Archive: Year: 2012

I've given to projects listed on Kickstarter ten times, according to my giving profile on the site. And every time I do, I marvel at how it all just seems to work. The platform has clearly found a sweet spot for connecting creative individuals and groups with other people who want to stake them on whatever crazy brilliant idea they have. It's making the most of social giving. And the most interesting thing, to me, is how good Kickstarter makes you feel when a project you are donating to succeeds in meeting its goal. Recently, Kickstarter hit a milestone: two popular proposals each managed to raise $1 million in just one day. More than $125 million dollars have been donated...

Last Tuesday at the American Society of News Editors annual conference, on a panel called “Watergate 4.0: How Would the Story Unfold in the Digital Age?” veteran investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were talking about the importance of traditional shoe-leather reporting when the following exchange occurred, according to Washington Post reporter Dan Zak: “One of the colleges asked students in a journalism class to write a one-page paper on how Watergate would be covered now,” said Bob Woodward, “and the professor — ” “Why don’t you say what school it was,” suggested Carl Bernstein, sitting to Woodward’s left...

This morning somewhere between two and four million people got an email in their inbox from Vint Cerf, Google's official "Internet evangelist," asking them to complete the following sentence: "The Internet is the power to …" and to share their answers with the tag #ourweb. The effort is a direct outgrowth of the seven million-plus petition drive Google ran last January 18th against the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), with the people being emailed the ones who opted in to getting more information on the issue. With this move, the other shoe that hadn't dropped since January's legislative battle is now in motion. As someone who has called for Google to really unleash the...

For a few minutes earlier today, a draft post that I am still working on was accidentally published on this site. The draft was tentatively titled, "Did Bob Woodward Make Up His Anti-Yale Internet Story?" and was on the question raised earlier this week by Woodward at the American Society of Newspaper Editors, about how Watergate might have unfolded differently if the Internet had existed then. I have egg on my face, since the story was not finished when it was accidentally published, and I was in the process of tracking down various participants for their comments. I could blame Drupal for reverting to a default setting after I made a small change in the draft, but that would be...

We're looking for an enterprising and well-organized assistant editor to join us in tracking and reporting on how technology is changing politics, government and civic life. The assistant editor will work on a new international section of techPresident, under the guidance of the site's editorial director, managing editor and section editor. This section will be a hub of current reporting, analysis and background materials on the groups working all over the world on government transparency, anti-corruption, open data, civic hacking, and what we often call “We-Government” projects. She or he will be responsible for assisting the section editor in managing our international stringer pool, tracking story development from assignment to delivery, doing copy-editing, adding photo illustrations and posting. The assistant editor...

I'm looking forward to this Thursday's Personal Democracy Plus call with Heather Holdridge and Deanna Zandt for a bunch of reasons. Obviously, the "internet wave" that is lifting all kinds of social activism boats is playing a big role in the politics of women's health care these days. As one of the country's biggest providers of health services to women and families, Planned Parenthood is inevitably in the middle of all of this. A year ago, when pressure in Congress to cut off federal funding to the organization started to hit a boiling point, Planned Parenthood saw a surge in membership, with more than a million new supporters joining. And more recently, in the four-day media firestorm that erupted when...

"Our e-mail list had reached 13 million people. We had essentially created our own television network, only better…" --David Plouffe, The Audacity to Win ~ Thank you for taking action! Hi Micah Last week you stood with millions of Americans to protect online freedom and innovation. Congress heard you, and delayed consideration of the PIPA and SOPA bills, which -- if enacted -- would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American businesses. We hope that today you will join us in thanking your representatives for protecting the Internet. And we want to thank you, again, for your actions last week. We are humbled that so many of you rallied around what we believe is the most transformative invention in history. Until next time, The Google team --Email...

Dear readers: The past few years have seen an unprecedented collision of the political and digital worlds, from social movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street; to the political battle surrounding the Komen Foundation; or the policy fight over the SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills. While we and other news sites have been doing our best to cover all these stories, what’s been missing is an authoritative resource to put these digital developments in context for professionals working in government, politics, non-profits, philanthropies, or other arenas that are all being transformed by technological forces. So, starting tomorrow, after eight years of producing our annual Personal Democracy Forum conference and the award-winning techPresident.com news site, Personal Democracy Media is now launching...

We don't think it's a coincidence that just days after the site ObamaLovesYouBack.com appeared online, the Obama '12 team sent out an email from Michele Obama titled "I Love You Back" and reading: Dear _____ I see this happen a lot: Someone in a crowd yells at my husband, "We love you, Barack." That's when he interrupts himself, smiles really big, and says, "I love you back." And he does. That's why Barack's dinners with supporters mean so much to him -- because they give him a chance to show it and to say thanks. I can say from experience you won't want to miss out on the next dinner. I hope you'll consider donating $3 -- or whatever you can to support the campaign --...

I've just come back from three-and-a-half days at South by Southwest Interactive, the venerable Austin mega-gathering that this year brought together something like 20,000 people from all over the US and the world for a nonstop shmoozeathon of panels, keynotes, pop-up events, parties and god knows what else. Believe it or not, it was my first time there, because I'm not a fan of huge crowds and long lines, but this year I was asked to speak on a panel on the internet's role in the 2012 election, and figured it was time to dive in. What I saw and experienced was an event that encapsulates pretty well the state of technology and culture today. That is, SXSW is still...