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Aaron Swartz awarded in Technorati developers' contest

BY Christian Crumlish | Wednesday, January 19 2005

The widget on the PDF home page that shows which Senators and Congressfolks are being talked about the most in the blogosphere is driven by Technorati using an application developed for this site by Aaron Swartz. Micah ... Read More

Kos on Blog Ethics

BY Christian Crumlish | Tuesday, January 18 2005

In a post called Ethics, Kos addresses the recent Zephyr / Dean / WSJ / Armstrong-Williams-equivalency flap: So to recap, if I write about something in which I hold a financial stake, I will disclose it. If I don't, then ... Read More

Orcinus is tracking incidents of 'violence, threats or intimidation'

BY Christian Crumlish | Tuesday, November 2 2004

David Neiwert is setting up a blog clearinghouse at his site, Orcinus, to report incidents of violence, threats, or intimidation against Democratic campaign workers, supporters, and voters. (He leaves it to "the other ... Read More

The importance of user interface

BY Christian Crumlish | Tuesday, November 2 2004

Snopes has the skinny on a voting-machine mishap in Texas. An early voter who attempted to vote a straight ticket discovered that her vote for Kerry/Edwards had been switched to a vote for Bush/Cheney. The cause appears ... Read More

Adina Levin's guide to campaign tools

BY Christian Crumlish | Thursday, October 28 2004

The collection of essays now known as Extreme Democracy should appear in book form early next year, but it is coming out in serialized PDF (portadble document format) at the moment at the project's blog. Read More

'Caging' memos mistakenly sent to parody site

BY Christian Crumlish | Thursday, October 28 2004

What is it with Republicans confusing .coms and .orgs? The GeorgeWBush.org parody site gets a lot of misdirected mail at their catchall address. Amidst the chaff were the occasional strategic or informative message sent ... Read More

Open-source voter file management

BY Christian Crumlish | Wednesday, October 27 2004

Advokit is an open-source grassroots-network voter-file campaign-management tool developed by veterans of the Dean primary campaign and available either as a hosted (ASP) service or as a stand-alone install. It offers ... Read More

Voting against vs. voting for

BY Christian Crumlish | Wednesday, October 20 2004

Brief blog reveries: Simon World's excellent notes from a John Zogby talk in Hong Kong led me to Cicero's post about The 'No' Vote at Winds of Change. Read More

Lessig and friends launch p2p-politics.org

BY Christian Crumlish | Wednesday, October 20 2004

From Lessig's political "spam" message about the new p2p-politics site that is leveraging archive.org to provide an open source for political ads: Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed 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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thursday >

Mastercard Funding New Mobile-Based Financial Services in Kenya (Updated)

MasterCard is funding a Grameen Foundation initiative to bring financial services to the poor and the unbanked in Kenya.

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Transparency and Public Shaming: Pakistan Tackles Tax Evasion

In Pakistan, where only one in 200 citizens files their income tax return, authorities published a directory of taxpayers' details for the first time. Officials explained the decision as an attempt to shame defaulters into paying up.

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wednesday >

Facebook Seeks Approval as Financial Service in Ireland. Is the Developing World Next?

On April 13 the Financial Times reported that Facebook is only weeks away from being approved as a financial service in Ireland. Is this foray into e-money motivated by Facebook's desire to conquer the developing world before other corporate Internet giants do? Maybe.

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The Rise and Fall of Iran's “Blogestan”

The robust community of Iranian bloggers—sometimes nicknamed “Blogestan”—has shrunk since its heyday between 2002 – 2010. “Whither Blogestan,” a recent report from the University of Pennsylvania's Iran Media Program sought to find out how and why. The researchers performed a web crawling analysis of Blogestan, survey 165 Persian blog users, and conducted 20 interviews with influential bloggers in the Persian community. They found multiple causes of the decline in blogging, including increased social media use and interference from authorities.

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