networked public sphere | TechPresident

Censorship on Facebook, Or Just Abiding By Terms of Service?

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, June 23 2011

If, as Roger Ebert suggests, his Facebook page was taken down after he posted a controversial comment on Twitter about the death of "Jackass" star Ryan Dunn, why should you care? Here, let Matthew Ingram explain: If ... Read More

Life Under An #Ashtag: Online Networking My Way Home From Europe

BY Micah L. Sifry | Sunday, April 18 2010

Sixty years ago, on May 10, 1940, Germany invaded Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. My mother, who was just shy of six years old, traveled with her parents and older brother and sister from Antwerp to the ... Read More

Clinton: The U.S. Sides with a Networked World

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, January 22 2010

When the crowd gathered yesterday morning in Washington's Newseum to hear Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's big speech on the topic "Internet freedom" included Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, ... Read More

The Internet as Toxic Avenger: Trafigura and the Ungagging of the Guardian

BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, October 13 2009

Here's a cautionary tale in how not to manage your message in a networked media age, or rather, further evidence of John Gilmore's brilliant maxim, "The internet interprets censorship has damage and routes around it." ... Read More

More on Obama's Roadblock: The White House YouTube Channel

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, September 21 2009

A friend responded to my post about Barack Obama's sagging YouTube statistics by noting that since the election, a lot of Obama's video viewers may have migrated over to his official White House YouTube channel. Fair ... Read More

The Obama Roadblock: Why He's Sagging Online

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, September 21 2009

If you chart the daily viewership of Barack Obama's official channel on YouTube, you might conclude that being President of the United States is the kiss of death for online enthusiasm. Here's TubeMogul's full chart from ... Read More

The Republic(?) of Facebook is Having an Election?

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, February 27 2009

I just got off the phone with Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer and Head of Global Public Policy at Facebook, and Adam Conner, its Washington DC Associate for Privacy and Public Policy, (and one-time techPresident ... Read More

The Revolution of the Online Commentariat

BY Editors | Monday, December 8 2008

The pyramid of Internet political functions consists of message (communications), money (fundraising) and mobilization. Atop that pyramid sits communications. Message drives money and triggers mobilization. Devoid of a ... Read More

The Crowd-Scouring of the Presidency (and the End of Rovian Politics?)

BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, October 21 2008

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, who just endorsed Barack Obama, tells Arianna Huffington, another Obama supporter, that "We are witnessing the end of Rovian politics," thanks to the internet and tools like YouTube. And ... Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed today >

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

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

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