Archive: Category: TechPresident

Video Vote Vigil is asking for volunteer videographers to send them video of disturbances outside polling locations on Election Day. Jon Lebkowsky writes that they aren't quite set up to accept content yet, but volunteers who are willing to take their cameras to the polls can sign up now to be notified when registration and uploads are implemented. "We're hoping a bunch of citizens with cameras will discourage efforts to intimidate voters, but if not, we'll have video and photo records which we'll place online as close to realtime as possible." They're especially looking for people who know how to make digital video, edit to within 10MB, and upload. This is another emerging example of citizen's media in action, and specifically...

Guess what? Internet users don't insulate themselves in information echo chambers. "Wired Americans are more aware than non-internet users of all kinds of arguments, even those that challenge their preferred candidates and issue positions." That's the news from a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, done in tandem with the University of Michigan School of Information. My first reaction was to say, "Big deal," since Internet users tend to have higher education levels than the general population, and that would explain at least some of their interest in different points of view. But Pew compared groups with similar demographic characteristics and still found a variation. In other words, Cass Sunstein is wrong. Millions of people aren't using the...

Jon Stahl reflects on the victory of "a decentralized network of citizens and media activists [that] took on the 'old media' network of Sinclair Broadcasting" and draws some interesting lessons: 1. Don’t agonize over which tactics are best – try ‘em all and continually report back on what seems to be working. In this fight, we quickly figured out that going after advertisers worked well. 2. Use technology tools to quickly aggregate information and make it available to everyone. In this case, one person put together a quick, simple database where folks could report in on Sinclair advertisers. This allowed a massive, distributed boycott to take shape overnight. 3. All of this stuff is...

If you're in NYC on Tuesday night, check out Matt Kohn and Dan Efram's new film, "CALL IT DEMOCRACY." It's showing from 7-9pm, FREE, at the New School, Swayduck Auditorium, 65 Fifth Ave, between 13th and 14th Streets. It's a non-partisan look at the history and future of elections in the United States. I helped Matt a little with the film along the way, and I know he's got some really eye-opening material, not just on Florida 2000 but also on the Electoral College (and how some liberal Dems once got in the way of reforming it). Could be very timely, depending on what happens November 2nd....

One out of four American adults have rated a product, service or person using online reputation systems, according to this new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And that's not counting the under 18-year-olds! (30% of 18-27 year-olds have posted an online rating, Pew says). Over at RateMyTeachers.com, more than 6 million ratings have been posted by students on more than 900,000 teachers at nearly 40,000 American and Canadian middle and high schools. That’s triple the number from one year ago, covering about 85% of all the schools in both countries. Hmmm. Just registered RateMyMemberofCongress.com and RateMyCongressCritter.com. Got the .org's too. Thinking ahead...