Archive: Category: TechPresident

So far, President Obama has answered several user-submitted questions posed to him in the last 45 minutes on Reddit. Supporters of Internet Freedom, the space program and campaign finance reform should like what he's said. English grammar teachers, not so much. Apparently he doesn't like capitalization. To a question asking for the White House's homemade beer recipe, he wrote: "It will be out soon! I can tell from first hand experience, it is tasty." To a question about his position on Internet Freedom, posed by David Weinberger (the author of several seminal books on the Internet, who goes by davidjoho on Reddit), he wrote: Internet freedom is something I know you all care passionately about; I do too. We will fight hard...

On the troubled northern border of Georgia, next to the disputed territory of South Ossetia, where two wars have been fought in the last two decades, an NGO has been quietly pioneering a new kind of distributed reporting system, one that uses SMS text messaging and the web to combine the data-rich mapping of Ushahidi with the meticulous requirements of human-rights researchers. The project has been in quiet development for two years, as a partnership between some intrepid developers and two NGOs, the Caucasus Research Resource Centers and a London-based conflict-transformation organization called Saferworld that is active in 17 countries around the world. Now, for the first time, they are going public with their Elva platform. Elva, which means "lightning"...

From the beginning of the 2011-2012 U.S. Presidential election campaign in April 2011, there have nearly 2 billion views of videos tagged about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney on YouTube, Ramya Raghavan of YouTube Politics blogged today. Of those, just about 100 million views are of official videos made by all of the presidential campaigns, including the other Republican primary contenders. That is, just 5% of the total views of videos about the American presidential candidates is official media, as opposed to user-generated content. Back in 2008, the ratio by the end of the election was 10%, or 150 million views out of 1.5 billion, according to data from TubeMogul and Divinity Metrics, that looked solely at videos containing either Barack Obama...

The journo-political industrial complex is headed for the national party conventions this weekend, with more than 15,000 journalists along with thousands more Republican delegates, activists, party operatives and outside protesters and hangers-on expected in Tampa, Florida by Monday. This year, along with the expensive sky-boxes and even more extravagant night-time parties that the chattering class uses to mark its turf (remember, national political conventions are just like high school, only almost everyone has expense accounts and the bad kids are kept out by the Secret Service), some folks will also be showing off their tech bling. It appears, as my colleague Miranda Neubauer reported yesterday, that it isn't enough just to personally have a fancy smartphone or tablet to...

Is Barack Obama getting his online mojo back? Maybe. On Saturday, August 18th, his campaign uploaded a new video to his YouTube channel titled, "We've Come Too Far to Turn Back Now," and began promoting it with a series of emails whose subject lines were far different from the plaintive appeals for donations that have become all too familiar to anyone on his giant list. "This video gave me the chills," read the subject line from Jen O'Malley Dillon, the deputy campaign manager. "This video, right here, explains why I'm working day in and day out to win this election. When the hours are long and the fight is hard, I know that what we're doing will make a real...

The folks at Amazon have just unveiled a seductive piece of eye-candy called the "Election Heat Map of 2012" that categorizes 500 top book titles as either "red" or "blue," and then breaks out current book-buying data state-by-state, offering a near-real-time look at which political books are more popular where. Right now, 56% of the political books being purchased are "red" and 44% are "blue"--and the accompanying map suggests that people in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland and Washington, DC are the only ones swimming against that trend, with Pennsylvania the only state with neutral reading interests. At the same time, Barack Obama's long-selling "The Audacity of Hope" is outselling Mitt Romney's "No Apology: The Case for American...

Soon after launching the Politics and the Internet timeline, we saw a tweet from long-time tech publisher and visionary Tim O'Reilly, retweeting a plug from Rep. Darrell Issa, but adding "Alas, omits @carlmalamud's work RT @DarrellIssa: An interactive history of the Internet & politics...

A "single point of failure" is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. Unfortunately for transparency activists, Julian Assange has become Wikileaks' single point of failure. Assange is back in the news today because, after nearly two months of holding out in Ecuador's London embassy, he has been granted "political asylum" by the Ecuadorian government. The decision has set off a diplomatic stand-off, with the U.K. government threatening to revoke the embassy's diplomatic status, and Ecuador responding with anger. Ever since August 20, 2010, when Swedish authorities issued an international warrant for Julian Assange's arrest for suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion, the transparency site has been in crisis. "We had...

Since yesterday afternoon, when we launched the "Politics and the Internet" timeline here at techPresident, we've been getting emails and tweets suggesting additions and corrections. So, I'm going to start blogging the changes as we make them, starting with this one, and we're going to compile those changes on this page, as the timeline grows. This morning I got an email from Vint Cerf, suggesting that we add the invention of TCP/IP to the timeline. The Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol are core to the architecture of the internet, and enable computers to reliably move bits around the network, using a technique called packet-switching. I wrote him back right away (it's not every day you hear from one of...

The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), an arm of the Pew Research Center directed by Tom Rosenstiel, has a new report out on "How the Presidential Candidates Use the Web and Social Media." Let me save you some time, in case you just don't have the stamina for a 33-page report on the two campaigns' use of their website blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and the level of social media response that usage generated over a two week period in early June: Their use of these tools is highly controlled and generating a relatively weak response. Here's how PEJ puts it: In theory, digital technology allows leaders to engage in a new level of “conversation” with voters, transforming campaigning into something...