Since launching our "Politics and the Internet" Timeline last August, we've gotten dozens of suggestions for revisions and additions from all kinds of people. We made a few right off the bat, and then decided to let them accumulate and do updates on a more periodic basis. The winter holiday break also seemed like a perfect time to get some distance on events, in terms of deciding what to include or leave out from recent developments in our world. As I noted in the original post on the timeline, this isn't an "official" list, but rather just our subjective judgment of the most important and notable developments at the intersection of technology and politics in the United States, online, and in the international arena. Here's what we've added... Read More

The Obama political operation took a big step today, sending out an email to its millions of supporters asking them to call Members of the House of Representatives to pass a Senate-approved bill aimed at preventing the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts on the bottom 98% of U.S. taxpayers. In some cases, recipients are being asked to call their own Member; in others, where their Member is already in favor of the Senate bill, Obama activists are being asked to call Obama supporters whose representatives may be a swing vote. In case there's any doubt, these emails are aimed at putting heat directly on Republican House members. Read More

It's not too soon to register for Personal Democracy Forum 2013, which will be happening June 6-7 (exactly seven months from now) at New York University's Skirball and Kimmel Centers. If you act now, you'll lock in our lowest rate for tickets, and considering who we already have coming, you should have no worries that this will be our best event yet. Read More

"We weren't quick enough out of the gate," four years ago, says Jeremy Bird, the national field director of President Obama's re-election campaign. "We will be quicker this time." He's not talking about the race just concluded. He's talking about how Organizing for America, the president's political organization, operated in the days and months after Obama's first election in 2008, compared to what is coming now. Read More

While not all of the numbers are in yet, we thought it would be useful to put in one place all the relevant data currently available about online and offline engagement by the Barack Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns. Some of these factoids are essentially unverifiable, but represent the claims being made by the campaigns in press reports. Others are drawn from available social network profiles and/or contemporaneous Google searches. Read More