Archive: Category: TechPresident

Ezra, Matthew, Sam, Mark and Garance. Jonah, John, Larry, Jonathan, Cliff, Iain, Tim, Roger, Warren, Andrew, Mark, Ramesh, Rich, Byron, and Kathryn. Daniel (all by his lonesome). Kevin (another lonely boy). David, John, Peter, Marc and Katrina. Respectively, those are the names you'll find on the blogs of The American Prospect, The National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Monthly, and The Nation. Now the New Republic joins the fraternity with its blog, The Plank. Written by Michael, Franklin and Jason. Thirty writers. Three of them are women. It's 2005, right?...

Pajamas Media, a new multi-author political blog venture that is due to go live in November, pulled back its peignoir a little yesterday, announcing an all-star slumber party of mostly right-leaning scribblers. Following in the slippers of the Huffington Post, this is the next big play by (mostly) political journalists and bloggers to aggregate their individual audiences into something of greater interest to advertisers. It will be fun to see if it succeeds, but it's hard to see how it will. Some of the political blogosphere's most well-known names are involved, including Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, screenwriter Roger Simon, The Volokh Conspiracy's Eugene Volokh, La Shawn Barber, Dean Esmay of Dean's World, and Little Green Footballs' Charles Johnson. So the site...

Hello, I must be returning. Actually, the main purpose of this post is to congratulate Chris Nolan on the launch of Spot-On, her new experiment in stand-alone journalism, and to thank her for holding down the fort for me here at PDF while I went off to dwell in the trenches of Andrew's campaign for NYC Public Advocate. I'm working on a detailed post-mortem of that campaign, a version of which I'm planning to share publicly, and looking forward to getting back into the thick of things here. I also want to give a big shout-out to Hart Hooton, our general manager; Kate Kaye, our associate editor; and Jen Vento, our webmaster. They've been busy developing some new features and design...

Noticed something interesting about Technorati's "top searches this hour" list: ever since the New York Times started its "TimesSelect" program and hid all its opinion columnists behind their paywall, the names of their columnists, and sometimes the titles of their columns, have been clogging up the top ten. Today, six of the top ten searches, in fact, are on Times' columnists names, and a seventh is on the title of Maureen Dowd's latest column, "Dancing in the Dark." The Times has made a big mistake in taking their most popular content out of the conversation, and the network is routing around the error. People are turning to bloggers, figuring they'll find the gist or the text of their favorite columnists in...

Dear readers, subscribers and friends of Personal Democracy Forum: First, thanks to all of you--speakers, moderators, sponsors, exhibitors, and participants-- who made this Monday's second annual forum a resounding success! I want to especially thank my colleagues Dawn Barber, Elizabeth Caputo, Hart Hooton, Kate Kaye, Jen Vento, Isabel Walcott and most of all Anthony Russamano for all their unbelievably hard work! We've all been taking a little bit of a breather since Monday, but will soon be sending out an evaluation survey for everyone who attended, since we want to learn from you what you liked, what could have been better, and how to make next year's forum even more valuable. Now a bit of internal PDF news: As of this week,...

Some of you have perhaps already heard that Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, has decided to run for Public Advocate of New York City. A big part of his motivation is to try to put into practice a lot of the ideas and tools that folks at PDF have been talking about. Needless to say, this is very exciting news for those of us involved in PDF, as well as his larger circle of friends, associates and practitioners interested in the personal-democracy revolution. In the interests of full disclosure, here are some particulars: -While Andrew has not yet made a formal campaign announcement, his website AdvocatesforRasiej went live this past Wednesday. For more details on his campaign, go...

Ronald Brownstein brings together two of my favorite worlds in his latest Outlook column for the LA Times: the Internet and third-party politics. Channeling Joe Trippi, who has been making this point for a while, he argues that when you combine the polarizing postures of the two major parties with the disintermediating power of Internet-based fundraising and organizing, you are creating the conditions for a potentially dynamic third-party or independent bid for the White House in 2008. He writes: The Internet could allow an independent candidate to more easily identify an audience and financial base, just as it has allowed blogs like the liberal Daily Kos or conservative InstaPundit to find a community of like-minded readers. More precisely, the Internet has...

Campaigns are hiring bloggers; it looks like Mathew Gross and crew have inspired a cottage industry. Tim Tagaris, who cut his teeth on Jeff Seemann's campaign last cycle, and then went to the Swing State Project blog for a couple of months, is working on Chuck Pennacchio's underdog Senate bid in Pennsylvania...