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

First POST: Makeup

BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, October 25 2011

Halloween-themed ad season has begun with this anti-super-PAC one from Common Cause. Fighting back online against President Barack Obama's new "we can't wait line" — can't wait, that is, for Congress to take ... Read More

First POST: 'Blockade'

BY Nick Judd | Monday, October 24 2011

The "WikiLeaks Mobile Information Collection Unit" truck, an occassional visitor to Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, is a prank. Photo: Pameladrew212 / Flickr Addressing the media at a conference this morning in ... Read More

First POST: Reckoning

BY Nick Judd | Friday, October 21 2011

British MP Tom Watson is expected to stir things up today at News Corp's first post-phone hacking shareholder's meeting. The BBC reports he says he plans to "make fresh allegations about malpractice by News Corp ... Read More

First POST: Counterpoint

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, October 20 2011

Writing in chalk on the sidewalk in Vancouver, British Columbia. Photo: Caelie__ / Flickr The latest blogger to build a map of Occupy protests around the world did so on Flickr's corporate blog, mapping Flickr photos ... Read More

First POST: Time Series

BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, October 19 2011

How to map data over time. Here's an obligatory debate reaction roundup. Debate-night campaign emails, in order of arrival: Ron Paul, "The Gloves Are Off," an email promoting a moneybomb today that made no mention of ... Read More

First POST: 'Aye, Captain'

BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, October 18 2011

Not-Mitt Romney is "leaving at three to pick apples." Associated Press reporters used encryption and removed the batteries from their phones, among other tech tactics, to keep their investigation of the New York Police ... Read More

First POST: Networks

BY Nick Judd | Monday, October 17 2011

One of Taegan Goddard's readers sends him a video. Title: "Herman Cain is Not Going to be the POTUS". Venue: YouTube, where, views-wise, Cain is just outside of the top four with just shy of 2 million views. Here's a ... Read More

First POST: Interrupted

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, October 13 2011

Research in Motion said BlackBerry service is expected to improve today after outages that have plagued users around the world. Photo: Cheon Fong Liew / Flickr Storm surge: After disruptions to BlackBerry service that ... Read More

First POST: Raised Eyebrows

BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, October 12 2011

Through the magic of Internet video comes Politico's Rick Perry reaction cam! Off-topic: Poor Ron Paul. The candidates last night, on Occupy Wall Street: - Gingrich: "I think the people who are protesting on Wall Street ... Read More

First POST: Looking Forward, Looking Back

BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, October 11 2011

This YouTube video plays a cameo role in the new profile of Elizabeth Warren, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau architect turned U.S. Senate candidate, that appears in November's issue of Vanity Fair. The video, ... Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed wednesday >

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