Archive: Category: TechPresident

It's one thing to read about an event in the newspaper; it's another thing to watch the event in its unexpurgated form as raw, unedited video. And as more people carry video cameras or video-enabled mobile phones, it's a safe bet that high-, medium- and even low-visibility political events are going to be recorded by participants and find their way to the web. Not every video will be a "macaca" moment, but these primary documents have their own power to persuade or affect opinions precisely because they're so organically real. This morning I went looking for raw video of Barack Obama's visit yesterday to a Boca Raton synagogue, where he was making a direct appeal to Florida's important bloc of...

We're still hard at work finalizing the program for this year's fifth annual Personal Democracy Forum, which is taking place June 23-24 at Rose Hall in New York City, and I'm pleased to be able to share these updates with you on speakers and panels. Don't wait til the last minute to register, by the way--the early bird rate is going to expire after May 31 and prices are going up. Save $100 by registering now. We've added these panels to the mix on Monday's sessions, which are focused mainly on how technology is changing campaigns, elections and political media: - Cyrus Krohn (RNC e-campaign director), Matt Ewing (MoveOn.org Operation Democracy), Austin Walne (Fred Thompson 2008), and Randall Winston (Project Agape/Facebook Causes)...

Is Barack Obama actually using the social media tracking tool FriendFeed to follow tech gurus Andrew McLaughlin, Chris Messina, Chris Pirillo, Dave Winer, Dave Sifry (how'd he slip in there?), Fred Wilson, Jason Calacanis, Jeff Jarvis, Michael Arrington, Loic le Meur, Robert Scoble, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Steve Rubel, and Susan Mernit along with lowly tech-politics bloggers like Patrick Ruffini, Luigi Montanez, Josh Levy and yours truly? Alas, the answer appears to be a big fat "No," according to a source inside the Obama internet team. Someone is "squatting" on the Obama name on Friendfeed, apparently--though they don't appear to be using it in a malicious way. One of the quirks of all these new services for sharing and tracking information, like Friendfeed and...

Here's the archived video of the "Transparency and Government" session at the Berkman at 10 conference that I participated in along with Sunlight Foundation head Ellen Miller this morning. (I am a consultant to Sunlight.) It was streamed live to the web by uber-video blogger Steve Garfield, who is the official videographer of the event....

For the next 45 minutes, you can join in and watch the "Open Media" session at the Berkman at 10 conference. It's being streamed live to web by uber-video blogger Steve Garfield....

Is the Internet good for democracy, or not? John Palfrey is up leading a distributed conversation on that topic for the second plenary session. Here's the short description, from the conference program: The Internet is changing how politics is conducted at every level, from local to national to global. Ten years ago, some predicted the online utopia of "everyone a pamphleteer." It's clear that the changes taking place on the Internet are more subtle than some anticipated, that they vary by place and context, and that the changes are not all good. Optimists argue that things are on the right track -- that the development of the "networked public sphere" is, overall, a very positive thing for democratic...

I'm at Harvard today and tomorrow attending the Berkman Center's 10th anniversary, and boy is this is an idea-rich environment. If you want to peek in on the proceedings, there are lots of ways to join in: You can watch Steve Garfield's live video streams on Qik.com, you can log into the IRC back-channel at irc.freenode.net/berkman, and there's a lot of blogging, twittering and flickring happening, all grouped around the tag "Berkmanat10". I highly recommend checking it out. Right now Jonathan Zittrain is giving a tour-de-force keynote on the endangered structure of the Internet. I started reading his book, "The Future of the Internet, And How to Stop It" on the plane ride up to Boston, and can already say it's must-reading....

Here's a peek at the emerging program for this year's fifth annual Personal Democracy Forum, which is coming up this June 23-24 in New York City. We're pretty excited about the line-up that's taking shape (and the fact that this is the first year we're expanding to two days). Plus we think that this year's event is going to be a seminal moment in defining the Internet's impact in opening up not only politics, but also governance (i.e., all the important stuff that happens after the election is over). "Rebooting the System" is our overall theme, and we'll be delving deep into how internet-driven mass participation is transforming everything from political media and message-making to fundraising and field organizing, along...

Here's an even more more updated peek at the emerging program for this year's fifth annual Personal Democracy Forum, which is coming up this June 23-24 in New York City. (I'm marking the latest updates with the word NEW next to them.) We're pretty excited about the line-up that's taking shape (and the fact that this is the first year we're expanding to two days). Plus we think that this year's event is going to be a seminal moment in defining the Internet's impact in opening up not only politics, but also governance (i.e., all the important stuff that happens after the election is over). "Rebooting the System" is our overall theme, and we'll be delving deep into how internet-driven...

I'm in a breakout session at the New Democratic Network's daylong conference on "New Tools, New Audiences," listening to Vijay Ravindran, the CTO of Catalist, talk about web 2.0 and its development of an "Enhanced Voter File." As usual, these are my rushed notes, and at best a good paraphrase of what was said, not direct quotation. The traditional voter file, which is collected by state bodies, is just name, contact info and party registration, and past voter behavior. The enhanced voter file, something that Democrats, Republicans and sometimes other organizations build and maintain, contains commercial data, census data, historical information about your behavior, and specialized data (like lifestyle choices). (Vijay notes, later in the Q&A, that this kind of data is...