Archive: Category: TechPresident

Monday afternoon, I happened to turn the TV on just as the House of Representatives was voting on the $700 billion Bush-Paulson-Pelosi bailout bill. Watching the split-screen coverage of traders on the floor of the U.S. Stock Exchange as they stared, transfixed, waiting to see if the public, through its representatives in Washington, was going to save their skins, was exhilarating. And then, when the bill went down to defeat, and the market went back to plunging, I was thrilled. Here's why: I'm tired of living in a de facto plutocracy. I also believe we are on the verge of a revolution in participation in government, powered by new technology that is making it possible for many more of us to...

Joi Ito's HeckleBot is going global tonight. That is, assuming Twitter doesn't crash. And if Twitter holds up under the traffic of most of its estimated three million users all chattering at once, we're all going to be participating in the birth of something new. You can call it the Global Brain or the Hive Mind, but the Machine that is Us/Using Us (to use Michael Wesch's brilliant phrase) is going up a level tonight, and media and democracy in America will never be the same. Let me explain. In early 2004, I was in San Diego for the "Digital Democracy Teach-In," a one-day event preceding the annual ETech confab, put on by internet publisher Tim O'Reilly (who was soon to...

Whoever is scripting Ralph Nader's recent forays into web video deserves an Oscar. Say whatever you want about Nader's politics, ego or stubbornness, you have to admit this stuff is good. I covered Nader closely in 2000 (and have several chapters on him in my book Spoiling for a Fight: Third Parties in America), and I recall how hard his staffers pushed him to do more media aimed at pop culture. One ad in particular, a parody of a Monster.com commercial, where a bunch of kids talked about their downsized visions of their future ("when I grow up, I want to be middle management") got all kinds of resistance from Nader, despite his staff's sense that it would play well....

Ever wanted to be able to show someone exactly how a "meme" moves across the web in real-time? Anthony Hamelle of Linkfluence has posted a video doing exactly that. He zeroes in on two political videos that made a big splash at the height of summer: the McCain campaign's successful viral attack on Barack Obama as a "Celeb," which compared him to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in the wake of his European tour and scored well over a million views; and Paris Hilton's snarky response, which ultimately overtook McCain with something over three million views. Hamelle is working with the same map of the US political blogosphere that he demo-ed this June at PdF, but in this video you can...

How long will it be before someone mashes Gov. Sarah Palin's latest interview with Katie Couric together with Miss Teen South Carolina? Watch: Watch CBS Videos Online and In the meantime, there's this wacky production of "Head of Skate," the Disney movie that Matt Damon summoned into being...

If the world could vote in the U.S. election, who would win? The Economist magazine has come up with an intriguing way for its readers worldwide to join in, by creating a "Global Electoral College" that assigns votes to each country based on its population size. As of now, more than 11,000 people have voted and as you can see from the graphic below, Obama is crushing McCain, which is somewhat surprising given the somewhat conservative bent of Economist readers, who are quite upscale. From the press release: As in America, each country has been allocated a minimum of three electoral-college votes with an extra vote allocated for every 700,000 or so of population. With over 6.5 billion people now enfranchised, the...

I'm pleased to have played a small part in helping our friends at the Sunlight Foundation pull togetherthis nifty piece of 3-D (Dynamic, Data-Driven) journalism on the Wall Street bailout: a Google Motion Chart built on top of data from the nonpartisan, invaluable Center for Responsive Politics that lets you see just how big the big money from FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) has grown in the last 20 years, and who gets it. If you play with the chart by mousing around with it, you can see how each sector (represented by a bubble) has invested in politicians over the years. Two interesting observations: note how between 1996 and 2000, the money from FIRE exploded just as the industry...

We're not sure if there's going to be a presidential debate tomorrow night or not, but either way it can't hurt to highlight some of the ways viewers can participate in advance or during the actual event: 1. MySpace is presenting "MyDebates: The Official Online Companion to the 2008 Presidential Debates," in conjunction with the Commission on Presidential Debates which, it must be noted, is a private corporation set up by the two major parties to control the fall debates. While the actual input via MySpace to the actual debate will be minimal (starting today you can email in proposed questions for moderator Tom Brokaw to possibly use at the October 7 "town-hall" style debate), MySpace is making online lemonade from...

Building on yesterday's post about the scattered but telling signs of public opposition to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion Wall Street bailout proposal, here's an update on what's been bubbling today. First, and most telling, is the entry of an infamous Internet meme, the FAIL sign, into this morning's nationally televised congressional testimony by Paulson and Fed chair Ben Bernacke. This picture, familiar to any of the millions of readers of the FAIL blog, should go down as an icon of our time, the moment when a user-generated online joke became a political protest slogan. You can expect to see that one word, FAIL, at lots of street protests this Thursday. That's the second big thing bubbling up online. Activists are...

The other day, I got an email from the McCain-Palin campaign urging me to sign up and get involved. "Take a Few Minutes to elect the McCain-Palin Ticket" it read. As it is my practice to join in all these efforts in order to better understand how the campaigns are using the web, I clicked the link and after filling out some basic info (name, address, etc), was offered the option of giving some further demographic info to join in various "coalitions" being organized in support of his candidacy. The sign-up section looked like this: Now, most of the demographic or interest groups listed make sense if you're planning to do some targeted work with campaign volunteers. "Americans of Faith", "Asian...