Archive: Year: 2011

A week ago, early Tuesday morning November 15th, New York City police forcibly evicted the Occupy Wall Street protest encampment at Zuccotti Park. Since then, there's been an interesting shift in how some key observers in the mainstream media talk about the movement. For example, David Carr, an influential media columnist for the New York Times, wrote yesterday as if the Occupy movement had essentially ended, with no recognition that there are still many other cities and campuses with physical occupations underway. "A tipping point is at hand," he intoned about the movement, "now that it is not gathered around campfires." He added, darkly, "When the spectacle disappears reporters often fold up their tents as well." Not to pick on...

A little more than half a year ago, at the beginning of March, I took a look at Newt Gingrich's presence online. As one of the longest-serving politicians in the presidential race, and a self-described geek, Newt had a big digital footprint even before he started formally campaigning. Now that he's been at it for a while, and as he's currently benefiting from a surge of interest and support among likely Republican primary voters, it's possible to see what--if anything--running for president can do to a politician's online presence, and vice versa. First off, running for president hasn't changed Newt's standing in Google search. Newt.org still comes up first and his Wikipedia page third, with a little salamander sandwiched in between....

Here comes everybody? Well, almost. As more people get their hands on the tools of communication and collaboration, it's become ridiculously easy to form a group and agitate around any case. But for all the multiplying ways that we're discovering to network and connect, online organizing still takes knowledge and practice. Giant e-groups like MoveOn.org, with its millions of email members, are constantly honing their approach. Online political hubs like DailyKos.com, Reddit.com, Change.org and Freedom Connector don't self-organize magically; smart network weavers tend to those gardens of activity, taking care to moderate conversations and filter (some) behavior, to ensure that a real community of purpose takes hold. Here at techPresident, we're constantly covering the many ways that savvy online organizers...

Today, I got an email from Jeremy Bird, national field director for the Obama 2012 campaign. I like Jeremy at a personal level, and think he's a really talented organizer. So I always open his emails (in truth, I open all presidential campaign emails I get, but pay less attention to most), and this one, which was titled "Something special happened in Colorado," initially caught my eye because I thought, perhaps mistakenly, that there might be a mention of the Denver "Occupy Wall Street" group, which has been one of several local groups caught up in pitched battles with police and elected officials over how to continue their protest legally. Briefly, I mused, maybe the Obama campaign has figured out...

Thirty-one year-old Iraq War veteran Thomas L. Day wrote a powerful oped for the Washington Post Friday, expressing his "final loss of faith" in the wake of the Penn State child molestation scandal. In it, he lambastes his parents generation for what he sees as its many failures of leadership. Right now it's flying around the web, driven by links from the likes of Michael Moore, who tweeted, "If you read only one thing online this week, please read this." Day writes: With the demise of my own community’s two most revered leaders, [Jerry] Sandusky and Joe Paterno, I have decided to continue to respect my elders, but to politely tell them, “Out of my way." They have had their time...

If you are interested in exploring the evolving relationship between social media and the mainstream press, check out the ongoing series of info-graphics at Numeroteca.org. Below, for example, you can see how the burst of chatter about #OccupyBoston led news coverage in the Boston Globe (and also how the Wall Street Journal has so far managed to avoid mentioning Occupy Wall Street on its front page). Go here for the full image....

Every day, half a million people visit the community news site Reddit to share links and filter information. A big chunk of those people go to the site's Politics section, and thousands also participate in "sub-reddits" on everything from anarchism and Americans Elect to Republicans and Ron Paul. Thirty-nine different Occupy groups have sub-reddits on the site, and the main one has nearly 20,000 members. More than that, Reddit is known as a community website where people often band together to help each other out, not just with sympathetic words or donations of money or services. As techPresident's Nick Judd reported last year ('I Lose Sleep Over Upvotes -- Seriously:' How a Subreddit Became a Social Action) a single 500-word rant...

Sarah Lai Stirland, Photo: Peter Krogh We're pleased to announce that starting next week, Sarah Lai Stirland will be joining the Personal Democracy staff as senior writer for techPresident. Sarah has long experience covering tech and politics, most recently for Talking Point Memo's Idea Lab section as its technology reporter and editor, and before that as Wired.com's politics and technology writer on its Threat Level blog. I'm particularly thrilled to have Sarah join our team because back in 2007-08, she was one of the only writers on this beat who--I have to admit it--beat us to stories that we wanted! Check out Sarah's archive of reporting here if you need a refresher. She'll be joining me and Nick Judd, who is moving...

Jim Pugh, CTO of Rebuild the Dream (and before that director of analytics and development with Organizing for America), recently shared with techPresident some slides from a New Organizing Institute training that he's done, that help illustrate the difference between viral and sub-viral growth. We all throw around the term "viral" with little distinction, and it's helpful to put some definition on it--especially as we see many references to the Occupy Wall Street movement's viral growth, or similar earlier talk about the Tea Party. Virality, says Pugh, is all about how many new people each user recruits to a cause. (Or, how many new views result from a person sharing a video, or the number of new clicks when someone shares...

In the wake of the rapid spread of the "We are the 99 Percent" meme, on October 5th, right-wing blogger Erick Erickson started a "We are the 53 Percent" response. One side says that the top 1 percent of the population has too much concentrated wealth and power; the other side says that nearly half the population doesn't pay income taxes and is making unfair claims on the output of the 53 percent who do. That's not an argument we're going to settle here. But we can shed light on which meme is doing better online. For example, in terms of organic interest, "We are the 99 percent" has consistently been topping "We are the 53 percent" on Google search. The same...