Archive: Year: 2011

Since Saturday afternoon, when I took a snapshot of 30 Facebook "Occupy X" groups corresponding to an array of large and midsize American cities, the number of people who have signed up (aka "liked") on these groups' pages has grown by 23.5%. That is, from 92,143 when I did my tally yesterday, to 113,802 mid-afternoon today. The numbers are impressive and steadily rising; indeed, as I glanced at some Facebook pages and then refreshed, they gained another 10 or 12 within minutes. I've expanded my spreadsheet to include a little over 50 Facebook "Occupy" pages, including a few that aren't just for cities (such as Occupy Maine and Occupy Michigan) and a few that aren't in the US (including Occupy...

I've built a partial spreadsheet listing some of the many cities across America where people are creating and joining "Occupy X" groups in solidarity with the OccupyWallStreet protest. Not counting the 49,000 people on the latter's page, a semi-random mix of 28 other mid-to-large cities have another 40,000 or so people signed up. OccupyTogether.org has links to more than 100 cities in all, so a simple extrapolation suggests that easily well over one hundred thousand people have signaled their support. It remains to be see how many will show up and stay on the ground. If you'd like to help flesh out this spreadsheet, email me at msifry at gmail dot come, or message me on Twitter @mlsif and I'll give...

"During movement times, the people involved have the same problems and can go from one communication to the next, start a conversation in one place and finish it in another. Now we're in what I call an organizational period, which has limited objectives, doesn't spread very rapidly and has a lot of paid people and bureaucracy. It's completely different from what takes place when there is a social movement." --Myles Horton, from his book "The Long Haul", talking about his work with two American social movements, the labor movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s America is about to experience the same youth-driven, hyper-networked wave of grassroots protests against economic inequality and political oligarchy that have been...

In case you missed it, the "paper of record" has a long front-page story today titled "As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe." It's kind of a goulash of anecdotes from Spain to Israel to India, with the common ingredients being youthful street protests, economic inequality, social networking and a hint of networked politics. Any day the Times quotes Yochai Benkler, the dean of networked theory and peer-based commons production, is a good day in my book. But for the record, this article could have also been written in 2003 or 2007-8. For argument's sake, the Times' story on the rise of the "second superpower," ("A New Power in the Streets," February 17, 2003) which focused on the...

Canadian open government activist David Eaves has another of his usually smart posts up today about the emerging foreign policy strategy behind the launch of the Open Government Partnership. He's not the first to note that advocacy "open government" in the hands of the Obama administration has been a tool of U.S. foreign policy (see Evgeny Morozov's or Sami Ben Gharbia's trenchant critiques). But Eaves places the effort in a more benign light, one that effortlessly channels language we've been hearing from people like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her innovation advisor, Alec Ross, but situates their thinking inside the broader geopolitical context that must concern American strategists: how to contain China's growing influence in Asia, Africa and Latin...

If you're on Barack Obama's email list, you've probably noticed how many of his subject lines seem highly familiar. "Put this on your car," "Frustrated," "This is actually pretty cool," and "How this dinner thing works," are all recent examples of subject lines the campaign has used. No doubt these subjects have been tested in advance and scored highly for open rates, but the treacly tone has led MentalFloss.com to make a quiz testing your ability to distinguish these real subject lines with messages "from my aunt," and Atlantic senior editor Garance Franke-Ruta has now piped up with a funny post comparing Obama to a "plaintive boyfriend worried about trying to save the relationship." We'll keep an eye on whether...

Longtime readers of techPresident know we love looking at YouTube political videos because the site offers so much interesting data about what people are watching, how videos are being shared, and so on. And while we haven't yet seen the break-out satirical mashups that charmed so many politics junkies back in 2007-08, there's plenty to be learned from a look at how the various presidential candidates and related national political figures are doing on YouTube. For starters, consider President Barack Obama's YouTube channel, which has reverted to campaign mode. While it hasn't yet cranked up to the daily volume we saw four years ago, Obama's channel is now featuring more of the mini-documentary videos on the stories of his campaign's...

PdF friend and conference '10 speaker Susan Crawford has a smart oped piece up on Bloomberg discussing the issues recently raised in San Francisco by Bay Area Rapid Transit's cutoff of public cell phone service during some protest marches against police brutality. BART's action has led to an emergency petition by a coalition of consumer and digital rights groups, asking the FCC to take action to uphold free speech. Crawford writes: When Earl Warren was California’s attorney general in 1942, he wanted the phone company to cut off service to a man suspected of involvement with illegal gambling. A California court ruled that disconnection was unjustified, saying that a telephone company had no right to refuse access to its facilities because...

Pete Cashmore, the founder and CEO of Mashable, has a post up on CNN.com gushing about the wonders of the new Facebook Timeline, a major revamp of the site that users will be experiencing soon. He writes: Facebook Timeline is the best change Facebook has ever made. Here's what'll happen once the Timeline profiles are launched: Your Facebook profile will go from having one central column to two, with boxes of text, photos, videos and even maps of your favorite locations. Rather than just displaying your most recent activities, your profile will become a scrapbook documenting your entire life, all the way back to your birth. Facebook will become a record of your existence: All your memories, your victories and...

One of the first political bloggers to break into the big time, Ana Marie Cox, is back just in time for the 2012 election cycle. (Over on the left, a picture of her on the cover of the New York Times Magazine from 2004, cheekily schooling old dogs Johnny Apple and Jack Germond.) Check out her new blog for the Guardian, here. And if you want a refresher course in how to pitch her (and how not to), give a listen to this PdF Network podcast that I did with her and fellow political blogger Ben Smith, back in May 2009. Those were the days, my friends....