New York City donors is dead, killed off by the White House's wariness of appearing too close to Wall Street, and the small donor revolution supported by the Internet. Well, yes and no. Take this invitation to a $1000-per-person fundraiser next week starring David Plouffe, the architect of the 2008 campaign: On July 29th, David Plouffe, President Obama’s campaign manager and author or Audacity to Win, will be coming to New York for an intimate reception and discussion. As a member of Obama for America’s inner circle, his insight and expertise is unmatched. David will update us...

Unemployment, and the issue of extending unemployment benefits to the 2.5 million people whose checks ran out seven weeks ago, has been much in the news of late. Earlier this afternoon, the Senate bill cleared a procedural hurdle, and with the House expected to pass the legislation tomorrow, the new benefits should be law soon. Curiously, considering the persistence of high unemployment, and all kinds of evidence that unemployed people are going online in huge numbers to find help (they have more spare time than the average person, don't forget), there's very little sign that anybody--government, labor unions, or other kinds of political organization--is explicitly trying to connect with the unemployed using the web. Other than the International Association of Machinists,...

Lucy Bernholz is writing one of the smartest and most engaging blogs I follow, Philanthropy 2173. The title of her site might make you think it's only about philanthropy, but it's really more about the future, social change, and how we can use open data and networking to reimagine public engagement. A recent post on "Measuring Success" gets at questions that should lurk constantly in the mind of anyone using new media for organizing. In a sentence, she is arguing for a new science of "social analytics" to enable better organizing, the same way web analytics allow marketers to fine-tune their online efforts. Here are the highlights: Just as click through rates changed advertising forever - and with it the news...

According to our Facebook tracking tool, President Obama has a whopping 11.3 million supporters on the giant social networking site. (Technically, Facebook used to count those people as "fans" but now they are just listed as "likes.") The national politician with the number closest to his, as we've reported many times, is former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, with just under 2 million. Seems like quite a comfortable lead, no? The rest of the Republican 2012 field lags way behind: Mitt Romney has about 465,000, Mike Huckabee about 366,000, Ron Paul about 238,000, Newt Gingrich with 69,000 and Tim Pawlenty has just 53,000. But if you play around with Facebook's internal demographic tools a different picture of political loyalties emerges. Fanning or...

As I both get older and use the web more, I am noticing that my memory seems to be changing. I used to think that this was just a product of a) getting older and b) juggling many more loose ties to people, more loose pieces of moving puzzles, and c) nothing all that interesting. But yesterday I had a funny experience and in sharing it with a friend, discovered that I wasn't alone. Essentially, what I'm noticing is that frequently, when I can't remember the name of someone or something, but have a few relevant pieces, the mere act of starting to enter that information into a Google search causes me to complete the memory. To wit, yesterday, during a brainstorming...

My old friends at the Public Campaign Action Fund, working with the Fair Elections Now coalition, say this is the first-ever political ad made using featuring an iPad. It's running on cable in Seattle, Denver, Tallahassee and Washington DC. Dawn Laguens and Matt Erickson of LKK Partners made it. Take a look:...

A new survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project shows that Americans are clambering onto the mobile internet at an astonishingly fast pace, with African-Americans, English-speaking Hispanics and 18-to-29-year-olds leading the way. The whole report is worth reading, but here are my quick take-aways: * In just the last year, the percentage of people accessing the internet via mobile phones has climbed from 32% to 40%. Daily usage has also jumped, from just 24% saying they went online several times a day from their mobile in 2009, to 43% in May 2010, when Pew conducted its survey. * Though Pew's data doesn't explore what Spanish-speaking Hispanics are doing online (c'mon guys, why can't you address that data gap?),...

On Monday, the same day that the Supreme Court was to open hearings on President Obama's nominee Elena Kagan, the first work day since the passage of sweeping and complicated legislation regulating finance--the largest sector of the hobbled American economy, and with huge unanswered questions about the direction of the country in everything from Afghanistan and the Middle East to energy policy at home, the leading online publication for Washington political coverage ran a two-thousand word article on none of these subjects. "Let me get this straight," one reader said as he read the article, titled "Theater of the Absurd" by Mike Allen and Glenn Thrush. "Another blow-by-blow report on the drama around the White House, written from the perspective...

Many thanks to Josh Nelson for taking the time to dig further into the available data about web traffic to environmental organization sites. His response to my earlier post makes several excellent points. He's right that Compete.com is an imperfect traffic measure, and he's also right to argue that comparing April 2010 traffic to May 2010 traffic could produce a skewed picture because of Earth Day. It's certainly heartening to see that the March vs May comparison shows nearly all of the Group of Ten's sites gaining traffic (except, oddly, the Sierra Club) and that the overall increase is a respectable 17% rather than a "paltry" (my word) 3%. That said, I still think this is an important topic to explore,...

I'm noodling around with a new micro-payments platform called Flattr. The button below links to our PdF 2010 video of Meetup founder Scott Heiferman's keynote talk at the conference, where he argued that "followers" do not a movement make. If you click on the button below, it takes you to a sign-up page for the service (which is still in private beta, but I have a few invites to give away), and an explanatory video. var flattr_url = 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltMX0qJ_eBs'; As the site's founders put it, "Flattr was founded to help people share money, not only content. Before Flattr, the only reasonable way to donate has been to use Paypal or other systems to send money to people. The threshold for this is...