Archive: Category: TechPresident

Thanks to some dogged nudging by the good folks at MuckRock.com*, we now have an authoritative list of the websites blocked by the U.S. Air Force because of the WikiLeaks disclosures. The list of 45 sites primarily covers various WikiLeaks mirror sites, as well as several of the main media outlets that partnered with the whistleblowing platform last year, including The New York Times, The Guardian, el Pais, Der Spiegel, and OWNI.fr. Leaving aside the wisdom of preventing American service-members from accessing information available to the rest of the world through mainstream media, and putting aside the idiotic controversy that erupted briefly when the Air Force initially said that even family members of soldiers could be prosecuted for reading the...

Scott Heiferman by jdlasica, on Flickr Meetup founder Scott Heiferman, a dear friend of PdF (here's his 2010 PdF talk), has written a rare email to the entire 9,657,777-person list of current Meetup users. Why? To explain how his company was born and inspired by the spirit of solidarity that arose in New York City in the days and weeks after the World Trade Center attacks. It's worth reading in full: Fellow Meetuppers, I don't write to our whole community often, but this week is special because it's the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and many people don't know that Meetup is a 9/11 baby. Let me tell you the Meetup story. I was living a couple miles from the Twin Towers, and I was...

If you haven't already, drop everything and take a few minutes to immerse yourself in an interactive map hosted by The New York Times that is collecting the memories and moods of people as they wrestle with the tenth anniversary of 9-11. It's part of a rich array of material, some interactive and some traditional, that the Times has just rolled out on its website, titled "The Reckoning." The Times' digital team has done this kind of crowd-sourced story-telling before, most notably in my mind with its 2008 "election wordtrain" that gathered and displayed, in real-time, the contributions of Obama and McCain supporters as they digested the results of the presidential election. But this new map goes further in demonstrating...

I'm theoretically on vacation right now and scarcely in a position to do a deep dive into all the news and commentary, but here's one quick comment about WikiLeaks's decision to release the complete and unredacted database of all 251,287 State Department cables in its possession: Back in January 2011, Julian Assange said in an interview with Paris Match that he believed that, "Transparency should be proportional to the power that one has. The more power one has, the greater the dangers generated by that power, and the more need for transparency. Conversely, the weaker one is, the more danger there is in being transparent." I quoted this statement approvingly in my book, WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. It is difficult...

This pretty much sums it up: I'll be back online after Labor Day. In the meantime, here are two fun short books/essays that you should go read: Heather Brooke's "Assange Agonistes"--The noted muckraker, whose digging led to breaking open the British Parliamentary expenses scandal, chronicles her convoluted collision last year with Julian Assange, and discusses how it was that she came to obtain her own leaked copy of the State Department cables and to work with the Guardian on its WikiLeaks coverage. If you are, like me, a WikiLeaks junkie, you will want to read Brooke's side of the story. Becky Hogge's "Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia"--An intimate journey through contemporary hacker culture, told by the former director of the...

It may not mean much for Jon Huntsman's dark horse candidacy, but his tweet yesterday stating his belief in evolution and global warming science has earned a whopping 3,600 re-tweets. According to Adam Green of 140Elect.com, that's a new record for the GOP field and tops Sarah Palin's best tweet by more than 50%. Green writes: What’s the value of a hot tweet and tons of retweets? It translates directly into new followers, and new followers are a chance for a candidate to reach more people with fundraising requests. Yesterday @JonHuntsman gained 4,275 followers. The only candidate to ever top that in a single day was Rick Perry on his announcement day. Huntsman managed to increase his total follower count by...

In the 2010 Republican primary for Texas governor, Rick Perry's campaign spent not one dime on direct mail or yard signs, and instead plowed its money into highly targeted online advertising, marketing and social networking to try to convert website visitors into volunteers. And the gamble worked--of the roughly 300,000 votes he got in winning the primary, about 50,000 were probably from his online network of home precinct captains. His online campaign director, Ryan Gravatt (who jocularly refers to himself as a "reformed newspaper reporter," shared all the details with PdF Network members on an hour-long conference call in May 2010. Read Nick Judd's recap here, or you can download the whole call here. Gravatt is working on Perry's newly announced...

The top search phrase for the query "Is Rick Perry...

Last night, about 90 minutes before the start of the Republican presidential candidates debate in Iowa, the Mitt Romney campaign sent out an email to its list entitled, "Mitt's Iowa Moment." The email had three purposes: 1) to fundraise (duh); 2) to highlight Romney's unscripted response to some hecklers at the Iowa State Fair that showcased his opposition to raising taxes (and deflect attention away from his other unscripted statement that "corporations are people, my friends," and 3) to get people to share the video with others. How did they do? Well, it turns out that it's pretty easy to compare the Romney campaign's pro-active message push with the organic interest that surfaced online around his "corporations are people" statement. And...

About an hour ago I got an email from David Axelrod, senior adviser to the Obama 2012 campaign. The title: "What Barak Said About Barack." The email is a great example of narrowcasting. If you're Jewish, you probably know how Barak (Ehud, the former Labor Prime Minister of Israel) is. If not, well, you probably didn't get the email. Why would the Obama campaign be sending out a Friday afternoon (don't they know it's almost Shabbos?) email about Israel? I don't know, but I presume they're either worried about Obama's standing with his Jewish supporters and/or concerned about the escalating tensions in the Middle East and the coming clash in the United Nations over Palestinian statehood. In either event, the e-mail reads...