In a broad announcement today first unveiled by New York City Deputy Mayor Robert K. Steel, city officials rolled out a series of initiatives designed to widen the availability of broadband Internet access in the city. Read More

The Republican House leadership is experimenting with tools that might make it easier for members of Congress to more easily understand what all the emails they get in a day really mean. There are also tools that track messages headed outbound towards Congress, like PopVox, that hope to give perspective on what representatives are hearing from the outside looking in. In this video, Dan Beckmann from the technology firm ib5k describes how his company's platform, Correlate, is designed to solve one aspect of the problem. It is now in use by Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer — a Democrat — and may appear elsewhere within House leadership soon, Beckmann says. Read More

Buffalo-based writer Ian Murphy's add-on to the post-PDF conversation is a saucy blind item or two — which "Democratic apparatchik" was peeking "artlessly" at a female speaker's chest during a pre-conference cocktail? — and a poke at what he called the "'internet is good, and aren't we all so important'" feel that crept into the conference at times. Eventually, this evolves into a cogent critique of the Internet's role in a healthy democracy as it was presented at the conference. Read More

Now making the rounds is a new video from a New York man calling himself "Obama Boy," in the tradition of 2008 viral video sensation Amber Lee Ettinger, the "Obama Girl." On the occasion of President Barack Obama's completed evolution towards support of gay marriage, "Obama Boy" Justin Brown decided to get on screen with a ballad celebrating POTUS' new stance, video writer Justin Duarte told Politico. Read More

The National Republican Congressional Committee sends along this infographic from the NRCC digital team explaining how they built NRCCPrinter, a gimmicky web setup that allowed users to fill out an Internet petition against the Affordable Care Act and then watch a printer near digital director Gerrit Lansing's desk at NRCC HQ as it printed them out. Read More

By now you may have seen artist and designer An Xiao Mina's Personal Democracy Forum 2012 talk, "Internet Street Art and Social Change in China," in which she talks about how street art, Internet memes and political satire collide online in China.

In her talk, she touched on how the Chinese language's abundance of homonyms and visual metaphor is fuel for political commentary that can find its way around censorship and surveillance.

Backstage at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, I asked her to go into more detail about how much Internet culture in China owes to a long history of cultural criticism. Our short conversation is after the jump.

The National Republican Congressional Committee's latest gambit for media attention involved a live feed of a printer as it churned out paper with the names of people who signed an online petition to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Looks like it may have worked too well. Over at Threat Level, David Kravets writes that pranksters started submitting bogus names ranging from "hello twitter" and "HelpI'mStuckInthisPrinter" to names less printable in family-friendly quarters of the Internet. Read More

The Federal Election Commission is expected today or Monday to release an advisory opinion about a company that proposes to collect political donations by text message, something that campaigns have long hoped to be able to accomplish. By all accounts, the FEC is on the verge of approving political donations via text. Read More