Archive: Category: TechPresident

Did Cardinal Ratzinger have a blog strategy for becoming Pope? A glance at this Blogpulse chart is suggestive...

Do you think the issue of telecom regulation has no effect on your life? David Isenberg, the ebullient and cherubic force behind this year's Freedom-to-Connect conference taking place today and tomorrow in Silver Spring, MD, just opened the event with this startling vision: The people of the world just got an "Internet dividend" of $1 trillion (that's $1,000,000,000,000) a year, thanks to the efforts of "six guys in Europe" (i.e. the Skype VOIPers, who are blazing the path toward universal free connectivity). This is money that "we don't need to spend on telephone service any more." David asks, "What will we spend it on? Ending hunger? Buying the pharmaceutical companies?" Now I see why David started his rant by referring to unnamed...

Talk-radio host and power-blogger Hugh Hewitt gets so many things right in his new book, Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World, that it’s almost painful to call him on the one truly gigantic thing that he gets wrong. It doesn’t help matters that he’s a genuinely nice guy who not only signed my copy of his book with a friendly inscription, “Thanks for leading it,” he’s kindly agreed to come speak at this May’s Personal Democracy Forum Conference in New York May 16. (Full disclosure: he also showers my brother David and his company Technorati with plenty of praise in the book.) But if the rise of independent citizen-driven media (a.k.a. blogging) is all about trust—as Hewitt puts...

Looks like Wendy's has a PR problem on its hands. The story hasn't made Google News yet, but it's burning up the blogosphere (over 1300 posts citing "Wendy" and "finger" on Technorati in the last day). Lesson for political operatives of all shapes and stripes: watch the blogs; they're your early warning system....

"Americans broadly and strongly disapprove of federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, with sizable majorities saying Congress is overstepping its bounds for political gain," writes ABC News' Gary Langer. "The public, by 63-28 percent, supports the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube, and by a 25-point margin opposes a law mandating federal review of her case. By a lopsided 67-19 percent most think the elected officials trying to keep Schiavo alive are doing so more for political advantage than out of concern for her or for the principles involved." So why is this case suddenly dominating the news? And why is the minority viewpoint winning? Part of the answer rests in the power of a photograph of Schiavo seemingly smiling in response...