Archive: Year: 2011

If the world needed further proof that the innovative and risk-taking methods of Washington, DC were spreading deeper into the American economy, it got its answer yesterday when Facebook, one of the fastest growing and most successful companies in Silicon Valley, announced that it was forming a political action committee, FB PAC. Andrew Noyes, Facebook's spokesman in Washington, explained the decision: "FB PAC will give our employees a way to make their voice heard in the political process by supporting candidates who share our goals of promoting the value of innovation to our economy while giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." Political action committees are all the rage in Washington, which is...

As expected, the first petitions to go over the 5,000 signature threshold on the new "We the People," WhiteHouse.gov e-petition platform include several on the subject of decriminalizing marijuana. The Gawker blog noted this fact first yesterday, and as of Sunday night the trend hadn't changed. Of the top ten petitions, so far five are either directly or indirectly on the issue. And thus observers like Gawker are already making fun of the White House for opening up the petition channel. This really shouldn't be such a big deal. A substantial minority of Americans, as high as 45%, think pot should be legalized. But the issue gets almost no serious attention in Washington. As a result, why should we be surprised...

OK, that headline is probably over the top, but after reading Dave Winer and Nik Cubrilovic's warnings this past weekend about Facebook's new "frictionless sharing" system, I was left wondering if Julian Assange of WikiLeaks wasn't on to something when he said that "Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented." Assange was talking about how Facebook collects information that people actively share about their relationships with each other (thus making such data prey to US intelligence prying), whereas Winer is raising the alarm about Facebook's new policy of proactively sharing information about what websites people are visiting, without them even affirmatively entering any kind of data onto their Facebook page. Winer offers this...

Ryan Grim, Zach Carter and Paul Blumenthal have a long piece up describing Google's expanding presence in Washington, D.C. that is worth more than one close reading. The headline is that the company, which has been long seen to tilt liberal (Eric Schmidt, its executive chairman, is close to the Obama White House, and in 2008, 83% of the money contributed by the company and its employees went to Democratic candidates and party committees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics), has recently gone on a spending spree on the Republican side of the aisle. "In the last nine months, Google has hired 18 lobbying shops -- not 18 lobbyists, but 18 firms, a dozen of them since July, a...

Tomorrow, Thursday September 22nd, the internet will play a supporting role in the latest Republican presidential "debate," as Fox News's reporters will be asking some questions submitted by the public via YouTube. As I've written earlier, there isn't much about the process of submitting and selecting questions for this "debate" that is genuinely breaking the mold or opening up the debates to real civic engagement, but it should be interesting to watch nonetheless. Close to 800 questions were submitted. In this preview video, YouTube political director Steve Grove offers a few more details on Google's role--viewers will get to see how some topics trend in search, as well as the popularity of some very general subjects and the locations where questions...

The transcript of yesterday's State Department briefing on the rollout of today's launch of the international Open Government Partnership makes for entertaining reading, as the two officials explaining the genesis of the effort insisted on being identified solely as "Senior Administration Official One" and "Senior Administration Official Two." Not only did the officials not appear to know the URL of the OGP website the contorted explanations of the also unnamed Moderator as to why an initiative that is all about transparency can't be transparent are truly precious: MODERATOR: Can we get the address for the website, first so that everybody has it? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL TWO: Yes. We can. It is being launched tomorrow and therefore does not roll off the tongue....

Next week, on September 22nd, Fox News is teaming up with Google/YouTube to present a different kind of presidential debate. Or is it? Like the CNN/YouTube debates of 2007, Fox is working with the folks at YouTube to invite the public to submit questions to the candidates, this time by either video or text. And unlike four years ago, when those questions went into a black hole (i.e., the CNN editorial team, which selected questions to use in the debate and refused to involve the public in the process), this time the questions are all being filtered thru the Google Moderator platform, which lets users vote questions up or down. And then, Fox is going to ask the presidential candidates...

If you visit the Twitter account of David Weprin, the Democratic state assemblyman who is running to fill the Congressional seat of disgraced former Rep. Anthony Wiener, you might be surprised -- at first -- to think that he's already declared victory. That's because one of his most recent tweets actually reads: "Thank you everyone who worked, volunteered and supported the effort that culminated in the good results last night. I am most appreciative." Bizarrely, though, that tweet is from Weprin's last election victory, in February of 2010. He hasn't had a word to share on Twitter since that night. Say what? It's just one more sign that Weprin is running a lousy, and probably losing, campaign. His website doesn't even point...

Thanks to some dogged nudging by the good folks at MuckRock.com*, we now have an authoritative list of the websites blocked by the U.S. Air Force because of the WikiLeaks disclosures. The list of 45 sites primarily covers various WikiLeaks mirror sites, as well as several of the main media outlets that partnered with the whistleblowing platform last year, including The New York Times, The Guardian, el Pais, Der Spiegel, and OWNI.fr. Leaving aside the wisdom of preventing American service-members from accessing information available to the rest of the world through mainstream media, and putting aside the idiotic controversy that erupted briefly when the Air Force initially said that even family members of soldiers could be prosecuted for reading the...

Scott Heiferman by jdlasica, on Flickr Meetup founder Scott Heiferman, a dear friend of PdF (here's his 2010 PdF talk), has written a rare email to the entire 9,657,777-person list of current Meetup users. Why? To explain how his company was born and inspired by the spirit of solidarity that arose in New York City in the days and weeks after the World Trade Center attacks. It's worth reading in full: Fellow Meetuppers, I don't write to our whole community often, but this week is special because it's the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and many people don't know that Meetup is a 9/11 baby. Let me tell you the Meetup story. I was living a couple miles from the Twin Towers, and I was...