Archive: Category: TechPresident

Judging from Technorati's tracking of the use of the terms "obamacare" and "public option," the effort by Republican message-meisters and blogger-activists to frame the health care reform bill as a new version of "Hillarycare" (and thus defeat it) appears to be gaining traction, at least as a tag: Keyword popularity across the Blogosphere This chart illustrates how many times blog posts across the Blogosphere contained the following keywords. obamacare vs. public option » Configure this widget for your site!...

There's something interesting going on over on Senator Arlen Specter's Facebook wall. Hundreds of people--many, if not all of them, constituents of the Pennsylvania Democrat (who was not long ago a Republican)--are posting short messages urging him to defend the Clean Air Act, which has been weakened in the House version of President Obama's pending climate legislation. Same with Senator Dianne Feinstein's and...

YouTube's new decision to make usage metrics publicly available give us a whole new trove of information to mine about how various political actors and messages are doing. This information--who’s watching your videos, geographic distribution, traffic flows and total views, ratings by users--has always been available to video publishers through YouTube's Insight tool. Now, if publishers choose to make that info public, we can see it too. Some examples of what you can find out: President Obama's special video message to the Iranian people on the Nowruz holiday, which has more than 600K views, was "most popular" in Iran: His policy speech announcing a "new strategy" for Afghanistan and Pakistan was very popular in Pakistan...

In case you missed it, or want to share it with friends and colleagues, here's digital ethnographer danah boyd's talk about race, class, and the disturbing signs of "digital white flight" among Americans online. She takes a close look at how young people seem to be self-segregating between Facebook and MySpace, and challenges to audience to look hard at how online social networks may be reproducing or intensifying social divisions in America. The text of danah's talk is up on her blog. Needless to say, it has generated a huge amount of intense discussion....

Here's the video of Michael Wesch's keynote talk from the second day of Personal Democracy Forum 2009. Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, first gained acclaim as the author of "The Machine is Us(ing) Us," a video about how the internet is changing society (that has been viewed more than 9 million times), and I was thrilled that we were able to get him to speak at PdF this year. I don't think I'm giving anything away when I note that Wesch's talk was clearly the favorite of conference goers--72% rated it among their top three presentations, and he got one of the two big standing ovations earned by conference keynoters. He artfully sketches a picture of modern...

It looks like Organizing for America, President Obama's de facto field organization based at the DNC, is ramping up its efforts to demonstrate support for health care reform. Last week I took a look at OFA's online directory of upcoming health care canvassing efforts, and found 561 events. Now the same search turns up 677 upcoming events across the country, a nominal increase at first glance--until you realize that the myBO database only shows upcoming actions, and many of the events listed in my search last week were for last weekend, and have thus expired. And states with likely Senate swing votes appear to be getting a lot of attention...

For a lazy summer weekend, the 404 561 local organizing events being advertised on Organizing for America's health-care action page look like a healthy (ahem) turnout for what some have called "President Obama's field operation." A little zooming around on Google Earth suggests that some states are well-represented, like California, Florida, and most of the midwest and northeast. Oddly, Oregon has no events listed, and South Carolina, an early hotbed of local Obama organizing, seems to have only three. Here's the text of the email sent out to Obama supporters calling on them to join in this weekend's health reform canvass, from OFA deputy director Jeremy Bird: These next few weeks will make the difference on health care reform. The President has said...

I just finished a very interesting PdF Network call with Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org, talking about the role of social media in the aftermath of the Iranian election, and Jim Gilliam of WhiteHouse2 and act.ly asked a really good question that deserves repeating and amplification. "What tools would be useful to you," he said to Katrin, "to help you with this work" of sifting and analyzing all the raw data coming out of Iran. Katrin, who has been in the thick of the #Iranelection media mix with her extensive retweeting of messages coming from inside Iran (the Web Ecology report on Twitter [.pdf link] in Iran ranks her as the 8th most prolific tweeter posting updates about the election), spoke...

U.S. bloggers like WhiteHouse.gov. A lot more than a year ago, Morningside Analytics shows (with pretty pictures, too). U.S. Senate to start posting their staff salaries, office expenses and the like online, catching up to the House. Now if only they'd post their campaign financing filings online, too! (Hello, Senator Roberts?) TechCrunch analyzes the potential for fundraising via Twitter. That is soooo last month. ProPublica's Amanda Michel is managing a reporting network of more than 1000 volunteers. Sarah Palin's Facebook page gains 30,000 followers in the wake of her announcement that she is resigning the office of Governor of Alaska. (Chart above.) (Nancy Scola is on vacation. We want her back.)...

During last year's election, candidate Barack Obama staked out an expansive position on the ways that technology and the internet could be harnessed to open up the political process to ordinary citizens. And so far his administration has been delivering on many of his promises, most notably with projects like Data.gov,...