It's taken me a little longer than I had hoped to pull together the data on how the Republican presidential candidates are doing in terms of bottom-up support for their campaigns online, for which I apologize. Here's the headline: They're almost invisible on the web. Compared to the Democratic presidential field, which I posted on a few days ago, the Republican contenders* are playing bush league ball online. Not even Triple A.

To give you just one example, if you add up all the friends all the Republican candidates have on their MySpace pages, and compare it to all the friends the Ds have, the totals will amaze you: 4,007 to 51,471. If I take fringe candidates Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo out of that equation, the Republican total drops below 2,000.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is releasing another of its ongoing reports tracking Americans' use of the internet today (and someone leaked us an advance copy), and this report contains some really important news:

So, I am on a a W3C programming committee for a "Mobile Web In Developing Countries" workshop to take take place this 5-6 of December 2006 in Bangalore, India.

We are looking for participants and or sponsors. and are therefore beginning the call for experts to participate in the Workshop in Bangalore, India, on 5-6 December 2006. Participants will discuss the challenges, requirements, and use cases for mobile Web access in developing countries. The Workshop will bring together experts in mobile Web technologies and specialists on emerging countries and the digital divide. To participate in the Workshop, please submit a position paper by email before 1 November 2006.

I have often said quite plainly that the blogosphere is a reflection of society in many ways. And it is clear to me that it is indeed a mirror of the racial inequities, discord and tensions that exist in the physical world.

More specifically, that highly partisan, left-leaning subset of the blogosphere is as white or whiter than the community from which it springs in the real world.

There are the white liberals who tacitly believe that they can represent the set of wide-ranging diverse progressive constituencies all by themselves, and then there is the much smaller, far less visible and tragically less influential group of white progressives who are as critical of the white domination as those of us progressives of color who see that "there's nothing new under the sun".

This was largely the theme of my comments at the Seize the Moment Conference in DC last weekend, where I provided my 10-minute remarks via audio file for the panel on the netroots.

I'm at the NetSquared conference in Santa Clara, CA today and tomorrow and will do my best to blog the high points. The theme so far: More voices are joining the public conversation, disrupting and potentially transforming the established order. And it's early to master this new reality, whether you're a politician or an advocacy group or an independent activist.

Some of the stand-out moments so far:

-Angela Glover Blackwell, founder of PolicyLink, making an eloquent opening call to make sure we use all this new tech to build a fully inclusive society....and talking about how network effects propelled the Covenant With Black America book to the top of the best-seller lists. It was also refreshing to hear her admit that her own organization is struggling with having one foot in the old-school world of the web (i.e., a website that is "brochure-ware"), and having one foot in a more participatory framework (LouisianaRebuilds.info). "It's very threatening that voices can now be heard directly and not through us," she said.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer just finished giving a rousing address on the need for universal broadband access. My favorite sound-bite:

In 1934, the federal government passed the "Universal Service Act," which guaranteed dial tone to every single residential address in the country, regardless of location. The Internet is the "dial tone" of our time and it is time we guarantee every citizen of New York State the right to access it and use it to advance themselves and advance the economy of this state.

You can read the full text here.

Tags: pdf2006 Eliot Spitzer

It's time to stand up and be counted, because the corporations who still think of the internet as an "information highway" want the power to set up toll booths and private speedways for their own content or that of high-paying customers, to the detriment of all of us. As Vint Cerf pointed out in a letter to Congressmen Joe Barton and John Dingell, whose Energy and Commerce Committee is pushing legislation drafted by the telcos that would wreak havoc:

The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation....Telephone companies cannot tell consumers who they can call; network operators should not dictate what people can do online.

Unfortunately, thanks to their money and lobbying muscle, the telcos could push their plans thru Congress unless everyone who depends on its open and neutral structure speaks up.

The debate over charging bulk email senders continues today with a strong op-ed piece by Esther Dyson in the New York Times that implicitly attacks all the arguments of the DearAOL.com coalition. The issue was discussed during an open roundtable earlier this week at PC Forum, where Richard Gingras of Goodmail was given a chance to hold forth for a half hour.

I have to correct Dave Winer, who I have a lot of respect for, who just posted something on his blog about this. During the discussion at PC Forum, when Winer got the mike and asked for arguments against Goodmail, three were raised. (Not "no one did," Dave.) One came from Elliott Noss, CEO of Tucows, who argued that Goodmail was drastically overestimating the cost to ISPs of dealing with spam. Gingras had said they spend 75 cents to a dollar per email inbox fighting spam, per month; Noss, whose company provides email accounts to millions of customers, really pushed back on that number. He also argued that Goodmail could kill the email model if AOL makes so much money from it that they decide to tighten their spam filters too much.