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A Very Special Afternoon Episode of "Opening Congress"

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, June 10 2010

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Insurgents Within the Minority

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, June 1 2010

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum expands upon an idea we've entertained here. New media or direct media or whatever you want to call it is going to naturally be more appealing to insurgents, a factor at play in the emerging ... Read More

The GOP's Growing Affection for Online Socializing

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, May 28 2010

Mother Jones' Stephanie Mencimer has a good, if overly stark, look at the state of things when it comes to congressional Democrats, Republicans, and the Internet: Read More

BP Undecided on Hitting Web Cam "Off" Switch

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, May 25 2010

Mother Jones' David Corn reports that Rep. Ed Markey is objecting to BP's decision to kill its live web cam at the moment it attempts to kill the leaking Deepwater Horizon well off the Gulf Coast. But BP is contending, ... Read More

Turning the GOP Platform into a Group Project

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, May 25 2010

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House Dems Get a New Media Space of Their Own

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, May 20 2010

Elements within the House Democratic caucus have been endeavoring for a while now to pull together a forum within which its members can share what they know when it comes to social media. No need to re-invent the savvy ... Read More

Pardon Me, This is a Hijacking...

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, April 23 2010

The Hill has the story of the campaign by one activist group to "politely hijack" the official Facebook pages of members of Congress. Read More

True Fact: Congress' Websites Don't Have to Stink

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, April 22 2010

This is what a congressional website should look like, says the Congressional Management Foundation; credit: Murkowski.Senate.gov Read More

The Visual Display of Legislative Information

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, April 7 2010

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News You Really Don't Need to Know About the Naming of Congressional Websites

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, March 29 2010

Here's an altogether useless bit of congressional web trivia to start our week off right. As it turns out, Rep. Randy Neugebauer, the Texas Republican whom you might know from his shout of "It's a baby killer!" ... Read More

News Briefs

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Brazilian President Signs Internet Bill of Rights Into Law at NetMundial

Earlier today Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff sanctioned Marco Civil, also called the Internet bill of rights, during the global Internet governance event, NetMundial, in Brazil.

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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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