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Election 2012: It's Not Facebook. It's the Data, Stupid.

BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, April 20 2011

Now that President Obama, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty have all declared their intentions to run for President in 2012 and rolled out their initial campaign ... Read More

Where Did You Put Barack Obama's Hologram?

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, April 15 2011

White House photo by Pete Souza At a Chicago fundraiser last night, President Obama had some harsh things to say about the state he found government technology in when he became president in remarks overheard and ... Read More

Axelrod Previews a Seriously Upgraded Obama '12 Digital Operation

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, April 15 2011

Team Obama has plans in the works to raise the bar it set online in '08, reports Politico's Mike Allen: President Barack Obama’s fledgling reelection campaign is building a volunteer network with the audacious ... Read More

It's Not the Announcement Video, It's the Parody of It

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, April 5 2011

Ben Smith points out that the National Republican Senatorial Committee's mocking video (above) that features Barack Obama riding a white unicorn that trails behind it a rainbow has gotten more views than Obama's ... Read More

Can Obama 2012 Bring the New Media Band Back Together Again?

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, April 4 2011

The kick-off of Barack Obama's 2012 re-election bid Monday morning came with a relaunch of BarackObama.com and a thoroughly Web-based announcement push that featured a campaign YouTube video, a text message, a Facebook ... Read More

"Are You In?": Obama Pitches 2012 as a Group Project

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, April 4 2011

And so it begins. He came by email, he came by web, he came by video, he came by text, he came by Facebook, and he came by tweet -- and, 20 months out from voting day, Barack Obama became the first officially declared ... Read More

If Obama Posts a Côte d'Ivoire Video to YouTube, Does Anyone Hear It?

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, April 1 2011

Last Friday, President Obama delivered the quick two-minute video message above on the struggle for power between Alassane Ouattara and Laurent Gbagbo in Côte d'Ivoire. "Now Côte d'Ivoire is at the crossroad, ... Read More

Obama Jokes Visitor Logs, Talks Leak Prosecution

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, March 30 2011

Earlier this week, open government advocates met with President Obama to talk open government in a 20-minute meeting that was off-the-record. Kidding! Project on Government Oversight executive director Danielle Brian ... Read More

The Most Secretest Tent in the World!

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, March 24 2011

White House photo by Pete Souza Just because it's cool. From the BBC's Rajini Vaidyanathan: A rare photo, released by the White House, shows Barack Obama fielding calls from a tent in Brazil, to keep up with events in ... Read More

Obama's Boing Boing Habit

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, March 16 2011

At last week's Gridiron Dinner, it seems, Barack Obama joked about his online reading practices "And while I know I have my share of critics out there, I don't focus on the negative stuff. I just don't pay much ... Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed thursday >

Civic Hackers Call on de Blasio to Fill Technology Vacancies

New York City technology advocates on Wednesday called on the de Blasio administration to fill vacancies in top technology policy positions, expressing some frustration at the lack of a leadership team to implement a cohesive technology strategy for the city. GO

China's Porn Purge Has Only Just Begun, And Already Sina Is Stripped of Publication License

It seems that China is taking spring cleaning pretty seriously. On April 13 they launched their most recent online purge, “Cleaning the Web 2014,” which will run until November. The goal is to rid China's Internet of pornographic text, pictures, video, and ads in order to “create a healthy cyberspace.” More than 100 websites and thousands of social media accounts have already been closed, after less than a month. Today the official Xinhua news agency reported that the authorities have stripped the Internet giant Sina (of Sina Weibo, the popular microblogging site) of its online publication license. This crackdown on porn comes on the heels of a crackdown on “rumors.” Clearly, this spring cleaning isn't about pornography, it's about censorship and control.

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wednesday >

Another Co-Opted Hashtag: #MustSeeIran

The Twitter hashtag #MustSeeIran was created to showcase Iran's architecture, landscapes, and would-be tourist destinations. It was then co-opted by activists to bring attention to human rights abuses and infringements. Now Twitter is home to two starkly different portraits of a country. GO

What Has the EU Ever Done For Us?: Countering Euroskepticism with Viral Videos and Monty Python

Ahead of the May 25 European Elections, the most intense campaigning may not be by the candidates or the political parties. Instead, some of the most passionate campaigns are more grassroots efforts focused on for a start stirring up the interest of the European electorate. GO

At NETmundial Brazil: Is "Multistakeholderism" Good for the Internet?

Today and tomorrow Brazil is hosting NETmundial, a global multi-stakeholder meeting on the future of Internet governance. GO

Brazilian President Signs Internet Bill of Rights Into Law at NetMundial

Earlier today Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff sanctioned Marco Civil, also called the Internet bill of rights, during the global Internet governance event, NetMundial, in Brazil.

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tuesday >

Ruck.us Reboots As a Candidate Digital Toolkit That's a Bit Too Like Democracy.com

Ruck.us launched with big ambitions and star appeal, hoping to crack the code on how to get millions of people to pool their political passions through their platform. When that ambition stalled, its founder Nathan Daschle--son of the former Senator--decided to pivot to offering political candidates an easy-to-use free web platform for organizing and fundraising. Now the new Ruck.us is out from stealth mode, entering a field already being served by competitors like NationBuilder, Salsa Labs and Democracy.com. And strangely enough, Ruck.us seems to want its early users to ask Democracy.com for help. GO

Armenian Legislators: You Can Be As Anonymous on the 'Net As You Like—Until You Can't

A proposed bill in Armenia would make it illegal for media outlets to include defamatory remarks by anonymous or fake sources, and require sites to remove libelous comments within 12 hours unless they identify the author.

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Founder Durov On Being Ousted From "Russian Facebook": "Some of What We Managed Is Already Impossible to Undo"

On Monday Pavel Durov, the founder of “Russian Facebook” VKontakte, announced that he was fired—and that he learned of the dismissal from the news media.

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monday >

The Good Wife Looks for the Next Snowden and Outwits the NSA

Even as the real Edward Snowden faces questions over his motives in Russia, another side of his legacy played out for the over nine million viewers of last night's The Good Wife, which concluded its season long storyline exploring NSA surveillance. In the episode titled All Tapped Out, one young NSA worker's legal concerns lead him to becoming a whistle-blower, setting off a chain of events that allows the main character, lawyer Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), and her husband, Illinois Governor Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), to turn the tables on the NSA using its own methods. GO

The Expanding Reach of China's Crowdsourced Environmental Monitoring Site, Danger Maps

Last week billionaire businessman Jack Ma, founder of the e-commerce company Alibaba, appealed to his “500 million-strong army” of consumers to help monitor water quality in China. Inexpensive testing kits sold through his company can be used to measure pH, phosphates, ammonia, and heavy metal levels, and then the data can be uploaded via smartphone to the environmental monitoring site Danger Maps. Although the initiative will push the Chinese authorities' tolerance for civic engagement and activism, Ethan Zuckerman has high hopes for “monitorial citizenship” in China.

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The 13 Worst Bits of Russia's Current and Maybe Future Internet Legislation

It appears that Russia is on the brink of passing still more repressive Internet regulations. A new telecommunications bill that would require popular blogs—those with 3,000 or more visits a day—to join a government registry and conform to government-mandated standards is expected to pass this week. What follows is a list of the worst bits of both proposed and existing Russian Internet law. Let us know in the comments or on Twitter if we missed anything.

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