Archive: Category: TechPresident

While much of the tech industry and blogosphere is pondering who President-elect Barack Obama might appoint as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer--Eric Schmidt? Jeff Bezos? Larry Lessig?--a bunch of heavy-hitting public interest groups in Washington and a couple of civic-minded techies out in Seattle have each launched promising interventions in the discussion. The first one, out yesterday, is a new site called ObamaCTO.org. The site is basically a feedback forum centered on one question: What should be the CTO's top priorities? ObamaCTO is built on Uservoice, which enables anyone to create an account, post their own idea, comment on any idea, and distribute up to 10 votes to help rank all the ideas posted. ObamaCTO.org just went live, so the...

Lots of people are wondering what will happen to the Obama campaigns huge network of online supporters and on-the-ground organizers. For example, Gara Lamarche, the president of the Atlantic Philanthropies is...

I'm still mulling what I'm going to say tonight at "The Organizing of the President," but here are two hints. First, let me recycle this long Obama quote from the post I did earlier this year on "Obama's Organization, and the Future of American Politics." "One of the things that I'm really proud about this campaign," he told an audience in Indianapolis on April 30, "is that we've built a structure that can sustain itself after the campaign." He then talks about how he won so many states, including states like Idaho. It was because of volunteers, he says, "they built the campaign." We didn't originally have big plans for Idaho, he tells his listeners, "but people made this structure." "Our database, it...

Today's announcement of the formation of the Obama-Biden Transition Project, covered in detail here by DemConWatchBlog, left me wondering about two things. 1. If the transition senior staff includes a communications director (Dan Pfeiffer, who was communications director in the campaign), why doesn't it include an internet or new media director? 2. What kinds of interactive components will the transition website include? The announcement included a note saying that "the official website for the transition is www.change.gov and it will be live later today," but so far that site isn't live, at least not for me. One thing I think we do know: it looks like Blue State Digital, the same powerhouse Democratic internet firm that handled Obama's online needs during the campaign,...

What one word described your state of mind on Election Day? The data wizards at the New York Times have a mesmerizing interactive application up that offers a dynamic picture of its readers' emotional state as they answered that question yesterday, which you can slice and dice by Obama supporters vs McCain supporters. There's not a lot of explanation on the site as to how it works, but I assume the larger words were the more popular ones. Here's the view from 1:00am last night:...

I'm going to be speaking on a panel tomorrow organized by Al Giordano and the FieldHands, along with Nate Silver and Sean Quinn of 538 and Tara Brownlee, the head of Obama's Illinois Field Department. The topic, which Al has already been doing a lot of writing and talking about, is "What's Next for the Obama Movement? The Organizing of the President." It's this Thursday, in Chicago, at 7 p.m, at DePaul University's SAC building # 254. 2320 N. Kenmore Ave. Al's got more details here, along with downloadable flyers for the event. I'm not sure if there will be a live feed of some kind but I'll shlep my Nokia N95 with me (that's a joke) and hope that I can...

This has got to be the coolest data visualization I've seen yet coming out of the Twitterverse. It's also one of the smartest product placement moves I've ever seen a traditional company do online. (A glance at Tropicana's...

Barack Obama probably used the word "hope" more than any other, calling himself a "hope-monger," not a fear-monger. Here's some interesting evidence that his rise to power is making a lot of people hopeful: Moodgrapher is a site that plots the mood levels reported by LiveJournal users in their posts during the last few days, updated every 10 minutes. LiveJournal is one of the world's largest blogger communities, with some 1.8 million active users, and the tool enables people to select from dozens of terms to describe their current mood. Moodgrapher tracks both the absolute counts and the rate of change. Take a look at how their level of hope has changed: There's also a big jump among LiveJournal users in...

What happens to Obama's network after the election? The answer depends a lot on decisions Obama and his top aides will make, but thanks to the lateral networking tools available to everyone online, the answer to that question is also up to his base, and the organizers and grass-roots leaders who are the nodes of his network. Thursday, I'm going to be speaking on a panel with Al Giordano of The Field and Nate Silver of 538, that Al has put together called "The Organizing of the President,/a>," where we'll offer some thoughts on this topic. (More details on exact location soon, but I think it's 7pm somewhere on the DePauw University campus). But, as expected, the answers are also...