John McCain | TechPresident

User-Generated Online Video Swamping Official Obama, Romney Content on YouTube

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, August 27 2012

From the beginning of the 2011-2012 U.S. Presidential election campaign in April 2011, there have nearly 2 billion views of videos tagged about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney on YouTube, Ramya Raghavan of YouTube Politics blogged today. The political campaigns are swimming in a sea of user-generated content, even moreso than in 2008. Read More

Do Sen. McCain's Tweets Hint at a Future Presidential Endorsement?

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, December 8 2011

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has said that he isn't going to endorse any Republican presidential candidate any time soon, but he may have blown his cover with a recent series of tweets. Though the Arizona senator was ... Read More

Long Island's Online Posse Includes Chuck Schumer

BY Miranda Neubauer | Thursday, December 1 2011

Minor uproar over a joke by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) about Long Island played out on Twitter yesterday. On the Senate floor, McCain, referring to a Supreme Court case, commented, "Isn't it true that Justice O'Connor ... Read More

John McCain Considers Twitter

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, April 6 2011

Apropos, perhaps, of this whole discussion of how P.J. Crowley's tweeting post-State Department, Sen. John McCain seemed to be in awe of the power of Twitter and other online communication tools of the modern age at a ... Read More

The Art and Craft of Building McCain's Twitter Base

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, September 23 2010

In a sadly overlooked comment on a post last month about that "John McCain is a Twitter genius" report, Stan Olshefski smartly points out that some part of McCain's 1.7 million follower base came about through ... Read More

Reinventing John McCain...dot com

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, February 5 2010

Credit: Forty Read More

McCain Allies Ask, Who's the Luddite Now?

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, November 16 2009

The Laws of USA-bility, According to Scott Thomas (Former Design Director, Obama for America)

BY Rachel Abrams | Tuesday, September 22 2009

To a web designer, IA stands for Information Architect. To a busload of Obama campaigners bound for swing states, IA meant Iowa. Thankfully, Scott Thomas, the former Design Director for the Obama election web site, was ... Read More

The New John McCain (Dot Com)

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, May 19 2009

Recalling the Online Ad Wars of 2008 (Book Excerpt)

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, May 4 2009

If most media outlets covering the presidential campaigns had anything to say about it, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and other social media phenomena would get all the credit for making 2008 the most digital election ever. ... Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed today >

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

wednesday >

New Russian Law Makes Publication of Information on Gay Rights Illegal

On June 11 the Russian parliament passed a bill against “homosexual propaganda” that effectively outlaws gay rights rallies and bans informational or pro-gay rights material from publication in the media or on the Internet. Violators of the law will risk heavy fines and censorship and, in the case of a media outlet, risk being shut down. It had near unanimous support, passing in a 436-to-0 vote, with only one abstention.

#PDF13

WeGov

Civic Hacking

Online Organizing