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Panhandler in San Francisco, February 2008. Source: Wikimedia Commons

How Low Can You Go? Why the $3 E-mail Ask is Working

BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, February 16 2012

All of a sudden, campaigns everywhere are literally begging for as little as $3 in their email fundraising pitches. Are Americans tapped out? Or is something else going on here? Read More

ActBlue, Conduit for Online Dem Dollars, To Help Fund Biggest PACs of All

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, October 20 2011

The Democratic political fund-raising site ActBlue is the latest organization to adjust itself for the brave new future of campaign finance. Politico was first to report that the site this morning filed with the Federal ... Read More

Dems' Money Infrastructure Gets a Wisconsin Workout

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, March 10 2011

Protestors gathered in Madison, March 6th; photo by antrover. The standoff in Wisconsin is putting the left's online organizing infrastructure through its paces. Read More

We the Ad Buyers: Spare Change Against Chuck Grassley

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, October 21 2010

The always-thinking organizers at the Progressive Campaign Change Committee and Democracy for America are trying a one-two old media-new media punch in their bid to bring down Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley. Read More

Last Night as a Triumph of the New Institutions of the Netroots

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, May 19 2010

The name of the game this morning is, of course, to find some big-picture meaning from last night's primary results. Here's one structural aspect that seems to be getting underplayed a bit. There's a case to be made for ... Read More

ActBlue Tallies One Millionth Contribution

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, May 10 2010

The netroots online fundraising platform ActBlue passed a big milestone today: it tallied the one-millionth contribution to flow through its system since being founded in 2004. The group's director of communications, ... Read More

ActBlue Opens Real-Time Stream of Donor Data for Dem Campaigns

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, March 26 2010

Democratic fundraising powerhouse ActBlue has just finished engineering a way for the many Democratic campaign who use the Salsa platform to get a steady stream of updates on who's raising what online on their behalf in ... Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed wednesday >

Summer Olympics to Stream Live From the UK — For Some

The BBC announced its plans yesterday to broadcast its live Olympics coverage of London's Summer games to PCs, mobile-devices and Internet-connected televisions, Reuters reported.

With a free Olympics application for Apple and Android phones, the BBC says it will be offering up to 24 live streams and video highlights clips, and plans for over 2,500 hours of live programming ... that is only available to viewers in the UK. NBC also plans to stream online, but the majority of free viewing of the Olympics will only be available to existing cable TV subscribers.

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CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" Will Have Some Tech-Politics Commentators

This should be interesting: CNN nightly news program Erin Burnett OutFront is out with its list of political commentators for the general election. Some of the names are familiar in Internet-politics-land. The gang includes Upworthy's Maegan Carberry, who was previously director of communications at Rock The Vote; Sasha Issenberg, who ventures into our corner of the political world frequently while documenting the new science of political campaigns for Slate; and Ben Smith, veteran political blogger turned BuzzFeed's top politics editor.

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Copyright Fights Heat Up Again Around Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) today re-released part of a previously leaked February 2011 draft of the U.S. proposal for the Trans-Pacific Partnership pact on his KeepTheWebOPEN website, as he joined calls by advocacy groups to make the currently ongoing deliberations about the treaty more open.

The United States, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam are all involved in negotiating the agreement, which include provisions about intellectual property and copyright that will play a role in the developing global online economy. A 12th round of negotiations on the deal is now under way in Dallas, Texas. Issa is encouraging users to use his MADISON platform to comment on the document, which the website Knowledge Economy International obtained and released in March 2011.

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House Republicans Relaunch Speaker.gov

House Speaker John A. Boehner's office on Tuesday pulled the wraps off of the Speaker's overhauled web site just in time for a major policy speech about House Republicans' stance on any debt limit negotiations in the coming year. GO

We're All Journalists, Indeed: Obama Campaign Guests Checked Mobile Phones at the Door

Zeke Miller at Buzzfeed, studiously reading pool reports from President Barack Obama's recent campaign fundraisers, catches something: the Obama campaign, per Washington Post pooler David Nakamura, appears to be collecting mobile phones from event attendees at the door, and storing them in plastic bags. At least, that was the case at a Monday event in New York City.

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Americans Don't Elect to Use Americans Elect; 3rd Party Hits Wall?

Is Americans Elect, the third ballot line cum party that hoped to use the Internet to nominate a centrist ticket for president in 2012 dead? It certainly looks that way. But before anyone starts writing the post-mortem, remember that it has ballot lines in half the states--and those could be used by renegade factions in 2012, or possibly in 2014 to run candidates for Congress. GO

Lori Compas, Netroots Challenger to Wisconsin Senate Republican Scott Fitzgerald, Posts Irreverent YouTube Riposte, And It Takes Off

Lori Compas, a Democrat who's challenging Wisconsin state Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) in the state's June 5 recall election, had a rather unusual Mother's Day this year: She spent at least part of the day making a YouTube video with her family. GO

Romney Campaign Targets Obama's Barnard Commencement Speech With Google Ads

New York City area web users looking for details about Barnard College's Commencement Ceremony, where President Barack Obama gave the Commencement Address earlier this afternoon, are also likely to have encountered a targeted ad calling out "Obama's Wasteful Spending" on Mitt Romney's website, as Emily Schultheis from Politico first reported. While she suggested it was targeted at only the zip code where the college is located on Manhattan's Upper West Side, it also showed up on a search for a zip code located in Queens, while accessing the Internet from Lower Manhattan. But it did not show up for an Internet user located outside the New York area. GO

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