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A Role for Kerry's Email List in HuffPo's Creation

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, January 5 2011

Vanity Fair's William D. Cohan does a deep dive into the fight over whether James Boyce and Peter Daou were behind the creation of a framework that evolved into the Huffington Post, and one particularly relevant bit ... Read More

Daou, Boyce to Sue Over HuffPo's Birth

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, November 16 2010

So who dreamt up the Huffington Post? Arianna Huffington has said that that she and a few friends, including eventually HuffPo partner Ken Lerer, gathered in her house and kicked around ideas in those heady days after ... Read More

HuffPo Lends Jon Stewart a Bus

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, September 29 2010

Here's an interesting twist to the notion that the tea party movement, such as it is, is somewhat less than organic because its received boosts from Fox News and other major allies in the conservative media: Arianna ... Read More

Swiftboating the Stimulus: Did the Internet Really Kill "Rovian" Politics?

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, February 19 2010

A year and a half ago, a few weeks before the presidential election, Google CEO Eric Schmidt made a bold claim about the impact of the internet on our public life: "We are witnessing the end of Rovian politics," he Read More

The Crowd-Scouring of the Presidency (and the End of Rovian Politics?)

BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, October 21 2008

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, who just endorsed Barack Obama, tells Arianna Huffington, another Obama supporter, that "We are witnessing the end of Rovian politics," thanks to the internet and tools like YouTube. And ... Read More

Daily Digest: A Most Sobering Promise

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, July 31 2008

Young voters are asked to make a tremendous sacrifice: lay off the bottle the night before Election Day; the debate continues over the nature of MoveOn; the RNC goes after Barack Obama on his supposed audacity; 10 ... Read More

Daily Digest: PdF '08 Day Two -- Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, June 24 2008

This second and final day of Personal Democracy Forum '08 saw the presentations from the likes of John Zittrain, Larry Lessig, Mark Pesce, and many others; the launch of a new universal broadband initiative; that ... Read More

ParkRidge47 Mystery Solved by HuffPost

BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, March 21 2007

My hat is off to Arianna Huffington and her crew for figuring out who made the "Vote Different" Hillary 1984 video mash-up, and even better for getting Phil de Vellis, its author, to say more about his reasons for ... Read More

News Briefs

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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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