Archive: Author: The Management

A few days ago, YouTube, the giant videosharing site, unveiled some site upgrades that has a vocal chunk of its user base up in arms. The most important change, from the point of view of YouTube's burgeoning critics, is the removal of social data about videos in all the different categories and its replacement with videos that are being handpicked by the site's editors. As Brave New Films' Jim Gilliam, who alerted me to this, explains, "Before there used to be several pages of 'the most viewed,' 'most discussed,' 'top rated,' 'top favorited,' etc. for each individual category there...

A few days ago, YouTube, the giant videosharing site, unveiled some site upgrades that has a vocal chunk of its user base up in arms. The most important change, from the point of view of YouTube's burgeoning critics, is the removal of social data about videos in all the different categories and its replacement with videos that are being handpicked by the site's editors. As Brave New Films' Jim Gilliam, who alerted me to this, explains, "Before there used to be several pages of 'the most viewed,' 'most discussed,' 'top rated,' 'top favorited,' etc. for each individual category there...

Don't wait til Monday to read Charlie Pierce's "Mud in the Digital Age" article in today's Boston Globe. The title makes it sound like the piece is mainly about dirty tricks online, but it's really more about the way things are now: The Internet, and the exploding technologies it has produced, has transformed everything about American politics in two ways: It’s accelerated the process, and it’s brought in vast and innovative new levels of citizen involvement. Those changes have been enough to break down the barriers between the actual campaign and the virtual campaign in every area, whether it’s the elite political press coping with bloggers, or in the structure of the campaigns themselves. The campaigns are lost in a new...

John Edwards has issued a strong statement in support of net neutrality today, writing a letter to the FCC stating that the issue "goes to the heart and soul of democracy." He writes: If you do not guarantee net neutrality, the Internet could go the way of network television and commercial radio - with just a few loud voices and no room for the grassroots and small entrepreneurs. Our country is already divided enough between the haves and have-nots. Where we go to school, where (and if) we get health care, whether we can retire with dignity - we have big divides in all of these areas in this country. While we work to create one America, we...

I'm glad that TechPresident blogger David All posted the "I've Got a Crush...

Longtime PdF readers may remember that for a while we had a page on the site that showed which Members of Congress were most being talked about in the blogosphere, a ranking system that was built for us by Aaron Swartz, using incoming links to their official congressional web sites as one metric, and using blog posts referencing their names as a second metric. We called it "HotPols," but ultimately we took it down because we weren't happy with either metric: too many posts were being counted that referred to people with the same name as a Member (take Adam Smith as once obvious example) and not enough bloggers were bothering to link to the Members' web pages for that...

[Yesterday, I spent an hour on the phone with Joe Green, co-founder of Project Agape, a still-partially-in-stealth start-up that is developing political social networking tools and platforms. It launched with a major new application built for Facebook Platform, called Causes. In the interview, Green talks about what he learned from his first experiment in building an online social network tuned around politics (See my March 2006 PdF article "Essembly.com: Finally, a Friendster for Politics"), his theories of online organizing, new features that Causes is going to roll out, tools Project Agape is building for MySpace and elsewhere, how to deal with privacy concerns, and how Causes differs from Change.org.] MS: How does Project Agape connect to your first effort in political...

Ben Katz of CompleteCampaigns.com writes with a really good question: How much should lower-level political candidates try to adopt the multi-faceted internet strategies of the presidential campaigns? Here's his email: I've been enjoying reading your updates on TechPresident about how Presidential campaigns are using web 2.0 tools such as MySpace, YouTube and Digg. And while I find these very exciting for the Presidential campaigns, I keep coming back to the same question: How does this impact the rest of politics? Do these tools have any impact on the 1,000 congressional campaigns, 5,000 legislative races or approximately 500,000 local campaigns? Does it make sense for a legislative campaign to setup a MySpace page, when the Presidential candidates are only averaging about 5 friends...

I'm not sure how far we should take this analogy, but Ron Paul is to the Republicans of 2008 as Howard Dean was to the Democrats of 2004: the one candidate speaking out prominently against the war when his colleagues were silent or supportive. Since politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, we shouldn't be surprised that he's starting to take off online. A week ago, Robert Smith of NPR did an interview with me on what he called the "fringe candidates"--specifically Paul and former Senator Mike Gravel--and how and why the internet might be helping their candidacies. Most of the interview of course didn't end up on air, but I was pretty satisfied with the two sound-bites from me that did...

Our "2008 Web Video Odyssey," which was produced by the good folks at PoliticsTV, is up on YouTube:...