Archive: Category: TechPresident

It's not every morning that you run into one of the most powerful men in the country in relatively intimate and unguarded surroundings, so today as I was boarding the shuttle down to DC and saw White House senior advisor David Axelrod seated by a window just behind the first class section, I decided I had to seize the moment. My parents gave me "change the world" disease when I was young, after all, and I probably will never shake it. The aisle was full in front of me anyway and thus I was literally standing across from him. Knowing I might only have a minute, I quickly pondered what to say. "Is this 'change we can believe in'?" I asked....

"What Matters Now" is a question we should ask ourselves all the time, but it also happens to be the title of a new, free e-book curated by our friend (and occasional PdF speaker) Seth Godin. He asked 70 people, including yours truly, to each contribute a page offering their answer, focused on one word that matters, plus a short (under 200 words) explanation. The result is a spicy bon-bon of a book, alternately compelling, contradictory, and provocative. You can download your copy here. The words contributed by each contributor are listed below. You need to download the eBook to read the accompanying essays. I'm humbled to be in such good company. Generosity by Seth Godin Fear by Anne Jackson Facts by Jessica Hagy Diginity...

1. There are too many top ten lists out there already. 2. No one remembers last year's top ten lists. 3. Any list is automatically self-limiting. 4. We didn't do a top ten list last year, either. 5. Ten is anyway an arbitrary number. 7. Link-baiting is so last century. 8. Lists are silly. 9. No one reads a top ten list to the bottom, so why bother....

Looking for a good transit app? There's a site for that. The good people at FrontSeat.org, makers of "software for civic life" like WalkScore.com (which promotes car-free living by providing a personalized "walkability" rating for any address) have unveiled their latest project: City-Go-Round. The site is a searchable database of public transit applications (apps) available in cities across America. Visitors also see a list of which transit agencies make their data publicly available to software developers and which agencies do not. “We are calling on transit agencies nationwide to open their data and follow the lead of the Open Government Directive issued this week by the White House,” said Mike Mathieu, founder and chairman of Front Seat. “City-Go-Round’s transit apps are...

The White House has just released its Open Government Directive, long-awaited by transparency and "government 2.0" advocates, and at first glance, the meat on the bone looks pretty juicy. (Or, if you prefer a vegan metaphor, the sauce on the seitan looks pretty, um, creamy?) Nancy's got a sharp and detailed write-up here, and since I've been stuck in a meeting all day, I'm only going to add one additional wrinkle on a topic close to my heart that I think is worth highlighting, nay, hailing. To me, one of the most important parts of the new directive is in this paragraph, in the section on "Publishing Government Information Online": To the extent practicable and subject to valid restrictions, agencies should publish...

A few minutes ago at 1:42pm, the White House blog announced a live web chat with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis "to discuss the contents of the Department of Labor’s new regulatory agenda, which focuses on improving the lives of working Americans and leveling the playing field for businesses that play by the rules." Questions can be submitted through this live chat window, via Twitter using the hashtag #DOLREGS, by calling 1-866-487-2365 or by emailing webmaster@dol.gov. There's only one hitch: the chat starts at 2:00pm. That's 18 minutes to engage a public. In fairness, the Department of Labor Regulations home page announced the upcoming chat sometime Friday afternoon, but that announcement didn't exactly get picked up by many observers. There's one consolation....

Who are we? What are we thinking about or responding to or passionate about or interested in? On October 21, 2009, I gave a talk to NPR Weekend Edition and Digital staff, during their staff retreat. The topic was "Navigating the World Live Web." My goal was to look at how we can tell new kinds of stories from the intentional and unintentional data streams being created by millions of users of the internet. Or, to use Paul Simon's memorable phrase, "the way we look to us all." Here's the video: During the first part of the talk I explore how people "vote" with their attention around political candidates and themes, and look at tools for unearthing interesting trends in public...

Just over a week ago, Fox News host Glenn Beck announced that he would be rolling out a series of "educational conventions" to be held around the country starting in Orlando, Florida, next spring on March 27 at the UCF Arena. He told a crowd at The Villages retirement community in that "up on GlennBeck.com we've partnered with a company called Eventful" where people can vote for their area. The whole series is supposed to culminate on August 28 in Washington, DC, "at the feet of Abraham Lincoln" (a date and location that ought to make students of the civil rights movement wince). Since then, more than 37,800 people have gone onto Eventful to "demand" that Beck come to their...

Jeff Clark (@jeffclark)at Neoformix is doing amazing work with data visualization. Check out his Twitter "StreamGraph" tool, for example. It shows the usage over time for the words most highly associated with your search term. Here's a look at the latest 1000 tweets mentioning "Obama": I've highlighted the expanding thread mentioning Michael Moore's handle (@mmflint) since the film-maker has just posted an "open letter" to the president asking him to not escalate the war in Afghanistan, and people are clearly retweeting it like crazy. Clark's tool also works with Twitter lists. Here's the stream for @nytimes/staff, a list of 95 people created by the newspaper. Hmm, seems like everyone just wants to talk about Tiger Woods and football! (Keep in mind, this...