Archive: Category: TechPresident

I'm at Esther Dyson's PC Forum for the next two-and-a-half days, and will try to blog intermittently as events allow. Right now we're in the middle of an opening panel bringing together three seemingly disparate speakers: -Howard Gardner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, best known for his theory of "multiple intelligences," who made a quiet but impassioned call for the movers and shakers in the room to aim to "do good" now, rather than just focus on making a pile and giving it away later in life. -Andy Stern of the SEIU, perhaps the most tech-savvy of union leaders (see Purple Ocean and his blog), who made an impassioned call for high-tech leaders and labor to find common ground in...

Molly Chapman Norton's recent article about Members of Congress and blogging has an interesting thread going, including Molly's discovery of a list maintained by the National Conference of State Legislators of state reps who blog, and word from one 2006 congressional candidate, Scott Chacon, who is blogging, podcasting many of his posts, and running with a voluntary limit of $100 a contributor (could Joe Trippi be advising him?). While we're on the topic, you can add to the list of politicians who blog: Former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly and Toledo City Councilman Frank Szollosi. Nader's first post is rather dry, which is too bad because he's actually quite a funny guy, and he's got...

The number of blogs is growing by about 40,000 a day, about four times the rate for most of last year, and the total number of blogs is rapidly approaching 8 million, reports brother Dave at Technorati. Most of the growth, he says, "can be attributed to the increase in new, mainstream services such as MSN Spaces, and in increases of use of services like Blogger, AOL Journals, and LiveJournal. In addition, services outside the United States have been taking off, including a number of media sites promoting blogging, such as Le Monde in France." There's also a dark side, he notes, which is the rise of fake blogs whose sole purpose is to artificially inflate the number of links...

MoveOn.org has quietly decided to experiment with a new form of off-line organizing, its Washington director Tom Matzzie tells me, one that readers of Zephyr Teachout's PDF articles will find immediately familiar: to support the formation of ongoing local MoveOn Teams, focused on the group's issue campaigns. At first glance this may not seem to be a big deal, but up until now MoveOn has mostly done "one-off" kinds of local meetings, organizing thousands of house-parties, but not nurturing the institutionalization of continuing connections between MoveOn members in a local area. The rollout of this experiment started Wednesday, with an email to the group's 2 million-plus members opposing "Bush's plan to stack the court." Matzzie tells me that at the 1500+ house...

Glenn Reynolds says that Thomas's speech was "the most cogent argument for the elimination of the FEC" that he's ever heard. Sorry, Glenn, but I disagree about that--we can't go to a system where there are no limits on what an individual can give to a candidate. Elections that are auctions are not free. He's now talking about blogs not as "the new powerbrokers," the topic he was asked to cover, but as "powerbreakers." Nice. Blogs are great at fundraising, he notes, but not at reaching people who don't care. Blogs motivate the motivated. Blogs also are driven by enemies. The newest one, he says, is the FEC. The bankruptcy bill being a similar, but smaller, example. He thinks nobody should be regulated by...

FEC Chair Scott Thomas is speaking now at the IPDI conference lunch, and he's started out by saying how he's here as a "pooper-scooper" to pick up after the "load" of "FECal matter" (his pun) dropped by his esteemed colleague, Bradley Smith. He says that the commission didn't take enough time to distinguish carefully when it adopted a "blunderbuss" exemption for all public communication online, with no distinction between a citizen-volunteer blogger at home and a paid professional with a honed message working in coordination with candidates or parties. Surely there will be some consideration of regulating paid party and corporate/labor political advertising on the Internet, now. On the other extreme, he doubts there will be any interest in touching what volunteers...

Two of our own contributing editors, Michael Bassik and Mike Krempasky, have been busy this past week organizing bipartisan coalition of bloggers, online journalists and political consultants seeking to head off any "crackdown" by the Federal Election Commission on blogging and other forms of online political expression. The letter is now out, and and if you want to add your name to the signatories, go to the OnlineCoalition.com. Not only is this a bipartisan list (including yours truly and two other PDFers, Brian Reich and Matt Stoller) but the very issue of blogging freedom brought together the conservatives at RedState.org (which owns the domain name for the site), the Deaniacs at EchoDitto (which designed and built the site), and the...

Phil Noble of PoliticsOnline just handed Joe Trippi $100 cash up on the plenary panel of the IPDI "Politics Online" conference, as instant affirmation of Joe's longstanding argument that someday soon a candidate for President is going to go on the Internet and issue a call to millions of Americans to run a campaign financed solely by small donations of no more than $100. The gesture got a big laugh from the crowd, and for good reason. Yesterday, I met with my old boss and friend Ellen Miller, who is now deputy director at the Campaign for America's Future, but prior to that, before founding Public Campaign (where we worked together) was the founder of the Center for Responsive Politics, the...