Techno-activist Gabe Wachob alerted me to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' announcement of campaigns.wikia.com. His mission statement includes the following:

I am launching today a new Wikia website aimed at being a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent.

This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.

Together, we will start to work on educating and engaging the political campaigns about how to stop being broadcast politicians, and how to start being community and participatory politicians.

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As a close personal friend of Joe Trippi (OK, as someone who has exchanged email with him at some time in the past), I just received this interesting message:

An interesting use of the internet as a way to communicate with voters is happening in the California primary election. Steve Westly, Democratic candidate for Governor, has recorded a three and a half minute message to voters and posted it on YouTube for everyone to view and share.

Watch the message

Already over 1,300+ people have watched the video this morning. With the primary election happening tomorrow, the stakes are high - can YouTube affect the election for California's next Governor?

I believe that the internet is a tool for communication that can be used to make politics better by replacing things like the thirty second TV ad with authentic messages and better dialogue. If this works, other campaigns will follow the Westly campaign's lead and the internet will become even more important to political campaigns. See the video for yourself and decide if this could be a better way to connect our politics.

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Jo Lee from CitizenSpeak writes that the Webby Awards dubbed CitizenSpeak as an Official Honoree, "a distinction awarded to sites for their excellence, vision and superior quality."

This is something of a consolation prize, granted to the top 20% of sites entered for consideration, but it is a legitimate honor nonetheless.

CitizenSpeak calls itself "MoveOn for the rest of us" and features a Drupal module for integrating into sites already running on Drupal (or its variant, Civicspace).

Will MySpace be to 2008 what MTV was to 2000?

Via Thomas Vander Wal I read that Senate candidate Allan Lichtman has taken his campaign to MySpace:

I got a new and different request today in a social site, a request to "add Allan Lichtman as a MySpace friend". While the campaign has an official Allan Lichtman for Congress site, I thought the MySpace page was a new and interesting approach, particularly for a candidate of the people.

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While, I know very little about Allan Lictman I added him as a friend as a marker to spend a little more time finding out about him and his campaign.

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Do we need a political social network? I really do not think that more verticals to social spaces are needed, but the social spaces we have need to stop being relative failures for the millions that use them and find them still frustrating.

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Just noticed that perennial New York candidate Mark Green (currently running for Attorney General) has launched a blog. His most recent post at the moment is a comment on Hillary's "Plantation" remark and how it's been used to distract from the point she was making.

(Geek note: The font of Green's entry changes to something less readable when you click through to the full entry - it looks like a stylesheet problem. The Mark Green campaign site looks good, but the platform sure does make crufty URLs.)

Think how far we've come in a relatively short time. Would a candidate even consider running without a blog in 2006?

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When Microsoft was being subjected to antitrust scrutiny by the US Department of Justice, the companies deep, accumulated e-mail archives proved to be an achilles heel, yielding one incriminating message after another, despite protests by Microsoft lawyers that the email messages were being taken out of context, or represented jokes, or constituted off-hand comments and not policy statements.

Now, with the Abramoff plea-bargain striking fear into congressfolks and staffers on the Hill (and perhaps some of their equivalents in the executive branch as well), Jack Abramoff's legendary fondness for putting all of his thoughts into the form of uncensored e-mail messages may prove to take down some of his former allies.

eBlock is a website that provides community web services at the neighborhood level. According to eBlock foundd Vivek Hutheesing:

eBlock began with a commercial impulse. A few years ago, I connected all of the homes in my neighborhood using a free website. I wanted to make identifying and hiring services more convenient and affordable by exploring how my neighbors and I could collaborate online to achieve this.... I began to appreciate that neighbors have a lot of common interests & concerns because they share a location.

eBlock provides an email-based alert system to promote public safety, offers emergency-preparedness lists and links, aggregates free offers from neighborhood stores, and claims to maintain privacy as an integral part of its model.

It appears to be a for-profit business and I'm not clear where its revenue comes from - possibly from participating businesses in the neighborhood.

Andrew Hoppin announced the launch of GoodStorm.com with a big party in San Francisco last week. GoodStorm is built on the CivicSpace platform and incorporates a number of newly developed e-commerce modules. The goal of GoodStorm is to provide merchandising services for advocacy organizations.

Joe Dante's Showtime political-horror parable "Homecoming" showed war veteran zombies rising from the grave to vote against the president who sent them to die for a lie, while, according to Variety, "a Karl Rove-like presidential adviser and Ann Coulter-like pundit (the names have been changed, but just barely) manipulate a talk circuit where gaseous windbags presume to speak for the military’s fallen."

Scriptwriter Sam Hamm granted an interview with Corrente's Victor Shystee in which he discussed the influence of blogs on the development of the moive:

It does have sort of an "Atrios's Greatest Hits" quality, doesn't it? But that’s the air we breathe. We’re in the midst of one of the most genuinely grotesque administrations in American history, one that will be long remembered for its corruption, mendacity and malfeasance. In Washington D.C. you cannot swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting a crime or a scandal or a national disgrace. So it was no great feat for us to cram a bunch of hot-button issues into the margins of our story. The big trick was deciding what to ignore.

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I know this makes me a geek that I think it's exciting that open source developers have come up with an open source CitizenSpeak module that plugs into CivicSpace. The module adds email advocacy functioanlity to CivicSpace (and Drupal) sites.

Right now there's a demo site where all are invited to "create and participate in e-advocacy campaigns and provide comments in the forums."