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Stacks and Stacks of Emails

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, November 2 2010

One reason your inbox might have felt a bit swamped by election emails in the last twelve hours: Blue State Digital, just one of the digital firms on the Democratic-slash-progressive side of things, reports having sent ... Read More

The Art of Online "Bombings" Spreads to Spelling

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, November 1 2010

Image credit: Brian Reis/The Daily Beast Read More

Rospars Laments Passion's Absence

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, November 1 2010

When it comes to the innovation use of digital tools, why has the 2010 election cycle been, frankly, a little dull? It comes down, writes Obama '08 new media director Joe Rospars, to a lack of passion: Without a massive ... Read More

Does Grassroots SEO Even Work?

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, October 19 2010

Photo credit: Stuck in Customs Writing for Politico, Sarah Lai Stirland covers Chris Bowers' "grassroots SEO&quo Read More

Twitter Politics, and the Folly of Focusing on the Big Bang

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, October 19 2010

Kids doing something that might someday lead to something.// Credit: Eden Pictures Read More

Why Sudan Could Use a Little Slacktivism

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, October 15 2010

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How Do We Know If the Spaghetti's Sticking?

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, October 15 2010

HuffPo's Sam Stein assesses the state of the online arms race, lumping together everything from online ads to fundraising drives to Twitter feeds to canvassing apps. The conclusion: we don't really know how effective any ... Read More

How You Build a Bigger Base: Lessons from the DNC

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, October 13 2010

The Venn diagram between the audience of this blog and that of the DNC's Open.Dems blog shows an overlap the size of Texas. So you should probably give the DNC's geek's site a try, no matter your political bent. Over ... Read More

On "Facebook Politics": Things Fall Apart, and That's Fine

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, October 7 2010

Rutgers professor Dave Karpf finds Princeton professor Julian Zelizer's "Facebook Politics" response in the great Gladwellian social change debate, a take we took up here, to be rather "second-rate." ... Read More

Facebook Politics Comes to Pepper Pike

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, October 7 2010

I wondered, can online politics be local? In a comment, Jill Zimon, recently-elected member of the Pepper Pike (OH) City Council, says, yes, absolutely: Read More

News Briefs

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Another Co-Opted Hashtag: #MustSeeIran

The Twitter hashtag #MustSeeIran was created to showcase Iran's architecture, landscapes, and would-be tourist destinations. It was then co-opted by activists to bring attention to human rights abuses and infringements. Now Twitter is home to two starkly different portraits of a country. GO

At NETmundial Brazil: Is "Multistakeholderism" Good for the Internet?

Today and tomorrow Brazil is hosting NETmundial, a global multi-stakeholder meeting on the future of Internet governance. GO

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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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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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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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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