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If Books Were Votes, Obama Would Beat Romney, And Congress Would Go Far Right

BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, August 21 2012

Amazon's Election Heat Map, August 21, 2012

The folks at Amazon have just unveiled a seductive piece of eye-candy called the "Election Heat Map of 2012" that categorizes 500 top book titles as either "red" or "blue," and then breaks out current book-buying data state-by-state, offering a near-real-time look at which political books are more popular where. Right now, 56% of the political books being purchased are "red" and 44% are "blue"--and the accompanying map suggests that people in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland and Washington, DC are the only ones swimming against that trend, with Pennsylvania the only state with neutral reading interests. At the same time, Barack Obama's long-selling "The Audacity of Hope" is outselling Mitt Romney's "No Apology: The Case for American Greatness" by a margin of 2-1 in the last thirty days. The heat map is fun to look at, but has to be taken with a huge spoonful of salt. Read More

What the Heck Does that Mean?: Why Amazon Hosts Websites

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, December 7 2010

Photo credit: kevindooley Recently, I was talking Wikileaks with a very smart person in my life who had to wonder, "What the heck is Amazon.com doing hosting websites, anyway?" F Read More

Freedom of the Press Is Guaranteed Only to Those Who Own Their Own Server

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, December 3 2010

Reflecting on Amazon's craven decision to pre-emptively cave in to pressure from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman and kick Wikileaks off its cloud servers, the thought occurs to me that it's time to update A.J. Liebling's old ... Read More

Yochai Benkler: "Every journalist should shudder...that Amazon took Wikileaks off its servers."

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, December 3 2010

Last night, at a panel discussion at the Columbia Journalism School on media policy, Harvard University professor Yochai Benkler, made a series of critical points about the role of online media watchdogs. As his text, he ... Read More

Lieberman's Message to Tech Companies: Stay Away From Wikileaks

BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, December 1 2010

Here's a little more detail on how Amazon came to kick Wikileaks off its servers. Yesterday, members of the staff of the Senate Homeland Security committee, which is chaired by Joe Lieberman (D-CT) (I-CT) saw a news ... Read More

Daily Digest: Who Says Experience Matters?

BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, March 13 2008

New technologies that may impact '08; one GOP consultant's Amazon wishlist; a relationship between online video and fundraising?; a peek at Election 2024; McCain's catatonic blog; the non-existent link between experience ... Read More

Did Facebook Play Favorites with Obama?

BY Editors | Monday, June 4 2007

Imagine this scenario: One day, retail giant Wal-Mart decides that it’s going to open up a section of all of its stores to products devised by outside suppliers, as long as they meet some internal company standards ... Read More

Amazonia

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, March 9 2007

It's Friday afternoon, and time to ask the burning questions that don't get asked at any other time of the week... Why is it that one out of a hundred people who go to Amazon to check out Barack Obama's bestselling book ... Read More

News Briefs

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Cory Booker Hires Democratic Organizing Veteran Addisu Demissie To Manage Senate Run

Newark Mayor Cory Booker has hired a veteran of the Democratic organizing world Addisu Demissie to manage his run to succeed the late New Jersey Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. GO

ShareProgress Debuts Social Sharing Optimization Tools

ShareProgress, a left-leaning tech startup in downtown San Francisco, launched its social sharing optimization platform Tuesday after several months of testing with the progressive advocacy group CREDO Action. GO

New Organizing Institute to Move from Collecting Election Data to Organizing Election Officials

The New Organizing Institute, a progressive nonprofit that trains campaigners and is no led by former Obama for America data director Ethan Roeder, is launching a new initiative next week aiming to "fix that" for local elections. NOI will announce a national network where local election administration officials can congregate to share solutions to common issues. It's a transition for a team at NOI that had previously been managing the Voting Information Project, which collects data on polling places, election districts and voter registration deadlines and prepares it for third parties in machine-readable format. In the 2012 election cycle, backed by the Pew Charitable Trusts and partnered with Google, VIP made information available in all 50 states. GO

Russian SOPA Passed First Reading

A first draft of a law nicknamed “Russian SOPA” was approved by the Russian parliament last Friday, June 14. Like the original Stop Online Piracy Act, the bill will establish penalties and procedures for online copyright violations.

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monday >

Czech Prime Minister Resigns Following Corruption and Surveillance Scandal

The prime minister of the Czech Republic resigned yesterday, irreparably damaged by a corruption scandal and the possibility of impropriety in his personal life. According to the Czech constitution, his entire government will also have to relinquish office.

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friday >

Mayors of New York City and San Francisco Announce "Digital Cities" Summit

The Mayors of New York City and San Francisco announced Friday that they're co-hosting meetings in the Fall and early next year to examine the "best practices" that lead to tech-enabled economic growth. The meetings are follow-ups to the initial Bloomberg Technology Summit held last year in New York City. This year's summit in New York ... GO

New York State Joins GitHub to Get Feedback on Open Data Policy

New York is the first state to publish an initial draft of its open data guidelines on GitHub to seek feedback from the public, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced in a press release Thursday. GO

Brazilians Protest Forced Evictions on YouTube and in Mock World Cup

Tomorrow Brazilians who have been forced out of their housing in advance of the 2014 World Cup will stage their own “People's Cup” in Rio de Janeiro to draw awareness to forced evictions.

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A “Fix-Rate” for Corruption: Integrity Action Wins the Google Global Impact Award

“From wanachi (“citizen”) to up there,” Emmanuel Dzombo explains with an upward sweep of his hand, is how Integrity Action has begun to reverse the bureaucratic top-down approach that has often blocked development work in Kenya. Dzombo is a local leader in Chengoni, Kenya, a country that ranks towards the very bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index – at 139. The organization believes it could do more, and Google.org seems to agree. The Google Impact Challenge will provide the charity with £500,000 that will allow it to develop a mobile application for tracking and collecting data from citizens. GO

Crowdsourced "Danger Maps" Track Air, Soil and Water Pollution in China

Chinese citizens are exposing sources of pollution and other environmental problems by contributing to the partially crowdsourced website 'Danger Maps'. So far, the Chinese government is letting them get away with it.

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thursday >

U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board To Meet Next Wednesday

A long dormant independent agency that was at least nominally supposed to exercise a modicum of oversight over the booming intelligence-industrial complex is scrambling to meet up next Wednesday, but the public will still be none the wiser about what it plans to do, since it is a closed door meeting. The only indication that the toothless ... GO

Despite Software Problems, Civic Hackers are Pedaling Bike Share Data

Reporters are shoaling around the news that New York City's new bike sharing system, Citi Bike, is benighted with problems stemming from its high-tech software. But that's not putting the brakes on plans to explore what programmers might do with data generated by the system by hosting a Citi Bike Civic Hack Night later this month. GO

Grassroots Republicans Are Not Waiting for the RNC To Revamp Their Digital Strategy

Several members of the Republican Party rank and file aren't waiting around for the GOP to reinvent itself on the technological front. They're organizing events themselves to explore what a tech-enabled GOP might look like for the 2014 cycle. GO

wednesday >

New Russian Law Makes Publication of Information on Gay Rights Illegal

On June 11 the Russian parliament passed a bill against “homosexual propaganda” that effectively outlaws gay rights rallies and bans informational or pro-gay rights material from publication in the media or on the Internet. Violators of the law will risk heavy fines and censorship and, in the case of a media outlet, risk being shut down. It had near unanimous support, passing in a 436-to-0 vote, with only one abstention.

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Macedonia Draft Law to Regulate and Restrict the "Last Arena for Freedom of Speech"

The draft of a media regulation law in Macedonia has journalists and press freedom watchdogs up in arms. The proposed Law on Media and Audiovisual Media Services was written by the government behind closed doors and without input from the media or NGOs. It has been interpreted as a decisive move on the part of the government to limit speech online in a country where press freedoms are already limited. Until now, Internet-based news sites were not regulated like print media.

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Trying to Prosecute Online Piracy in Canada? Good Luck!

A private firm that is monitoring Canadians who download pirated content online has found itself at the center of a legal battle. GO

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