A year and a half ago, a few weeks before the presidential election, Google CEO Eric Schmidt made a bold claim about the impact of the internet on our public life: "We are witnessing the end of Rovian politics," he ">declared to Arianna Huffington. Many observers, this writer included, enthused at how the internet was enabling the mass fact-checking of political statements--I called it "crowd-scouring"--and imagined that perhaps whatever the outcome of the 2008 election, "these new habits and tools will get aimed at making government more honest, open and effective."

Today, watching how our political discourse seems, depressingly, to still be dominated by blatantly anti-factual claims (such as the notion that $862 billion in stimulus spending didn't create one new job, as newly elected Senator Scott Brown recently claimed), it's worth asking whether Schmidt's pronouncement was way too optimistic. Has something changed? Were we too optimistic back in 2008? Or is there another element (no longer) at work, which people perhaps are less aware of: the existence of a robust, "people's army" of pro-Obama factcheckers in 2008, which has withered away in the last year?

Credit: State.gov

This morning, the U.S. State Department rolled a new project that they developed in conjunction with the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for New Media. They're calling it Opinion Space, and I'll admit that I don't yet understand the "why" bit of it (or even the "how" necessarily), but there's no reason for you not to play with it in the meantime.

The gist is that that Opinion Space is a data visualization tool that collects opinions from people, and then bunches them together into hotspots. There's a good chance that you'll find that you're a lot like people living in other places around the globe. At this point, Opinion Space looks very much proof-of-concept. But what's striking is that it seems a lot more like something that you expect coming out of the MIT Media Lab than the United States State Department. It's a redefinition -- or, really, one more tweak in a continuing redefinition -- of the mission and means of U.S. development and diplomacy, and it's been happening under the purview of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a pretty quick pace.

Back to this particular tool thingy. According the FAQs, the goal of Opinion Space's interface and architecture is to combat three things that are bad about modern "participatory culture." The first is that the data produced in online discussions can be unmanageably large. The second is that people tend to cluster with like-minded folks (see, blogospheres), which leads to "cyberpolarization." The third is that moderate opinions tend to be drowned out by more extreme ones. The hope is that by going the visual, statistical route here, the effect will be to "'depolarize' discussions by including all participants on a level playing field." Plus, people like to look at maps, especially ones with glowy dots.

[MORE] Some initial notes upon playing with Opinion Space: In this iteration, there are two means by which to input opinions. The first is by rating five statements on a sliding scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree; the topics: nuclear weapons, proactive diplomacy, climate change, investment in food, and empowering women.

Neat enough. But it's the second that's particularly interesting. That option is an open "Ideas for Secretary of State Clinton" text field. You can see how that way of getting information in the interface could lead to an interesting clustering of opinions about the role and perception of U.S. diplomacy and development in the world.

Credit: iTunes Store

One step closer to the dream of canvassers everywhere to have a two-way, digital, portable voter file in their pocket is MiniVAN Touch, the just-released iPhone app version of the Voter Activation Network data program used to power a great deal of Democratic campaigns and the field organizing efforts of a wide range of progressive groups. The target audience: existing VAN clients, as it requires users to already have a way to log into the VAN.

"We definitely feel this has a broader audience than the Palm app it replaced," VAN new media director Mike Sager tells me, "because it is so easy to use and troubleshoot. We think lots of candidates themselves will carry the app when they go door to door."

Are we nearing the promise land of the paperless campaign? Perhaps not quite yet, but Sager says that the iPhone version of VAN can at least cut down on the vast amounts of time and effort that can get wasted during the course of a campaign's pounding of the pavement or working of a crowd. "The app is dramatically more efficient than walking with paper lists," says Sager, "as it eliminates all the follow up data entry -- press one button, and your contacts are recorded in VAN."

If you haven't noticed already, I like "crazy" ideas. That is, notions that may appear like they come from outside the ballpark, but have a germ of possibility and suggest, "There might be a better way to do things than what we're doing now." (Here are some of my more recent ones.) And I like working at the intersection of technology and politics precisely because, well, while politics looks pretty broken (gridlocked, frustrating, money-dominated, etc), technology is bringing us revolutions like clockwork.

Credit: Pavlov Museum

While, at this moment in early 2010, a vast majority of Americans believe that the American system of government is broken -- 86%, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll that came out yesterday -- only one in 20 Americans believe that the damage to institutional democracy in the United States is irreparable and the democratic experiment hopeless. Where does that hopefulness find its footing? Of course, the great promise of online politics was, is, that by tapping into the distributed world that the web has helped to cultivate, the channels might open up between the electorate and the elected, and great waves of participatory democracy might gush forth. Maybe the very nature of representative government isn't altered as a result, the thinking behind distributed democracy goes. But in this new world order, Congress and others in office would be forced into a relationship of greater accountability. Good, responsive members of Congress would flourish in a system of incentives that wasn't so dominated by the wealth-funded interests of a few or the hollow arguments of those with the establishment standing to get their voices heard.

How big are the right-roots? And how do they stack up against the net-roots? I've been asking that question of various people lately, and also looking at some of the metrics available, as both sides of the American political spectrum continue to grow and flex their online muscles in this turbulent season. Here's some relevant data regarding their respective online donor bases.

This Friday we have a special "Scandinavian edition" of the Europe roundup, brought to you by PDF friend Bente Kalsnes.
If you want you can send us stories or interesting links to look into. And don't forget to check our twitter account!

• Norway | The Prime Minister is in the playground
  The Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg is inviting bloggers to his office this week to discuss about the government's new website, Samarbeid for Arbeid (which means, more or less, "working for collaboration"). The website is made of a blog and a Twitter aggregator, sorted by four topics. If bloggers or Twitter users want the Prime Minister to read their posts, they can register the blog or tag tweets with predefined keywords.

As Ben Smith has noted, the National Republican Congressional Committee, chair by Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, has sent out an email to the NRCC mailing list that is designed to look as if Nancy Pelosi is the sender. Pelosi's name is listed in the from field. The actual sender address -- masked by default in many email programs, including Gmail -- is an NRCC one, info@nrccmail.org.

Credit: NRCC

"Dear Naive Republican...," the email begins -- perhaps a clue that the missive didn't actually come from the office of the Speaker.

As it turns out, this post is the second entry in what is shaping up to be a series that we might call the "Sure, you can do that online, but should you?" posts about the possibilities and perils of online politics. The first, from yesterday, involved whether a Texas District Attorney should really be tweeting out the names, case numbers, and other identifying details of people involved in DUI and domestic abuse cases, even if those details are part of the public record.

Credit: NRCC

The outer boundaries of good email practice might be uncharted. But does the NRCC's spoofing the name of an elected official -- or anyone, for that matter -- cross over into the Thar be dragons zone of places to stay away from? Does it make matters worse that the phony email from the NRCC is capped of with what appears to be Pelosi's real signature? (Also, did you know that Wikipedia has copies of famous people's signatures?)

For what it's worth, your humble blogger happened to get a copy of the NRCC email in her inbox. And your gullible blogger, without opening it, totally believed it to be an email from the Speaker.

Credit: The White House

• Nope, that's not Wall-E in the front row of the White House theater, sitting between Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, as we first thought. Through the miracle that is the "original size" feature on Flickr, you can zoom in and see that it's actually some kind of a purse. Probably Spielberg's.
• As part of Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" campaign, the White House is running an Apps for Healthy Kids competition that offers up $40,000 in prize money for "innovative, fun and engaging tools and games that encourage children directly or through their parents to make more nutritious food choices and be more physically active." The contest seems to bring together some of the Obamas favorite things: vegetables and open government; they want developers to make use of the USDA's nutrition data that it recently released through Data.gov.
• The federal highway folks have was seems to be a new zoomy-in map of federal highway projects.
• And Ben Smith's "Remainders" end-of-the-day link post (which, we freely admit, inspired our "Clearing the Cache" regular feature) figures into a plot line on the rather enjoyable new CBS drama The Good Wife. What a world!

• E.U. | Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition
  Last week a document on Internet policy has been realeased by the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council. The document addresses Member States about illegal activities and how to fight them, but there seem to be a little confusion: copyright infringments, racist speech and child pornography are all together in the "Internet frame". A way to justify the imposition of Internet filtering?
  Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of the advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, has very strong words on the issue, defining the document 'disturbing'.

• Norway | When it comes to open data, potential is not enough.
  Norway and the other Scandinavian countries are potential open data champions, thanks to an established tradition of transparency in government. And it's true that there's a lot going on when it comes to open data: some months ago PDF speaker Bente Kalsnes listed an incredible amount of projects and initiatives.
  But apparently it's not enough to reach a noteworthy level.

Credit: IdealWare

The non-profit IdealWare surveyed more than 400 staffers at various non-profits back in November to find out what social media tools they're using, and whether they're finding those applications are meeting their organizational needs on three fronts: reaching new allies, fundraising, and deepening their relationships with existing supporters:

Respondents considered Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and video- and photo-sharing sites reasonably effective -- at least at outreach and enhancing existing relationships. MySpace was not as well-thought-of, and ranked lowest for each of the three goals. LinkedIn was considered comparatively effective for fundraising, but lagged behind everything but MySpace for the other goals.

How the reports speaks to your organizational objectives depends on what those objectives are, so check out the full 20-page study here. But spoiler alert: non-profiters seem to find Twitter the Swiss Army knife of social media tools.