Archive: Year: 2011

Calling all tech-politics activists and entrepreneurs: Google and Personal Democracy Forum are teaming up to offer registration fellowships that cover the full forum registration costs and a meal with Googlers for ten well-qualified, creative political entrepreneurs to attend this year's conference on June 6-7 at New York University in New York City. We're looking for innovative people who are trying to tackle big, meangingful problems. Are you trying to change government? Shaking up the non-profit world with a promising new start-up? Blazing new trails in online politics? The Google PdF Fellowship could be yours. To apply, take a few minutes to fill out this form. The deadline for applications is 12 noon EST on April 29, 2011. Winners will be notified by May...

Back in February, about 200 people gathered at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus for an unusual gathering of non-profit leaders, funders, corporate donors, social media experts, capacity-building organizations and other social change technologists. The TechSoup Global Contributors' Summit was different from your typical conference; rather than feed people's brains with amazing speakers, its goal was to gather amazing people with already well-fed brains to galvanize real collaboration. The idea, in the word's TechSoup Global founder and co-CEO Daniel Ben-Horin, was to pull together leading representatives of the four kinds of groups that TechSoup works with--"networks of organizations that need technology support, networks of corporations that are willing to donate their products, networks of funders interested in building the capacity of civil...

Too often, the discussion of technology and politics employs a kind of lazy shorthand. We say things like "The Internet is revolutionizing politics," or "the Internet is helping dictators," as if a set of network protocols and bits and wires could do anything on its own. Unfortunately, that shorthand often infects our discussion of current events, and we end up debating things like "Twitter Revolution" or "Facebook effect" rather than the real issues, which are what people do with these tools; how key actors like organizers, leaders, volunteers and followers interact; and how these players are learning from and adapting to the new environment they are themselves helping create and shape. The Internet, after all, doesn't empower anyone. We empower...

On Monday, I blogged about Twitter's new "Who to Follow" feature, and urged the company to update its list of suggested accounts to follow under "Politics." And lo and behold, they've done it. But, as you'll see, important questions still remain unanswered about how the list is constructed and what it is supposed to tell us. Gone from the top 25 are clunkers like @CarlyforCA (Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, who had tweeted since last November--she went from #1 to #47, oddly), @RasmussenPoll (Republican pollster Scott Rasmussen--he's now #56 after being #2), @MicheleMalkin (the ultra-right blogger, who went from #5 to #48), and @HouseFloor, an autotweeter that reports every time Congress votes or comes to order, is gone entirely. @JohnBoehner, the House...

Today, Twitter announced a new search feature designed to help users find accounts worth following, based on your personal interests. The tool is supposed to show you suggested users when you search on any term, but I couldn't get that to work (I guess this is a really new feature). It also will show you suggested people to follow on a "who to follow" tab, which you can access from your Twitter home page, as you can see below. Unfortunately, Twitter's list of accounts to follow under "politics" isn't all that new or interesting. First of all, it's the same list of people you will find if you are already using the Twitter mobile client and have stumbled onto the bottom...

Over in Germany, it appears that the traditional political press that covers the government is all a ...

The rumor, reported by the New York Times, that Robert Gibbs is in negotiations to join Facebook in a "senior role" to help "manage the company's communications," leads me to this thought: Who better to manage communications for a global company that rarely answers a direct question about its management than the former spokesman for a White House that rarely answered a direct question about its management? One wishes Facebook wasn't so interested in such a conventional choice...

Philip Howard adds one more crucial variable to the discussion of the factors affecting the Arab Spring (see my "Egypt, Tunisia: Generation TXT Comes of Age?"): oil, or the degree to which a country's economy has or hasn't developed a middle-class not dependent on Texas Tea. Howard, whose book "The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam" offers a complex and nuanced (if dry and somewhat academic) taxonomy for analyzing the varied pace of democratization across the region, suggests that Jordan, Morocco, and Syria may be the closest to experiencing uprisings such as the ones that overthrew despots in Tunisia and Egypt. While noting that they each have complicated histories and unique domestic political profiles, "They...

Want to make some copies of government records from the Cuyahoga County recorder's office, at a reasonable cost? Why, you'd want to use a ...

The good folks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project are out with another one of their regular updates on the Internet's role in politics, and the takeaway appears to be: The net is fueling extremism and making America more polarized. To wit, Pew reports, "55% of all internet users feel that the internet increases the influence of those with extreme political views, compared with 30% who say that the internet reduces the influence of those with extreme views by giving ordinary citizens a chance to be heard." This could be true, or it could be a false positive. What if people are conflating things? Arguably politics in America is more polarized, but cable TV and talk radio and...