Archive: Category: TechPresident

We already know that most presidential candidate websites are notoriously bereft of in-depth information about the candidates, other than a few hand-picked issue memos and the usual biographical fluffery. But we didn't know until today just how poorly these sites do in attracting attention from the most active denizens of the political web. This survey on DailyKos of its readers shows that most net-roots activists could care less about campaign websites. About half of the people responding said they NEVER visit candidate websites, and about another third said they rarely do. In the comments thread, you can get a glimpse of the sorts of things that would make candidate websites more useful, like: -their voting records -less spin -fewer video clips (for people dependent...

Social network guru Valdis Krebs has posted a new version of his classic illustration of political polarization in America, as viewed by the book-buying habits of Amazon's customers. Using Amazon's "also bought" data, he shows that the market for political books is clearly divided between "blue" and "red" book-buyers, with only a few titles crossing over to both audiences. Thus, buyers of "The Fall of the House of Bush" by Craig Unger were very likely to buy, say, Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal," while readers of Glenn Beck's "An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems" also liked John Bolton's ""Surrender Is Not an Option." Among the few "purple" crossovers: Lou Dobbs' ""Independents Day." I've included...

OK, so I've now heard from a bunch of friends, including several wiser and cooler heads with many years of experience in the trenches, and they've convinced me that I overstated things in my previous post attacking TechCrunch. I am not looking to score legal points against TechCrunch for referring to its primary as a "Tech President Primary" and its coming endorsement as a "Tech President Endorsement." Clearly, even though we have established a brand in the TechPresident name, and won a bunch of accolades for our work, lots of people can use the generic phrase "tech president" as in a president who cares about or "gets" technology issues. And frankly, it's a good thing if there's some more competition stirred...

Three days ago, on December 20th, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch posted an announcement on his blog. "Who Will Be the First Tech President?" he asked, and he invited his readers to help him decide which candidates they should endorse as their "Tech President" with an online vote on the site. I sent him an email (full text below) objecting to the overlap in names and asking Arrington to call his primary "something different from the 'Tech President' primary" and to refer to his overall project "as something other than 'Who Will Be the First Tech President.'" The next morning, a mutual friend got us in touch with his co-editor Erick Schonfeld. After I forwarded him the same email that I had...

Three days ago, on December 20th, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch posted an announcement on his blog. "Who Will Be the First Tech President?" he asked, and he invited his readers to help him decide which candidates they should endorse as their "Tech President" with an online vote on the site. I sent him an email (full text below) objecting to the overlap in names and asking Arrington to call his primary "something different from the 'Tech President' primary" and to refer to his overall project "as something other than 'Who Will Be the First Tech President.'" The next morning, a mutual friend got us in touch with his co-editor Erick Schonfeld. After I forwarded him the same email that I had...

Someone is trying to play a trick on the press, to the detriment of both the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns. Two days ago, we at techPresident got a call from a top reporter about the curious fact that urls like BarackOsama2008.org and Osama2008.org point to the same IP address that hosts HillaryClinton.com. The question was if this showed the Clinton campaign was planning some kind of attack, and yesterday pro-Obama blogger Andrew Sullivan posted a short item saying the connection looked "pretty fishy" to him. Well, it's a non-story. Someone is trying to make the Clinton campaign look bad, and they're taking advantage of the fact that you can point any domain at anyone else's IP address. The offending sites...

Beth Simone Noveck has written a seminal piece on "Wiki-Government" for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and I recommend you read the whole thing. Noveck is Professor of Law and director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School and the McClatchy Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, who has been advising the U.S. Patent Office on its new open-source approach to involving the public in helping review patent applications, and that experience informs her vision. She lays out a powerful case for reinventing government with "civic software" (a term I once floated and still love) that "can shift power from professional sources of authoritative knowledge to new kinds of...

On any given day, I've got about four or five books that I'm currently reading--or trying to finish--and I can understand why some people try to take a "reading week" (or month) where they do nothing but catch up with the piles of things that we wish we had time to read. I'm taking a break from my own piles to offer some capsule reviews of several books I did manage to read this year that cover the emerging world of technology and politics. At the top of my list of recommendations, I have to put Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter's anthology "Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics". I've marked...

I've just finished spending two days at a mini-retreat on open government data organized by Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org, hosted by Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media and funded by the Sunlight Foundation, Google and Yahoo!. The purpose of the meeting was to gather a bunch of folks from both the public and private sectors who are working on everything from pro-democracy websites to hyper-local news startups to see if we could draft some common principles for data and open government, and also to deepen connections and collaboration among a powerfully creative group of individuals and projects. (Full disclosure: I was there in my consulting role as a senior technology adviser to Sunlight, but this was another of those fortuitous events...

The Web on the Candidates While we've been following the progress of CNN, YouTube, MTV, and MySpace, My Own Damn Channel has been quietly hosting their own debate, the Silent Debate. Today's debate pits John Edwards against Mike Huckabee with Tim Russert moderating. Apart from host Harry Shearer's introduction and goodbye, no one says a word. Its' a beautiful thing. TechPresident contributors David All and Dan Manatt are partnering up on a new video series they're calling NetCenter08. The first episode, a reaction to last week's CNN/YouTube debate, features slick editing chops from Dan, who runs PoliticsTV, and a good back-and-forth between the two. Good things are coming, let's hope they keep it up! Ron Paul supporters (should...