Archive: Category: TechPresident

Before they fade further into the past, a quick note on last weekend's back-to-back presidential debates in New Hampshire and the role of online platforms therein. In case you've forgotten, I'm talking about the ABC News/Yahoo event Saturday night and the NBC/Facebook event Sunday morning. And neither made a dent, when it comes to using interactive media to involve the public in the debates. For the record, according to a transcript, Yahoo was mentioned four times during the ABC event, and co-moderator Diane Sawyer sourced one question back to Yahoo, saying "Yahoo! sends us questions, as you know. We have them from real viewers. And I’d like to post one, because it is about gay marriage." (Yes, her overall performance...

This is where we distinguish between the truly important and the simply shiny, the technology efforts that matter and the ones that are just fluff, the bold claims vs the reality. From social media to fundraising to community engagement, there's plenty of hype. We need to become digitally literate enough to distinguish what is smoke and what is real. What follows is an eclectic selection of posts that try to put the discussion on solid ground....

A few days ago, the Romney campaign posted an interesting and somewhat revealing infographic about their online efforts touting the various milestones they've hit. "Supporters are joining and sharing online in unprecedented levels," they claimed. Well, maybe. The question is compared to what. The infographic offers two kinds of metrics that lend themselves to some comparisons. The first is traffic to and time spent on the campaign website. In the seven months since the Romney campaign launched, the campaign says that 3.25 million people have visited MittRomney.com leading to 10.88 million page views. They convert that number to 14.5 years of time spent on the site. These are impressive-looking numbers, but they're actually not that big a deal. A little...

While Rick Santorum's campaign may have left some money on the table on the night of their Iowa caucus near-victory, they're trying to recoup with a "money-bomb" that is leaning heavily on the social fundraising platform Fundly.com. As of now they have almost 2,600 people raising money through the site, and they've collectively brought in almost $240,000. That's a strong start; if Santorum continues to do well in the early states Fundly could be a critical factor in his campaign's online infrastructure....

We're closing out this symposium on The Year Ahead with an array of contributors who took our question and pushed back. Asked "If 2011 was a year of tumult fueled, in part, by our growing ability to network, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the year ahead--and why?" this group refused to be bottled in. As you will see from reading what Dominic Campbell, Peter Corbett, Susan Crawford, Dan Gillmor, Gideon Lichfield, Eli Pariser, Mark Pesce, Marko Rakar, Douglas Rushkoff, and Daniel Sieradski had to say, life in the mix of ups and downs that was 2011 strongly colors how they see the future. They are telling us, "Yes, networking is fueling a massive wave of protest and change, but...

The always provocative Dave Winer is on a roll at the moment, fired up both by Occupy Wall Street and the fight over SOPA, which he argues are made for each other....

Yesterday we heard from the optimists, the people who see the network-powered tumult of 2011 as the harbinger of more positive social changes to come this year. Today, we have the responses of a smaller but equally provocative group, the pessimists. We asked them the following question: "If 2011 was a year of tumult fueled, in part, by our growing ability to network, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the year ahead--and why?" and their answers range from gloomy to downright apocalyptic. What's interesting about these responses is how they take the same events--economic dislocation, the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the presidential election--and project losses, rather than gains, for democracy and better government. Also, it's noteworthy that...

If you're reading this site, the odds are that you're optimistic about how technology is changing politics worldwide. That's certainly the conclusion of many from the diverse array of smart people from the worlds of government, technology, journalism and activism who we asked during the winter holiday break to ponder the following question: "If 2011 was a year of tumult fueled, in part, by our growing ability to network, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the year ahead — and why?" Of the nearly thirty people who answered, just about half — a polymorphous mix of Republicans, Democrats, hacktivists, journalists and academics — came down strongly on the optimistic side of things. Increasing instability, inequality, and secrecy; the heightened efforts...

Here at techPresident, we're getting tired of stories or services claiming to find a clear correlation between chatter on Twitter or Facebook and the fortunes of the candidates running for president of the United States. The beginning of the new year and the Iowa caucuses seem to have brought out a fresh wave of them. The flashiest is the Washington Post's new "MentionMachine" tool "that monitors Twitter and media across the Web for political candidate mentions, revealing trends and spikes that show where the conversation is and why." It claims that "growth in the numbers of legitimate followers or a high recurrence of retweets are both indicative of growing grass-roots support." What nonsense. There are so many ways that such changes...

NPR senior strategist and PdF pal Andy Carvin just put out a call on Twitter for help titling his book proposal. He tweets: "Need to brainstorm a working title for my book proposal. Any ideas? Would really like to avoid using social media cliches. #acarvinbook" Some good ones: -"click click revolution" by Blake Hounshell -"Talk, Click, Book: How Social Media Aided a Year of Revolution," by Andrew Katz My suggestion: "Crowd Sorcerer: Weaving a News Network in the Digital Age."...