Archive: Category: TechPresident

Last night, a crowd of more than one hundred gathered on the sixth floor of MIT's Media Lab to help Rebecca MacKinnon launch her new book, The Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom. The audience included net luminaries like Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, and Andrew Newman, the director of the Tor Project, and the discussion was at the same level. Count me among those who are thoroughly convinced by MacKinnon's reporting and arguments. The heart of her book can be summed up by these two quotes: It is time to stop debating whether the Internet is an effective tool for political expression, and to move on to the much more urgent question of...

I watched the "enhanced version" of President Obama's State of the Union speech last night, which was streamed live from WhiteHouse.gov, and it worked. That is, I found myself paying closer attention to the parts of the speech that were being "enhanced" by the addition of a variety of photographs and charts--89 in all--that the White House inserted alongside the video of the President speaking. But there were also some odd effects. For one, I don't remember a thing that Obama said, though I do remember the slide illustrating the rise in income of the top 1% of the population, and I also remember the slide that illustrated the need to streamline government jobs programs by showing a PacMan eating...

In the wake of last week's online uprising against the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, there's a fascinating dynamic starting to unfold as technology leaders and grassroots activists wrestle with the question: now what? On one side, I'm seeing signs of a new willingness from tech leaders to not just engage Washington the old-fashioned way (by expanding their expenditures on lobbying and campaign donations) but by also addressing the underlying "pay-to-play" system that made it almost possible for one industry, the entertainment sector, to use legislation to impose its will on another industry, the Internet sector. Grassroots activists clearly are pressing in this direction. On the other hand, there's also clearly some reticence on the part of...

A Personal Democracy Media Editorial Last year, when Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and when House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Lamar Smith introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), they probably had no idea that they, along with a bipartisan group of cosponsors, would awaken a sleeping tiger. After all, the proposed legislation was fairly technical in nature and would cost the government little to implement. But in the days and weeks that followed, it has become exceedingly clear that Leahy and Smith and their allies in the entertainment industry misread the political landscape. Instead of a slam dunk designed to crack down on so-called "online piracy," the bills have backfired on Hollywood, fostering the emergence of...

We're pleased to announce that Chris Wong is joining Personal Democracy Media to curate this June's ninth annual Personal Democracy Forum. He comes to us with a wide range of experience in the world of open knowledge, free culture and creative new approaches to civic collaboration. He's a postgraduate fellow and lecturer at the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School, and a visiting fellow at both the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy and the Yale Law School Information Society Project. Currently, he is leading research on the NSF-funded Open Patent project exploring the tagging and visualization of patent information, and was previously the founding project manager of the IILP’s historic Peer To Patent...

Of all the tech companies that have gotten involved with big media players around the Republican primary debates, Twitter continues to show the most genuine interest in producing something meaningful out of what, for the most part, appears to be co-marketing opportunities. Which is only saying a little--the media bigfoots running these events really don't appear to care about online user input and feedback much, and just want a little of that internet buzz to rub off on them. But that's of a piece with the media's general approach to this cycle's juggernaut of debates. (See Republican Mark McKinnon's excellent new discussion paper, "Gone Rogue: Time to Reform the Presidential Primary Debates," for a chapter-and-verse dissection of just how bad...

In preparation for tonight's Republican presidential debate, which is featuring a collaboration between Fox News and Twitter similar to their last event using the hashtags #answer and #dodge to involve viewer feedback in the conversation, I went looking on the FoxNews.com website to see if there was any more information about how they were going to handle the Twitter feedback. (You may recall that last time around, this experiment was essentially a bust.) Well, I didn't discover anything about the so-called "Twitter election," but I did stumble on this interesting fact. According to the latest Fox News poll, President Obama has a 45% approval rating, with 57% of those surveyed disapproving of him and 8% undecided. That's a very impressive 110%...

The battle over so-called 'online piracy' has awakened a sleeping tiger. For years, the Internet community has been outgunned and outspent by Hollywood and the copyright cartel in Washington. Now, proposed legislation that would enable the government to take drastic action against rogue websites and force internet service providers to police content moving through their services far more stringently has triggered a growing response from tech companies large and small. From COICA to Protect-IP to SOPA and PIPA, the acronyms have changed but the goal has been largely the same: make sharing of content harder, even impossible, to shore up the business models of intellectual property owners. But as we have been reporting, this push in Washington is now being...

Thursday morning, Politico announced that it was joining with Facebook to "measure GOP candidate buzz" and give its readers an "exclusive look at the conversation taking place on the social networking site" ahead of the January 21 South Carolina primary. "Mitt, Paul winning Facebook primary" was the headline on their first story on the project. "'Social media has forever changed the way candidates campaign for the presidency,' said John F. Harris, editor-in-chief of Politico, in a press release about the new partnership. He added, “Facebook has been instrumental in expanding the political dialogue among voters and we couldn't be more excited about the opportunity to offer our readers a look inside this very telling conversation.” At the core of the partnership are...

Can we use interactive real-time media to make the political process more engaging and accountable? In particular, can we make candidate debates and live town halls into something more than a joint TV appearance for the regurgitation of sound-bites and talking points? Since 2007, we've had more than a detached interest in this topic, launching our own interactive platform for crowdsourcing questions called 10Questions.com. We've worked with partners like the Knight Foundation, the Omidyar Network and Yahoo! News and Finance to try to inject some new ideas into the process. And we've kept a close eye on all kinds of interesting and not-so-interesting partnerships between conventional media organizations and digital platforms. Join the conversation here....