Personal Democracy Plus Our premium content network. LEARN MORE You are not logged in. LOG IN NOW >

Twitter Offers Some #Answers on Who #Dodged Debate Questions in S. Carolina

BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, January 17 2012

Mitt Romney's Not So Artful #Dodging

Last night's Fox News debate in South Carolina was another made-for-TV circus, and not surprisingly, Fox failed to do anything remotely meaningful with the Twitter data. But Twitter itself took the time to analyze and report on the real-time flow. Late last night, the company blog posted some interesting visualizations that demonstrate that it is possible to tease some signal from all the noise. Read More

FoxNews.com's Curious Math

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, January 16 2012

Micah writes: "In preparation for tonight's Republican presidential debate, which is featuring a collaboration between Fox News and Twitter similar to their last event using the hashtags #answer and #dodge to involve viewer feedback in the conversation, I went looking on the FoxNews.com website to see if there was any more information about how they were going to handle the Twitter feedback. (You may recall that last time around, this experiment was essentially a bust.)" Read More

Politico-Facebook Sentiment Analysis Will Generate "Bogus" Results, Expert Says

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, January 13 2012

Facebook is analyzing its users' status updates, postings and comments that refer to the candidates, and assigning positive and negative values to them, producing a daily track of their supposed ups and downs. It's called "sentiment analysis." It's the heart of the pretty charts and graphs that the two companies rolled out to tout their partnership. And it's total bunk. Read More

Facebook, Yahoo NH Debate Roles Leave Us Wanting More

BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, January 11 2012

Before they fade further into the past, a quick note on last weekend's back-to-back presidential debates in New Hampshire and the role of online platforms therein. In case you've forgotten, I'm talking about the ABC News/Yahoo event Saturday night and the NBC/Facebook event Sunday morning. And neither made a dent, when it comes to using interactive media to involve the public in the debates. Read More

Romney Online, By the Numbers

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, January 9 2012

The stats in Mitt Romney's newly released infographic are impressive-looking, but they're actually not that big a deal. A little reverse-engineering of the math embedded in that statement suggests that people are spending about 42 seconds per page view on the Romney site. This is respectable but not particularly high. Jim Pugh, the former director of analytics and development for Organizing for America, told me that "a time of 40 seconds is pretty average for political sites." Read More

Santorum Campaign Using Fundly.com to Crowd-Source $-Raising

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, January 9 2012

While Rick Santorum's campaign may have left some money on the table on the night of their Iowa caucus near-victory, they're trying to recoup with a "money-bomb" that is leaning heavily on the social fundraising platform Fundly.com. As of now they have almost 2,600 people raising money through the site, and they've collectively brought in almost $240,000. Read More

The Year Ahead: The Future, It's Complicated!

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, January 9 2012

We're closing out this symposium on The Year Ahead with an array of contributors who took our question and pushed back. Asked "If 2011 was a year of tumult fueled, in part, by our growing ability to network, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the year ahead — and why?" this group refused to be bottled in. Read More

Dave Winer: "We need to merge the political blogosphere and tech blogosphere."

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, January 6 2012

The always provocative Dave Winer is on a roll at the moment, fired up both by Occupy Wall Street and the fight over SOPA, which he argues are made for each other. Read More

The Year Ahead: Next, the Pessimists

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, January 6 2012

Occupy Oakland, Nov. 2011. Photo: Clay@SU/Flickr

We asked some of the smartest people we know: "If 2011 was a year of tumult fueled, in part, by our growing ability to network, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the year ahead--and why?" Yesterday, we heard from the optimists who got back to us. Today, we present a smaller group whose answers range from gloomy to downright apocalyptic. Read More

The Year Ahead: First, the Optimistic View(s)

BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, January 5 2012

Photo: Perfecto Insecto/Flickr

If you're reading this site, the odds are that you're optimistic about how technology is changing politics worldwide. That's certainly the conclusion of many from the diverse array of smart people from the worlds of government, technology, journalism and activism who we asked during the winter holiday break to ponder the following question: "If 2011 was a year of tumult fueled, in part, by our growing ability to network, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the year ahead — and why?" Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed today >

Please Stop Selling MOOCs As a Cure-All for Higher Education

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, promise to provide cheap or free college courses to any student with a Wi-Fi connection, but that's about it. Funny, then, that someone would suggest otherwise. Funnier still, because that someone is Anant Agarwal, the president of edX, in a recent piece that appeared on the Guardian's website. GO

Brazil's Middle Class Protestors Take the Struggle Online, With Mixed Results

Protestors in Brazil have made their war cry heard all over social media and as a result, have received quite a bit of attention from the international community with popular hashtags such as #itsnotabout20cents and #ChangeBrazil. But while they have used tools like Facebook to organize and rally, the effectiveness of their Twitter use is harder to gauge. GO

The Thicker China's "Great Firewall" Becomes, the Subtler the Doors to Sneak Through

As China announces it will tighten restrictions on access to the Internet, Chinese citizens show that they've developed new ways around them. GO

tuesday >

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.

GO

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.

GO

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.

GO

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.

GO

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

More