Markos Moulitsas | TechPresident

DailyKos.com, Democratic Left's Online Hub, Had a Banner Year in 2012

BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, November 14 2012

Daily Kos traffic, 2007-2012

DailyKos.com, the Grand Central Station of the online Democratic left, had a record-breaking year, the site's founder Markos Moulitsas announced last Friday. For the last thirty days before Election Day, the site garnered more than 4 million unique visitors, according to its Quantcast stats. That's up from 1.8 million uniques for the month of January, or 2.3 million that it garnered during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement in October 2011. Here's why. Read More

For Netroots Candidate Darcy Burner, Third Time's Not the Charm?

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Tuesday, August 7 2012

When primary voters in Washington's 1st Congressional District go to the polls today, one of the names on the ballot might be more familiar to them than others. That would be Darcy Burner, a netroots favorite who's running along with six other Democrats to succeed former Rep. Jay Inslee, who retired from the seat earlier this year to run for governor.

Last week, Ted Cruz rode a wave of Tea Party anti-establishment energy to win the Texas Republican primary for U.S. Senate. Burner's election is an opportunity for progressives to elect someone with a similar level of ideological purity, someone who was a keynote speaker at the popular Netroots Nation conference and received endorsements from the likes of MoveOn.org, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas and Alan Grayson. Up until now, it seemed as if Burner was going to come out on top in the race between the Democrats — but an ad blitz from her main Democratic rival Suzan DelBene and the vagaries of the immediate pre-primary campaign seemed to be edging her out yet again headed into Tuesday.

[Update Wednesday:] Burner lost, conceding to DelBene in a race in which Burner was badly outspent by the other leading Democrat. DelBene, progressive blogger Matt Stoller told us before election night, injected the race with $1.9 million of her own money before launching an ad blitz that observers say contributed to her victory.

FTC vs Bloggers: Cruising for a Bruising?

BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, October 14 2009

The last time I saw political bloggers across the spectrum agreeing about anything, it was in opposition to some overly restrictive notions emanating from the Federal Elections Commission about regulating political ... Read More

Clearing the Cache: Obama Hits Send, Will 13M Hit Reply?

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, March 16 2009

Obama hits the send button. Will 13 million hit reply? Did Vivek Kundra's transparent policies as DC CTO help suss out the office crook? Both TechDailyDose and David Stephenson think so. Read More

Daily Digest: Obama, Clinton, and the Saga of the Smear

BY Joshua Levy | Thursday, December 6 2007

Markos Moulitsas joins another mainstream political rag; a satiric post about a new computer chip implanted in candidates' heads that makes them say almost anything; tracing the Obama smear emails; Mitt Romney ... Read More

Daily Digest 8/9/07

BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, August 9 2007

Fallout from Elizabeth Edwards' quote; Rocketboom on how Denver '08 will be open access; cracks in the liberal-left; bundling for the unbundled; Ellen Goodman weighs in on net-gender; YouTube YouChoose has issues; ABC ... Read More

Sunday Morning Post-Kos Notes

BY Micah L. Sifry | Sunday, August 5 2007

The techPresident team left YearlyKos yesterday evening, before Markos Moulitsas's keynote, and we're taking today off to catch our breath and nurse our sore feet (it was not for nothing that some were calling YK the ... Read More

Random Notes from YearlyKos

BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, August 2 2007

Is it possible that there are no workshops on the Iraq War at this year's YearlyKos?...Barack Obama is winning the armband poll among registered attendees...and what does Markos Moulitsas say about the DLC, Hillary ... Read More

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Crowdsourcing Waste Management Solutions in Montenegro

For once we aren't talking about the worldwide scarcity of toilets, just good old-fashioned household waste. Montenegro has a garbage problem so bad even the tourists are complaining about it. A new mobile app sponsored by the Agency for Environmental Protection, NGO Ozon and United Nations Development Programme in Montenegro will hopefully get citizens involved in reporting illegal garbage dumps. GO

monday >

Her Majesty's Government Wants to Monetize Open Data

A new paper from the chair of the U.K. government's Open Strategy Board outlines the best practices for the government's open data policies. The government-commissioned Shakespeare Review – after author Stephan Shakespeare – looks into ways to monetize open data, and recommends an all-encompassing National Data Strategy.

Will Silicon Valley "Disrupt" Politics With a Candidate for Congress?

Sean Parker, of Napster fame and now executive general partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, has invested in political startups before. But last week, he went a step further — co-hosting a fundraising event for a candidate for Congress. Parker and SV Angel co-founder Ron Conway organized a crowd of Internet industry luminaries to support Ro Khanna, a former assistant deputy secretary in Barack Obama's Commerce Department. Khanna is preparing a challenge to Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), whose newly redrawn congressional district encompasses Silicon Valley. GO

Burma's Upcoming Telecom Revolution Will Probably Not Bring Internet Freedom

Burma (Myanmar) is on the threshold of an Internet revolution, but Human Rights Watch has warned companies to proceed with caution or risk trampling Burmese citizens' rights. GO

friday >

Chilean Anti-Corruption Resource: A Crowdsourced Database of Social and Political Connections

In countries where a small minority of social circles have a majority of the political and economic power, personal relationships can affect major decision-making, a serious concern of anti-corruption activists. A new web platform stores personal profiles of key players in Chilean business and politics, complete with biographies and personal and professional connections through family, education, social circles, employers and coworkers, to make tracking social relationships and conflict-of-interest easier. Called Poderopedia (from the Spanish word for power), the project sounds kind of like LinkedIn, but the creation and management of profiles is being crowdsourced out to journalists, activists and concerned citizens.

Middle Eastern Telecom Accused of Working With Saudi Arabia to Spy on Citizens

Mobily, an arm of the state-owned Middle Eastern telecom giant Etihad Etisalat, has been accused of working with Saudi Arabia to develop software that would allow the government to bypass protections for social media users. The exposé comes from Moxie Marlinspike (neé Matthew Rosenfield), an expert in a certain type of malicious Internet attack called MITM (man-in-the-middle), whereby attackers intercept and secretly alter private messages exchanged via email and other social media platforms. GO

Saudi Religious Leader Warns Twitter Users of Consequences in the Afterlife

In late March, Saudi Arabia's top religious cleric said Twitter was for clowns and corrupters. Earlier this week, he said anyone using social media, in particular Twitter, “has lost this world and the afterlife.” His comments might be laughable, if they did not come at a time when the Saudi government is looking into monitoring or blocking social media sites and eliminating user anonymity.

thursday >

What The Other Silicon Valley Immigration Group Is Doing This Month

A bipartisan coalition of political advocacy, business and tech groups are moving ahead to launch a social media blitz next week designed to persuade members of the Senate to vote in favor of immigration reform legislation supported in Silicon Valley. "We're going to create a virtual digital storm," said Jeremy Robbins in a Wednesday ... GO

The New Yorker Hopes "Strongbox" Is a Wiretap-Proof Sieve for Leaks

The New Yorker yesterday became the first outlet to implement DeadDrop, a new system for sources to submit information to journalists online in a more secure and anonymous way than, for example, email. GO

Female Organizer of Pakistan's First Hackathon Stresses Collaboration Over Competition

After Pakistan banned Valentine's Day this year, Sabeen Mahmud started an online protest in which people uploaded photos to mock the government ban. In the weeks following she received death threats and menacing phone calls, and early on she had to stay home from work. That did nothing, however, to keep her from further organizing. Last month, the café she started in Karachi hosted Pakistan's first ever hackathon, which tackled problems including sanitation, crime, disaster management, and education. She even invited a government representative to observe the initial conversations, tackling sensitive areas like government inefficiency and elections.

wednesday >

White House Innovation Fellows Project Spins Off Into A Business

Clay Johnson and Adam Becker joined the Presidential Innovation Fellows program to help the White House fix the way government does business. Now they're turning that mission into a business themselves. GO

Fighting Fires With Data, New York City Launches New Safety Inspection System

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that New York City has implemented city-wide a new risk based inspection system focused on fire safety that is driven by analytics from multiple city agencies. GO

Chinese Netizens Use Digital Initiative to Gain Media Attention for Unsolved Poisoning Case

Last month a medical science student at a Shanghai university died from poisoning, allegedly murdered by his roommate. The specifics of the crime echoed a case from the mid-1990s, in which a 19-year-old student was poisoned with thallium. That case has once again been thrown into the media spotlight, but after 18 years the media has changed and the spotlight means a trending hashtag on Sina Weibo or an online petition to the U.S. President.

PDF France 2013: “Au Code, Citoyens!”

This year PDF France will take place in Paris on June 13, with the theme "Au Code, Citoyens!" ("To Code, Citizens!") The speakers' lineup includes some of the continent's leaders in the digital revolution. GO

tuesday >

Website Imitation is Flattery in New York City Council Race

A New York City Council candidate who had made his name as a technology consultant and spearheaded an open government initiative several years ago found parts of his website copied by another City Council candidate in a different borough, as Politicker first reported. GO

Mike Honda Locks Up Establishment Support, But Challenger Has Ear of the Silicon Valley Elite

Some of Silicon Valley's most influential business people will hold a fundraiser in San Francisco this Thursday for Ro Khanna, the 36-year-old lawyer who's challenging 71-year-old California Democrat Mike Honda for his 17th Congressional District seat. The names at the top of the invite: Ron Conway and Sean Parker. They're apparently forming a committee to help Khanna build his campaign. The other bold-face names who are listed as part of the 'committee in formation' include Salesforce.com's Founder and CEO Marc Benioff, Benchmark Capital General Partners' Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton, tech entrepreneur Shawn Fanning, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, her big data venture investor husband Zach Bogue, and Conway's SV Angel colleague, Founder and Managing Partner David Lee. GO

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