Archive: Year: 2011

If you haven't already, drop everything and take a few minutes to immerse yourself in an interactive map hosted by The New York Times that is collecting the memories and moods of people as they wrestle with the tenth anniversary of 9-11. It's part of a rich array of material, some interactive and some traditional, that the Times has just rolled out on its website, titled "The Reckoning." The Times' digital team has done this kind of crowd-sourced story-telling before, most notably in my mind with its 2008 "election wordtrain" that gathered and displayed, in real-time, the contributions of Obama and McCain supporters as they digested the results of the presidential election. But this new map goes further in demonstrating...

I'm theoretically on vacation right now and scarcely in a position to do a deep dive into all the news and commentary, but here's one quick comment about WikiLeaks's decision to release the complete and unredacted database of all 251,287 State Department cables in its possession: Back in January 2011, Julian Assange said in an interview with Paris Match that he believed that, "Transparency should be proportional to the power that one has. The more power one has, the greater the dangers generated by that power, and the more need for transparency. Conversely, the weaker one is, the more danger there is in being transparent." I quoted this statement approvingly in my book, WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. It is difficult...

This pretty much sums it up: I'll be back online after Labor Day. In the meantime, here are two fun short books/essays that you should go read: Heather Brooke's "Assange Agonistes"--The noted muckraker, whose digging led to breaking open the British Parliamentary expenses scandal, chronicles her convoluted collision last year with Julian Assange, and discusses how it was that she came to obtain her own leaked copy of the State Department cables and to work with the Guardian on its WikiLeaks coverage. If you are, like me, a WikiLeaks junkie, you will want to read Brooke's side of the story. Becky Hogge's "Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia"--An intimate journey through contemporary hacker culture, told by the former director of the...

It may not mean much for Jon Huntsman's dark horse candidacy, but his tweet yesterday stating his belief in evolution and global warming science has earned a whopping 3,600 re-tweets. According to Adam Green of 140Elect.com, that's a new record for the GOP field and tops Sarah Palin's best tweet by more than 50%. Green writes: What’s the value of a hot tweet and tons of retweets? It translates directly into new followers, and new followers are a chance for a candidate to reach more people with fundraising requests. Yesterday @JonHuntsman gained 4,275 followers. The only candidate to ever top that in a single day was Rick Perry on his announcement day. Huntsman managed to increase his total follower count by...

In the 2010 Republican primary for Texas governor, Rick Perry's campaign spent not one dime on direct mail or yard signs, and instead plowed its money into highly targeted online advertising, marketing and social networking to try to convert website visitors into volunteers. And the gamble worked--of the roughly 300,000 votes he got in winning the primary, about 50,000 were probably from his online network of home precinct captains. His online campaign director, Ryan Gravatt (who jocularly refers to himself as a "reformed newspaper reporter," shared all the details with PdF Network members on an hour-long conference call in May 2010. Read Nick Judd's recap here, or you can download the whole call here. Gravatt is working on Perry's newly announced...

The top search phrase for the query "Is Rick Perry...

Last night, about 90 minutes before the start of the Republican presidential candidates debate in Iowa, the Mitt Romney campaign sent out an email to its list entitled, "Mitt's Iowa Moment." The email had three purposes: 1) to fundraise (duh); 2) to highlight Romney's unscripted response to some hecklers at the Iowa State Fair that showcased his opposition to raising taxes (and deflect attention away from his other unscripted statement that "corporations are people, my friends," and 3) to get people to share the video with others. How did they do? Well, it turns out that it's pretty easy to compare the Romney campaign's pro-active message push with the organic interest that surfaced online around his "corporations are people" statement. And...

About an hour ago I got an email from David Axelrod, senior adviser to the Obama 2012 campaign. The title: "What Barak Said About Barack." The email is a great example of narrowcasting. If you're Jewish, you probably know how Barak (Ehud, the former Labor Prime Minister of Israel) is. If not, well, you probably didn't get the email. Why would the Obama campaign be sending out a Friday afternoon (don't they know it's almost Shabbos?) email about Israel? I don't know, but I presume they're either worried about Obama's standing with his Jewish supporters and/or concerned about the escalating tensions in the Middle East and the coming clash in the United Nations over Palestinian statehood. In either event, the e-mail reads...

Add Israel to the growing list of countries (Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Spain, Italy, England...

It was big "news" on Friday in social media circles: "Obama Loses 36,000+ Followers in #Compromise Campaign," Mashable headlined it. Fox News, The Daily News, The New York Post and plenty of other media outlets repeated the story, all repeating the claim that a one-third of one-percent drop in Obama's 9.4 million Twitter following was a big deal. So, how about a headline for today: Obama is up 37,000 followers on Twitter since that dip on Friday. Surely this must mean something, but what, oh-great-social-media-gurus? The truth is, neither the dip nor the rise in Obama's daily Twitter count should be taken as meaning much of anything. Like most Twitter celebrities, the @barackobama account is a hollow signifier. Millions of people...