Micah L. Sifry's blog

Networked Community, or Hyperconnected Mob? What to do about Internet Attention Deficit Disorder

2008-10-06T21:12:01-04:00

Are we going down the tubes, or can we use the tubes to save us from ourselves? When I'm not distracted by the latest news, that's what I'm trying to think about these days. Here are some unfinished thoughts on the topic...

Over Labor Day weekend, I spent some time with a very smart group of engineers, quantitative analysts, and e-activists, all of whom were wrestling with the question of whether the internet could contribute to solving the climate crisis, and while everyone had something to say, we didn't do a very good job of thinking together. As we all sat with our laptops open, half-listening while we tapped away on our email or Twitter-feeds, I wondered, have we all caught Internet attention-deficit-disorder?

Now we're all watching Wall Street's continuing meltdown, and thousands, maybe even millions, of us are trying to answer that age-old political question, "What is to be done?" But the spike in online discussion of the economic crisis--Ari Melber noted in The Nation a huge surge in references to the bailout in the blogosphere over the last week--hasn't exactly resulted in clarity about what to do.

As Nancy Scola posted a few days ago, uber-geek Robert Scoble is throwing his hands up in the air at all the armchair punditizing going on, and declaring his intention to turn his attention back toward the very elites who supposedly had their hands on the wheel steering us into this mess! (Not David Brooks, Scoble!)

The problem with information overload, and interaction overload, may well be hardwired in our brains--the so-called "Dunbar number" of 150 being the rough limit of how many people we can actually have a real relationship with. But we can definitely do a better job building and sharing better filters for dealing with these overloads. Now, more than ever, we need to take this problem of collaborative cogitation seriously--otherwise all the web is doing is making it easier for more people to talk to each other, but not necessarily to listen to each other.

As Mark Pesce, who keynoted PdF this year with a provocative talk on the new age of hyper-mimesis and hyper-connection, says in a fresh post on his blog:

Four years ago, when I began my research into sharing and social networks, I asked a basic question: Will we find some way to transcend this biological limit, break free of the tyranny of cranial capacity, grow beyond the limits of Dunbar’s Number?

After all, we have the technology. We can hyperconnect in so many ways, through so many media, across the entire range of sensory modalities, it is as if the material world, which we have fashioned into our own image, wants nothing more than to boost our capacity for relationship.

And now we have two forces in opposition, both originating in the mind. Our old mind hews closely to the community and Dunbar’s Number. Our new mind seeks the power of the mob, and the amplification of numbers beyond imagination. This is the central paradox of the early 21st century, this is the rift which will never close. On one side we are civil, and civilized. On the other we are awesome, terrible, and terrifying. And everything we’ve done in the last fifteen years has simply pushed us closer to the abyss of the awesome.

We can not reasonably put down these new weapons of communication, even as they grind communities beneath them like so many old and brittle bones. We can not turn the dial of history backward. We are what we are, and already we have a good sense of what we are becoming. It may not be pretty – it may not even feel human – but this is things as they are.

Mark argues that we are caught between our need to belong to real functioning human-scale communities and our tendency to be sucked into larger, mob-like behavior, and offers a way out of this nightmare: make our communities smarter by harnessing the power of the mob, i.e. crowdsourcing.

...every time we gather together in our hyperconnected mobs to crowdsource some particular task, we become better informed, we become more powerful. Which means it becomes more likely that the hyperconnected mob will come together again around some other task suited to crowdsourcing, and will become even more powerful. That system of positive feedbacks – which we are already quite in the midst of – is fashioning a new polity, a rewritten social contract, which is making the institutions of the 19th and 20th centuries – that is, the industrial era – seem as antiquated and quaint as the feudal systems which they replaced.

It is not that these institutions are dying, but rather, they now face worthy competitors. Democracy, as an example, works well in communities, but can fail epically when it scales to mobs. Crowdsourced knowledge requires a mob, but that knowledge, once it has been collected, can be shared within a community, to hyperempower that community. This tug-of-war between communities and crowds is setting all of our institutions, old and new, vibrating like taught strings.

I think that Mark is right that we're constantly discovering and playing with new patterns for collaboration. Everything from the rise of the netroots to the rise of Twitter #hashtag campaigns are examples of new forms of self-organization and collaboration. But here's the thing: we're in danger of rushing so fast into the future of networked communication, playing with our new tools and inventing new ones, that we'll never get really get the crowdsourcing-->community effects refined that we need. ("Dean done right," some people used to call it.)

Anthony Citrano, one of the founders of PopTech, expresses part of what I'm thinking in this post, which he titled "Breadlines and Battlecries." Addressing A-list bloggers like Scoble, he wrote:

I’m not asking you to give up your gadgets nor to stop blogging about blogging. Social media is unquestionably transforming our global culture and our politics. But let’s devote less energy to the tools themselves and more to the fuller realization of their potential. I suggest a little less time navel-gazing and a little more time using your voices, tools and networks to catalyze broad, deep, honest conversations about public policy. And it will be contagious: in doing so, you will set an example for the millions who will see and hear you.

Citrano's point is that we need more focus and less chatter; more signal, less noise; more attention to serious civic issues, less on ephemera. I think we also need better tools and practices in how we use the social web to make sense of our times, and it's time for political technologists to make more of an effort to congeal that conversation. Do you agree? If so, will you join me in such a conversation, if, for example, we were to pick a time for a monthly conference call for everyone who might be interested in joining in?

After the Wall St Bailout: More Plutocracy, or the Rise of Net-Powered Politics?

2008-10-01T21:50:35-04:00

Monday afternoon, I happened to turn the TV on just as the House of Representatives was voting on the $700 billion Bush-Paulson-Pelosi bailout bill. Watching the split-screen coverage of traders on the floor of the U.S. Stock Exchange as they stared, transfixed, waiting to see if the public, through its representatives in Washington, was going to save their skins, was exhilarating. And then, when the bill went down to defeat, and the market went back to plunging, I was thrilled.

Here's why: I'm tired of living in a de facto plutocracy. I also believe we are on the verge of a revolution in participation in government, powered by new technology that is making it possible for many more of us to connect together and have a meaningful voice in the process. The bailout bill, and the process by which it is being jammed through Congress, is an affront to those democratic values. We can do better. And the vote Monday showed, in nascent form, how the same forces that are eating away at the underpinnings of "broadcast politics," the capital-intensive way of electing a President whose demise we've been chronicling here at techPresident, are also starting to unsettle "business as usual" on Capitol Hill.

Several years ago, when I was at Public Campaign, a non-profit, non-partisan group dedicated to establishing voluntary full public financing of election campaigns, I worked on a variety of projects aiming to illustrate all the ways that Big Money had commandeered democracy. One of them was a poster that we called, "State of the Union: Congress Meets Wall Street/How Big Corporate Campaign Contributors are Buying America…And What the Rest of Us Pay." The halls of Congress had become synonymous with the trading floor of Wall Street, we argued, and to drive the point home, here's the image we developed, working with a wonderful designer named Chris Foss.

To be honest, it's not an uplifting picture. The floor of the "people's House" shouldn't be equated with the trading floor of the Stock Exchange. But to many Americans, of all political stripes, that is what Congress has become: a place where votes are for sale to the highest bidder, where access is openly bought and sold, where Members are measured not by the substance of their ideas but by the size of their campaign war-chest, and where the biggest winners have been the best-connected, biggest-bankrolled interests of the financial sector.

This chart below, which I posted about last week, shows just how much money from the financial sector has come to dominate the financing of campaigns in the last ten years. (Press the play button and follow the biggest ball, which represents finance, as it balloons in size and shifts its giving to follow the party in power in Congress.)

So here's what in my view is the most important fact about Monday's vote in Congress: for one day, at least, democracy beat plutocracy. Or, as David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and author of Free Lunch: How The Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expenses (and Stick You with the Bill), put it, the vote "shows that Washington is not entirely in the service of the political donor class, by which I mean Wall Street and the corporations who rely on it for their financing. These campaign donors, a narrow slice of America, have lobbied and donated their way into a system that stacks the economic rules in their favor."

I can't prove this, but I think that the same rise in voter participation that we're seeing in the explosion of small donors to the presidential campaigns and in the explosion of networked bloggers watch-dogging the media may also be starting to hit Congress. Ordinary people want more of a say in the process, so they're starting to pool their money and their voices, and they've learned--thanks to the Internet--that they can have an impact, certainly on the presidential campaign of the last 18 months. (Zephyr Teachout credits the Howard Dean and Ron Paul decentralized campaigns as having taught many citizen activists that they had the power to influence the process, and I agree, though I would widen that circle to include supporters of many candidates, including Obama, Clinton, Edwards, and Huckabee.)

When the White House and Congress, two highly unpopular institutions at the moment, come along with a top-down, no-debate, no-transparency, save-the-fatcats bill and ask for its immediate passage, we shouldn't be surprised to see those same forces reflexively hit back. Or, as Markos Moulitsas, one of the exemplars of the new people-powered networked politics, just put it, "Back in my day, we didn't hand off 5% of our entire GDP to an unelected political appointee on the whims of the stock market."

What happens next? Well, we're in the interregnum now. An old way of doing things is dying, and the new one being born isn't quite in place yet. In all likelihood, Congress is going to solve the crisis of the moment by putting lipstick on its pig of a bill--that is, by adding an alluring set of "sweeteners" (our tax money directed to particular interests of particular Members, little of which will be related to the actual problems of the economy, but all of which is geared to these Members' actual fears of facing the voters). And the bill will pass.

But the process has been a huge shock to the networked public sphere, which is rapidly adapting to all the new realities exposed over the course of the last week. And, as Scott Heiferman of Meetup once said, "the genie of self-organization is out of the bottle." Critical masses of citizens are coming together around this bailout fight. They've swamped Congress's servers, not only with incoming email messages protesting the vote, but also in searching to get the actual text of the proposed legislation. They've swarmed all over metastasizing text of the draft bill (which now contains sections on wool modifications and wooden arrows) and are creating a new expectation, that Members actually read the full bill they are voting on, before they vote. They're networking together to draft better ideas into life (see Jon Pincus's effort on MixedInk here and David Sirota's efforts on OpenLeft here and here. And they're finding and elevatin a new array of economist-bloggers, who are filling an information vacuum left by the mainstream media's embrace of the basic assumptions of the Bush-Paulson-Pelosi approach to the crisis.

As these new social connections are made and spread, they will gain salience. Not enough to stop whatever bill is about to pass the Senate and presumably the House on Friday, but eventually, enough to alter the way business is done on Capitol Hill. We are watching and we are learning, and in the last few weeks of financial crisis many of us have discovered that the powers-that-be are just making it up as they go along and Emperor really doesn't have much to wear. I don't think we're going to return to the old status quo, where moneyed interests and well-connected lobbyists comfortably call the shots, any more than we're going back to the days when Big Donors, Big-Foot Journalists and Big Name Consultants decided who could be a serious candidate for President and what they would talk about and the rest of us just watched and waited until our moment to vote.

The stakes are too high, too many of us are watching and joining in, and we've learned that when we get connected, we can make a difference.

From HeckleBot to Twitterverse: Net-Centric Democracy Goes Global Tonight

2008-09-26T18:17:09-04:00

Joi Ito's HeckleBot is going global tonight. That is, assuming Twitter doesn't crash. And if Twitter holds up under the traffic of most of its estimated three million users all chattering at once, we're all going to be participating in the birth of something new. You can call it the Global Brain or the Hive Mind, but the Machine that is Us/Using Us (to use Michael Wesch's brilliant phrase) is going up a level tonight, and media and democracy in America will never be the same.

Let me explain. In early 2004, I was in San Diego for the "Digital Democracy Teach-In," a one-day event preceding the annual ETech confab, put on by internet publisher Tim O'Reilly (who was soon to coin the term "web 2.0"). On stage, Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi was being interviewed by Ed Cone, an industry journalist who had done some indepth pieces on the campaign. But while that was going on, at least half the audience had their laptops open during the talk. But they weren't taking notes: they were typing messages to each other, participating in a live chat-room using the conference's free wifi service. And their
"back-channel" conversation—which was full of pithy and funny riffs on Trippi and Cone's talk, useful links amplifying points they were making, along with side-jokes and questions about where to go out for lunch—was being projected on a a big LED monitor called the HeckleBot, alongside the stage, for all to read.

It was a disconcerting and exhilarating moment, because it showed me exactly how the internet could give everyone a voice in a public conversation, and how the lateral networking between tech-empowered individuals could open up a top-down form like a conference keynote.

The HeckleBot was built after Ito, one of the net's pioneering forces, posted a comment on his blog that read: "People should be able to heckle the speakers at a conference from IRC via a bot that talks to an LED display facing the speakers. If people help me build this, I will take it to conferences with me."

Ito's goal, by the way, was to take a conversation that was already a private back-channel and turn it into something that everyone could benefit from. (He was already the host of a long-running Internet Relay Chat channel called #joiito, and thus well-versed in the salutary and entertaining effects of getting a bunch of interesting people together to share their reactions to whatever was going on.)

The HeckleBot made it possible for everyone in the audience to hear from each other, not only from speakers--so if someone had something smart to say, you didn't have to wait to hear them say it from the podium or be lucky enough to be sitting next to them as they whispered it to you. And it also made it possible for the audience--or rather, the people who used to be called the audience--to give feedback to the speakers. Once I saw it in action, I knew we were entering a new age of lateral networked communication.

Now, we're on the verge of a national (or international) test of what is in effect, the Twitter Hecklebot. The machine is already up and running over at Election.Twitter.com (if you want the full blast of the fire hose), or, if you're a Twitter user already, you've got a more selective stream to track of friends or people you find interesting to follow. Most of us will be online tonight, and whatever is going on in the presidential debate between Obama and McCain will rapidly ricochet through the Twitterverse as we watch together. (You can already see this taking shape in advance as many people play with the hashtag #mccainshot and #obamashot, spreading terms that they suggest people including in debate-watching drinking games. To wit, "Drinking rules for tonight: #obamashot for every time Obama says 'change' and #mccainshot every time McCain says 'my friends.'")

Now, it's true that the candidates themselves will not have any idea of what we're saying to each other. Nor will the moderator, Jim Lehrer. We're not (yet) at that level of a networked conversation. But the mainstream media will be watching, and using the stream to help it gauge public reactions to the debate, probably in the same way that it uses focus groups and instant polls. And we'll be watching them watch us.

Slowly, we're collectively building a more networked democracy out of self-organizing experiments like these. Each time a crowd gets together on the world live web, new connections are made, new tastes are formed, and these networks and tastes will grow. The old tricks of the political game--lies, spin, talking out of both sides of your mouth--are working less and less, because this networked public sphere keeps getting better at exposing them to public view. People like being connected to each other, and having a voice in the conversation--and they love rewarding each other with attention when someone points to something smart or funny or useful. That used to be the job only of the broadcast media--and the old gatekeepers kept the conversation tightly under control. That control is disappearing rapidly; tonight may be the night that we all start to realize just how much power we have.

Tracking a Political Meme: McCain vs Paris Hilton

2008-09-25T16:33:01-04:00

Ever wanted to be able to show someone exactly how a "meme" moves across the web in real-time? Anthony Hamelle of Linkfluence has posted a video doing exactly that. He zeroes in on two political videos that made a big splash at the height of summer: the McCain campaign's successful viral attack on Barack Obama as a "Celeb," which compared him to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in the wake of his European tour and scored well over a million views; and Paris Hilton's snarky response, which ultimately overtook McCain with something over three million views.

Hamelle is working with the same map of the US political blogosphere that he demo-ed this June at PdF, but in this video you can get a sense of the power of the underlying diagnostic tools at his disposal.

As Hamelle notes in a blog post about this analysis, you can answer several vital questions about how an idea or meme spreads online using Linkfluence:

- “Who’s most likely to have started this rumour?” [all content is indexed and time-stamped, making it easy to spot the “fire-starter” blog at the onset of the animation* and track propagation henceforth]
- “Who or what is exerting most influence?” [everyone’s got their own ‘secret sauce’ to determine influence on the web. Ours is called the “linkfluence score” which is essentially based on one’s site relative position of authority within its community (see this primer for more details)]
- “Who should we add to our list of key contacts / influencers?” [here again, visualization comes in handy: key influencers don’t exist in a vacuum, they are positioned at the center of their own community of readers and peers. They are first and foremost, hubs of information absorption and dissemination, showing up as large ‘nodes’ (larger dots) in the social graph.]

Here's a screenshot of the tool in action, showing the 24-hour period when the most blogs were posting about the Hilton video. There's a list on the left, and each blog is also highlighted in the graphic (though I'm sure that's probably hard to really see).

The same "best 24-hour" period of linkage by political blogs to the original McCain video is not nearly as rich in links.

I'd Like to Give the World a Vote

2008-09-25T12:58:13-04:00

If the world could vote in the U.S. election, who would win? The Economist magazine has come up with an intriguing way for its readers worldwide to join in, by creating a "Global Electoral College" that assigns votes to each country based on its population size. As of now, more than 11,000 people have voted and as you can see from the graphic below, Obama is crushing McCain, which is somewhat surprising given the somewhat conservative bent of Economist readers, who are quite upscale.

From the press release:

As in America, each country has been allocated a minimum of three electoral-college votes with an extra vote allocated for every 700,000 or so of population. With over 6.5 billion people now enfranchised, the result is a much larger electoral college of 9,875. Every nation needs to have at least ten individual votes in order to have their electoral-college votes counted. The GEC online voting booth is open until 5PM EST on November 2, 2008, when the candidate with the most electoral-college votes will be declared the winner in a live announcement by Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the conclusion of The Economist Art of Debate, part of the magazine¹s [Off the Page] fall event series in New York City. Online, the GEC features an interactive world map that allows users to see information about how each of candidates is faring on a global and country-by-country basis, as well as links to election analysis from The Economist.

The Economist says that each voter will be asked to declare their country of citizenship before casting their ballot, though they could have gone with a more serious approach and actually code people by their IP address. The magazine notes, tongue-in-cheek, "Currently, there are no plans to use international monitors to certify fair and accurate tabulation."

How about building a United Nations 2.0, along similar lines?

Bailout Datatorial: Follow the Money From Wall St. to DC, 1990-present

2008-09-25T12:18:46-04:00

I'm pleased to have played a small part in helping our friends at the Sunlight Foundation pull togetherthis nifty piece of 3-D (Dynamic, Data-Driven) journalism on the Wall Street bailout: a Google Motion Chart built on top of data from the nonpartisan, invaluable Center for Responsive Politics that lets you see just how big the big money from FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) has grown in the last 20 years, and who gets it.

If you play with the chart by mousing around with it, you can see how each sector (represented by a bubble) has invested in politicians over the years. Two interesting observations: note how between 1996 and 2000, the money from FIRE exploded just as the industry was pushing Washington to deregulate finance (by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, among other things). Also note how the tilt of FIRE's money shifts from the Rs to the Ds between 2004 and 2008, just as party control shifted to the Ds in Congress.

For more help understanding the chart, watch this screencast by Sunlight's Larry Makinson:

Sunlight has put the underlying code for the chart up on the web, in case you want to make your own narration. Cool.

Political Blogs are Making News

2008-09-17T11:14:00-04:00

Two current examples of how bloggers are not just commenting on the political news of the day, but actually making it:

Al Giordano and Bill Conroy of NarcoNews were the first to report that one of Sarah Palin's first acts upon becoming Governor of Alaska was to equip the governor's mansion with a tanning bed. How did they come up with this fact, which has been confirmed by Alaskan officials? Giordano explained on his blog:

"The investigation began as the result of a comment posted here by a reader (you know who you are; uncloak if you like and share the credit!), a comment I didn't approve because it made a rather fantastic claim: that one of the first things Governor Sarah Palin did upon taking office was to have a tanning bed installed in the Governor's Mansion for her use.

Given, it's not as big a deal as her policy positions and other mighty matters, but it offers a new piece of hard information about the nominee that nobody knows: Who would of thought that for all the hype about hunting and fishing and outdoorsy-ness, the governor is really a pioneer of the Great Indoors?

Still, we had to make sure the story was true and backed up by the facts. Too many bloggers - upon receipt of that tip - would have posted it, probably even exaggerated it, only to have a claim backfire if the facts behind it couldn't be readily documented. We've seen that dynamic at work too much in the past two weeks.

And so we worked the phones, researched, developed and talked to sources in Alaska and found that not only is the tanning bed story true, but by pulling at that thread it lead to others about authenticity, ethics, energy conservation, public health policy and who this person really is.

Giordano and Conroy's story has since been picked up by ABC News, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, etc. Not bad for two bloggers, one of whom lives and reports from Mexico!

Then there is Eartha Jane Melzer's September 10 story in the Michigan Messenger, "Lose Your House, Lose Your Vote," which reported that "the chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Melzer in a telephone interview. The story is rapidly going national, with VP candidate Joe Biden mentioning it while on a campaign stop in Michigan, the Obama campaign suing to prevent such acts of "voter caging" and the Republican party of Michigan threatening a libel suit against the Michigan Messenger.

In both cases, it should be noted that these bloggers aren't pure amateurs. Giordano (who is an old friend of mine) has many years of reporting experience under his belt, including years with the Boston Phoenix. And the Michigan Messenger, where Melzer works, is one of an array of state-based news blogs supported by the Center for Independent Media, which trains bloggers in reporting and also gives them serious editorial support. Part of the Center's mission is to bolster state-level political reporting, which has withered as commercial newspapers slowly shrink and cut back on their news staffs. It looks like they're getting a good return on their investment right now.

[Full disclosure: I am a senior advisor to the Sunlight Foundation, which gave CIM $100K in 2007 to "support an effort to establish a national branch of its New Journalist Program in Washington, DC for training of political news bloggers who will cover Congress, federal agencies, the presidency, Supreme Court and the influence of lobbying, the national press corps and campaign finance."]

Daily Digest: Split-Screening Obama Speech and Palin VP Pick

2008-08-29T12:07:03-04:00

The Web on the Candidates

* There was a ton of live blogging, twittering and videoblogging last night, and we're not going to attempt to summarize it all here. Personally, I found glancing at Twitscoop, which shows the hottest terms on Twitter at any given moment, to be a wonderful way to take the pulse of the watch-erati as we all waited for Obama's acceptance speech. There were lots of obvious winners, like Crow (for Sheryl Crow) and Legend (for John Legend), but who knew that displaced manufacturing worker, average guy speaker and lifelong Republican Barney Smith would be such a hit? Obviously his line "We need a president who puts Barney Smith before Smith Barney," hit the populist chord of fame best of all.

* Speaking of covering DNC08 live, Keith McSpurren of CoverItLive, the live blogging tool that we're big fans of, shared these details with us:

"Who live blogs the Democrats? Basically, people who really don’t like Democrats. Over the past 4 days of the DNC, CiL has had a little more than 250 live blogs covering the activities in Denver. From Q&A sessions during the day, to small chats and of course, live blogging the speeches. Reasonable mix of regional television stations, newspapers big and small and of course, bloggers. Traffic was pretty level across the three nights at around 75k unique readers (total/day focused on DNC things). Granted, lots of people still do not know about CiL and we are by no means putting ourselves up as some accurate sample size of online journalism. Let’s just say, those are pretty good numbers for our service at this time and the number of new signups (people that will use the CiL service as writers) has had a big upswing as so many bloggers were sitting around each other saying "what’s that you are using”....but i digress. Last night, during the Obama speech, by far, the 3 largest live blogs in terms of audience size/reader comments and duration (how long their readers stayed online) were Redstate, Ace 'o Spades and Blogs for John McCain. There could be any number of reasons for this and I think we need to be about 50% bigger before i could say we have a representative sample (likely by election night in November we’ll be there). To be clear, there were many live blogs that i would describe as ‘supportive’ of Obama but they did not match up in terms of sheer audience size.

* Looks like the Republican bloggers who were buzzing early today about this Gulfstream (owned by McCain backer Lacy Clay) flight from Alaska that landed in Dayton Thursday night were on target, as multiple news sources confirm that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will be John McCain's VP pick.

* The Palin choice should make Adam Brickley happy: He's been plugging away on his blog Draft Sarah Palin for Vice President has been plugging away since February 2007, which is impressive as she only entered office as Alaska's Governor a month earlier! Right now, Brickley is looking like the Jerome Armstrong (remember his early call for Howard Dean, in 2002?) of 2008.

* It should also make the blogger behind PalinInvestigated happy: "Syrin" describes herself as a "Republican women" [sic] "committed to strengthening our Republican Party [and] empowering conservative women." Liberal investigative bloggers like Josh Marshall are already salivating at the prospect of digging yet further into Alaska's political cesspools, which he notes include a scandal around the firing of the state's Public Safety Commissioner, her former brother-in-law, who is in a bitter custody battle with Palin's sister.

* Want to know which candidates will raise your taxes? One solution: go to ObamaTaxcut.com and plug in your filing status, your number of dependents, and an estimate of your adjusted gross income. Using data from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and the Washington Post, the site has a frankly partisan aim: to show users that Obama would cut their taxes more than McCain. It was made by Zach Hensel, a graduate student who tells us that he "decided to make the site after seeing pretty much every McCain ad repeat the claim that Obama wants to raise taxes on everyone making more than $42,000." The site initially got a big boost in traffic from Digg, he says, but then got buried by Digg users saying it was "inaccurate." Says Hensel, "It seems that success on Digg generated some traffic that'll keep up for a while, though; most of the hits coming in now don't have referrers, so it's probably being passed around by e-mail."

The Candidates on the Web

* After hinting all day yesterday that he would announce his VP choice that evening and in effect step on Obama's speech, the McCain campaign instead took the high road and released a short TV ad on the web called "Convention Night," congratulating Obama on receiving the Democratic nomination. It was a classy move. "Tomorrow we'll be back at it," McCain added, and indeed, even before the day was done his campaign released a tough statement attacking Obama's speech.

* I don't know if it was the Palin choice, but in the rush to get the news up on the McCain website, visitors were treated to a broken home-page:

* While I knocked the Obama campaign yesterday for failing to insert the campaign's website url more frontally into the first three days of the Democratic convention, last night not only was "BarackObama.com" prominently featured on big screens at Invesco Field, the campaign also unveiled a state-of-the-art text-messaging push. Attendees in the 80,000+ person crowd were asked to text "DNC" to 62262, the Obama campaign short code, along with TV viewers, and you could see the results on a live interactive map above the field. My colleague Andrew Rasiej was on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday to talk about the value of text-messaging to the campaign.

Convention Rules; Missing the Boat in Denver and Minneapolis

2008-08-22T10:59:11-04:00

When will the political conventions enter the Connected Age? That question has been bouncing around my mind recently as we at techPresident keep fielding phone calls from reporters doing stories on Barack Obama's decision to announce his VP choice first by text message. Don't get me wrong: It's a great attention-grabbing gimmick, and it's helping his campaign build a powerful new tool to reach people (primarily the young), but it's hardly a revolution in politics.

The fuss over Obama's TXT gimmick reminds me of the fuss over the credentialing of bloggers to the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston. The traditional press also went gaga over that, and I can still picture the steady stream of reporters who trooped up to the nosebleed section where the bloggers were seated, coming to do a feature story on the only new thing that was happening that year. "Are you blogging right now?" they'd breathlessly ask, as we sat with our laptops open.

It's worth asking, though, why the convention organizers haven't done more to re-imagine their extravaganzas in light of all the new technologies of participation spreading through society. Not only are these gatherings still completely geared for television (don't tell the delegates, but they used to have a real role to play beyond being a colorful backdrop for TV anchors), they're designed for television circa 1990.

TV today is far more interactive, but that cultural change--which is itself a response to competition from the interactive internet--doesn't seem to have gotten through to the Hollywood producers and veteran lobbyists who, respectively, have long tackled the job of putting on the Democratic and Republican ~~TV shows~~ conventions.

Every week, something like 20 million watch shows like American Idol, and at the end of each show, millions of them vote on their favorite performers. No one is gaga about that use of text messaging; it's hardly rocket science.

This week, something like 20 million people will tune in each night to watch the conventions, but I'd be surprised if either the Democrats or the Republicans try to create any kind of interactive community out of that audience. Yes, they did a YouTube contest to find a representative "average person" to give them a free pass to attend, and yes, they're using tools like blogs and Flickr to keep us informed on how the conventions are taking shape. But in terms of making the actual events more engaging, they're probably spending more time worrying about the timing of the balloon drop.

Think of it: All they need to do is put up a big banner behind the speakers each night saying, "Join the conversation; go to www.democrats.org" (or www.rnc.org) and set up an interface to involve people in live chats by state or zipcode. State delegations could be enlisted to participate. Or, if that's too interactive for you, they could ask people to vote for their favorite speaker each night, just for fun. Or they could be promoting a contest to make a TV ad for the general election fight to come (stealing a page from the Mitt Romney campaign's "Create Your Own Ad" contest).

Even without such efforts, it's obvious that tens of thousands of people, maybe more, are going to be virtually participating in the conventions by creating and joining conversations online, or by going to convention watching parties in their neighbors' homes. Check out the usage of the tags "dnc08" and "rnc08,/a>" on Twitter if you doubt me. Lots of people--not just credentialed bloggers--are going to be posting their own original content from Denver and Minneapolis. Big political community hubs like DailyKos or Townhall.com will experience a surge in traffic and comments.

Indeed, if there's one lesson from the last two years, it's that for millions of people, politics is no longer a spectator sport. We've gotten involved in co-creating the campaigns and co-shaping the public discourse, and we like it. We're off the bus, out of the smoke-filled room, and crashing the gates. Old chokepoints like the presidential debates are bound to come under assault next. It's surprising, though, that the conventional planners didn't see this as more of an opportunity. Maybe next time?

Commission on Presidential Debates Boldly Goes to Web 0.2, Launches a Dud

2008-08-06T06:50:07-04:00

This morning, the Commission on Presidential Debates and MySpace are announcing "MyDebates.org,," a "landmark partnership" that they claim "will do for the debates what TV did in 1960 for the Nixon Kennedy election." [The release they emailed around yesterday said there was a 5am PST embargo on this news, but given that their press release is now live on the web at http://www.myspace.com/mydebates, I figure they've broken their own embargo.] Their joint press release says this new site "will offer a host of interactive tools for viewers to virally engage in the political process." The release notes that "marks the first time that the CPD has paired with an Internet property to include online functionality into the event series and traditional debate format."

So, what are the "landmark" functionalities we're about to be treated to?

Visitors to the site will have the option of downloading a personalized application which, during the debates, will stream the television event live from the embed location (e.g. within a blog, social network, or website). The application will also provide users with an on-demand playback functionality as well as issue-based tracking, allowing users to track a candidate’s stance on issues they care about throughout the live stream. The full functionality will be available in the days leading up to the first Presidential debate on Friday, September 26.

Additionally, ‘MyDebates.org’ will feature high-quality video streaming and as the candidates are speaking, “issue icons” will light up as candidates discuss specific main topics. Users will be polled periodically throughout the debates with short questions with multiple choice answers (or iconic responses, e.g. thumbs-up/ down). This format will reduce distraction while eliciting specific and valuable feedback.

Translation: You can use a MySpace widget to stream the live video of the debate on your own site. Someone will tag the video content with some kind of icon-like issue tags, just in case you want to rewind to watch something again. And invisible pollsters will have the opportunity to poll viewers using this widget, for use in ways that you will have absolutely no control over.

Oh and there's one more bone: "The second Presidential debate, in a Town Hall format, will take place on Tuesday, October 7. ‘MyDebates.org’ will provide the Web platform through which Americans will submit questions which may be presented to the candidates during this event." I like that use of "may be presented." We wouldn't actually want to promise anything, would we?

That's it. This is pathetic. It's like saying, "I just bought a synthesizer and all I can think to do with it is play Chopsticks."

I don't fault MySpace for this travesty so much as I fault the Commission, for lack of imagination and courage. Recall that at least the MySpace/MTV forums during the primaries included real-time feedback from viewers that the audience could see, and the candidates even saw the aggregated responses, in real time. Also recall that Google/YouTube and the City of New Orleans have been offering their services for a candidates forum on September 18, and surely something creative could have come of that.

What they're offering us here is little more than live video streaming, which is like, so, year 2000. When you consider what YouTube and CNN did in the past year, along with what MySpace and MTV did, as well as what we did with 10Questions.com--in each case to expand voter participation in debates and in some cases open new kinds of feedback loops, you have to admit this is really disappointing. Honestly, it would almost be better if they didn't bother to include MySpace. (And one might want to ask, why only MySpace when plenty of other sites and services could provide this video service?)

Says Janet Brown, Executive Director of the Presidential Debate Commission, “Our educational partnership with MySpace builds on the unique power of digital media to further engage voters on the issues and help ensure their voices are heard in new and effective ways." She added, "I’m confident that this is the best way for new media to intersect with the general election Presidential debates."

"Best way"? This is depressing and should generate outrage. At a moment when we can start thinking seriously about Rebooting America and opening up the political process in all kinds of creative ways, the best the CPD could come up with was this? (In fairness, we should also blame the McCain and Obama campaigns, who no doubt told the CPD that they didn't really want any significant changes to what has become a very reliable and controlled format for the TV debates.)

I have to say, though, that while I'm outraged, I'm not surprised. The Commission on Presidential Debates has long been, along with the Electoral College, one of the more archaic and anti-democratic elements of the presidential election process. But unlike the Electoral College, the CPD isn't enshrined in the Constitution and has no particular claim on legitimacy. It is in fact a private entity that was created by the two major parties in 1986 (its founding chairmen were then-RNC chair Frank Fahrenkopf and then-DNC chair Paul Kirk) to supplant the longstanding role of the League of Women Voters as a nonpartisan forum for presidential debates.

Both parties had reasons to be upset with the League for its honorable insistence on inviting a third-party candidate to the 1980 debates, independent John Anderson. And so they foisted themselves on the process, began taking corporate sponsorships to pay for the debates, and established arbitrary criteria for who could or couldn't be included in them. As a creation of the two major parties, the CPD has also been much more subservient to the interests of the presidential campaigns, giving them tremendous leverage over the content and style of the actual events. Since the Commission took over, the so-called "Spin Room" for post-debate media-massaging has been actually institutionalized, with a large arena next to the press holding pen prominently labeled "Spin Room."

Now they're giving us a shack and asking us to call it a "landmark." Feh. Please wake me when it's over.

Commission on Presidential Debates Boldly Goes to Web 0.2, Launches a Dud

2008-08-06T06:50:07-04:00

So, what are the "landmark" functionalities we're about to be treated to?

Visitors to the site will have the option of downloading a personalized application which, during the debates, will stream the television event live from the embed location (e.g. within a blog, social network, or website). The application will also provide users with an on-demand playback functionality as well as issue-based tracking, allowing users to track a candidate’s stance on issues they care about throughout the live stream. The full functionality will be available in the days leading up to the first Presidential debate on Friday, September 26.

Additionally, ‘MyDebates.org’ will feature high-quality video streaming and as the candidates are speaking, “issue icons” will light up as candidates discuss specific main topics. Users will be polled periodically throughout the debates with short questions with multiple choice answers (or iconic responses, e.g. thumbs-up/ down). This format will reduce distraction while eliciting specific and valuable feedback.

That's it. This is pathetic. It's like saying, "I just bought a synthesizer and all I can think to do with it is play Chopsticks."

Now they're giving us a shack and asking us to call it a "landmark." Feh. Please wake me when it's over.

Netroots Nation 2008, Live Video Here

2008-07-17T17:04:03-04:00

I'm in Austin, Texas for the Netroots Nation conference today and tomorrow, and will try to do some live video interviews as I bump into people and post them here. I'm speaking tomorrow on a panel on "Transparency, Participation and Reinvention in Government in the Next Administration Through Web 2.0 Tools and Culture," which I think could have had the shorter title of "Rebooting Government in 2009" but you get the drift. I'm looking forward to meeting and talking with my fellow panelists, Justin Hamilton, Silona Bonewald, Andrew Hoppin, W. David Stephenson, and Jeanne Holm. Andrew and Jeanne are both with NASA, so hopefully they've brought some good schwag, like a miniature Saturn rocket or something. Ping me via Twitter (@mlsif) if there's something or someone on the agenda that you want me to track down.

PdF2008: Shirky, Teachout, Rushkoff, Jones, Clift Keynotes Are Up on Blip.tv + Final Plenary on Leadership

2008-07-05T14:54:15-04:00

We've posted another chunk of video of plenary sessions from "Personal Democracy Forum 2008: Rebooting the System" on our Blip.tv channel at pdf.blip.tv. You can watch:

* Clay Shirky on Politics As If Everybody Can Participate.
* Zephyr Teachout on The Internet's Still Unfinished Potential.
* Douglas Rushkoff on The New Renaissance.
* Van Jones on How Social Technology Can Help Solve Global Problems.
* Steven Clift on The Power of Information to Transform Government.
* Redefining Leadership in a Networked Age, with Brian Behlendorf, Scott Heiferman, Gina Cooper and Craig Newmark.

Collect them, trade them with your friends, get the whole set!

The FISA Protest and myBO: Can We Talk? Can They Listen?

2008-07-03T09:57:33-04:00

The online mini-rising to protest Barack Obama's support for the Congressional compromise to renew the FISA legislation has been getting a lot of attention, with much being made (by us and plenty of others, including Ari Melber in the Nation, The New York Times, et al) that activists are using Obama's own social networking platform, my.BarackObama.com, to organize and channel their efforts to get him to alter his stand. Indeed, as of today the Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right group has swelled to more than 14,000 members, which makes it the single largest self-organized group on the whole platform, which reportedly has close to a million registered members.

This is certainly a good example of what thinkers like Clay Shirky and Mark Pesce have been talking about, when it comes to "ridiculously easy group formation" (qua Shirky) and how "Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment" (qua Pesce). But right now the main reason this development is important is NOT because the group itself is that powerful; it's because attention-amplifiers in the blogosphere and the MSM are covering the story and thus threatening some of Obama's hard-won image as a change agent, which could conceivably weaken his vaunted fundraising and organizing machine. So while the Obama campaign is keeping a poker face about the importance of some of its members using the master's tools to challenge his position, it is no doubt paying attention, too.

The fact is, we're all entering completely new territory here. There have always been efforts to influence political candidates to take or change positions during a campaign (or afterward), but we've never before had a national campaign create an open platform for mobilizing supporters AND THEN seen a salient chunk of those supporters openly use that platform to challenge the candidate on a policy position. Indeed, while the net is inherently a two-way, many-to-many medium, no politician has yet used it to listen to his supporters as a group. Yes, the Obama campaign has asked its supporters to share their stories about their health care woes, and some of those anecdotes have made it into the campaign's blog or policy papers. But we have no norms for a collective, public discussion--even though we now have the capacity for one.

Zephyr Teachout has made the point here at techPresident that none of the campaigns have used the web, yet, to share power with their supporters--the most they've been willing to do is share tasks (like phonebanking or door-knocking). This FISA protest raises the question of power head-on: What were the arguments inside Senator Obama's policy circle over accepting or rejecting the congressional compromise bill? Who gets the candidate's ear? How did they get that access? The FISA fight also should force net-activists to ponder some questions too. How would you like to have input on the policy-making process? If you want a candidate to listen to you, what measure of standing should make your voice(s) relevant? Sheer numbers? Total donations? Your ability to make a lot of noise?

The hubbub over the FISA protest also raises another issue worth discussing as we ponder the future. Is myBO really such an amazing organizing platform? Yes, anyone can join and instantly get the ability to create their own blog, start or join groups, start or sign up for events, create your own fundraising effort, and connect with friends. The site also awards users points for all kinds of activities, creating a bit of a virtuous competition to do more with it. The "My Neighborhood" button is a nifty way to see people and events in your immediate vicinity. And the Obama campaign clearly has its eye on the most important things it needs to win in November: getting supporters to focus their energies on things like raising money, bringing in more supporters, phone-banking, door-knocking, and getting out the vote--as its "grassroots action guide" makes crystal clear.

But while myBO does make it easy to start a group online, it doesn't make it easy to grow it. You can't launch a group by inputting a bunch of email addresses into it, the way you can with a Google group, for example, which will automatically treat those people as members whether they like it or not. (One reason the campaign may have chosen this restriction is to insure that its email list, which includes everyone who joins myBO, is fully opt-in and thus doesn't get blacklisted by spam-blockers.) You can reach out and try to "friend" other people on the site, but you can't message someone directly unless you already have their email address. First they have to accept you as a friend.

Unlike Facebook, when you join a group or post something to your blog, on myBO your friends don't get an update unless they decide to visit your home page, another drag on the spread of messages internally. In reverse, this means that if you're the organizer of a group on myBO, you don't get a notification every time someone new joins. You can join a group and message everyone on the group's list-serve, but we all know how clunky list-serves can be for managing large group conversations. (Indeed, I just got on the FISA protest group two days ago and this morning I received a digest from it containing 464 messages, all from the last 24 hours!)

Limitations like these have led Obama activists to go elsewhere to do some of their organizing, or to build hybrid efforts that live partially on myBO and partially elsewhere online. For example, the FISA protest group on myBO has also created a Facebook group, in part because the newsfeed feature on Facebook is very good at spreading information across the social graph quickly. Or, as they say in their FAQ on their outside wiki site: "Facebook groups can grow very quickly, and it can be a great 'feeder' to the group on myBO.") Likewise, several hundred Obama supporters who are fans of Al Giordano's blog The Field have set up shop on the meta-social-network site Ning, rather than nesting on myBO.

I asked a couple of people for their opinion of myBO's tool set and got some interesting responses back. Mike Stark, one of the two administrators of the FISA group all in the news at the moment, said:

"My personal opinion is that the MYBO tools are pretty archaic. So far as I know, as moderator of the group, I've got no way of setting messaging defaults for new members, the blog is bare-bones, there's no IM capability, most people don't complete profiles (which is a debatable benefit - by not requiring a lengthy registration process, more people sign up for the site), and networking does seem to be 'a process'."

Another person who is a web developer and organizer said: "The lateral tools on myBO stink." In particular, this person added, the friend-finder tool is "definitely a generation or two behind compared to what LinkedIn or Facebook are offering." Also, this person noted, "Since the system doesn't handle multiple friend requests very elegantly, people may have had issues getting swamped with requests. And it doesn't seem to have any concept of a friend-activity aggregating feed, which maybe isn't so surprising since that's a decent chunk of engineering and really Facebook's key innovation."

Why dwell in such detail on the structure and functionalities of myBO? Well, as Lawrence Lessig wrote, "code is law." The structure of the conversation and organizing enabled on myBO could well be the prototype for whatever successor platform a President Obama uses to help him govern. By default, myBO is the place where millions of Obama supporters are most likely to cross paths online (you can go elsewhere online, of course, but this is the place with the most self-selected Obama supporters, by definition). There's a lot of power to be tapped here. How it is used, who gets to do what, and who listens to whom, are questions that will matter a great deal going forward.

UK Shows the Way Toward Public Data 2.0

2008-07-02T09:57:20-04:00

Our cousins across the pond continue to show that "government 2.0" isn't just something that we have to do "to" government, but it's something government can do "with" us. The Power of Information Task Force has just launched a contest called "Show Us a Better Way" that is calling for "ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated." They've put up 20,000 pounds for the winning idea, which is something like a gazillion dollars (these days). This is really kewl.

To make the contest really productive, the taskforce has brought together a wealth of government data-sets and useful APIs, including several previously unavailable treasure-troves, including neighborhood statistics (covering such things as access to services, community wellbeing/social environment, crime and safety, economic deprivation, education, skills and training), health care information, a list of all UK schools and the official notices of the London Gazette.

The kinds of things the organizers are looking for are detailed here. They include obvious mashups like crime mapping, and services like mySociety's "FixMyStreet." But then there's "RateMyPrison" (that's for visitors, not inmates, I think), the "Army Rumour Service," and a host of other fantastic civic software projects collected on a wiki that is worth its weight in gold.

I'm not surprised to see Tom Loosemore's name showing up helping manage the site's blog--he's long been a leader in this space from his days around mySociety to his work at the BBC. Kudos to all!