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Crowdsourcing the Apocalypse

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, November 16 2010

You know what Howard Dean and Sarah Palin have in common? Both, finds the New York Times Magazine's Matt Bai, are crowd-sourced candidates who, finding themselves "buffeted in a digital storm of emotion," ... Read More

McCaskill Responds to Bai

BY Nancy Scola | Saturday, May 9 2009

Claire McCaskill has an appropriately short and effectively sweet response to Matt Bai's disapproving take on Twitter's growing popularity in Washington politics. Hitting politicians for inane tweeting is something like ... Read More

Twitter and Politics: What Matt Bai Doesn't Get

BY Micah L. Sifry | Sunday, April 26 2009

First Maureen Dowd writes a (justly parodied) silly diss of Twitter, and now Matt Bai, who covers politics for the Times Sunday Magazine, offers his own misreading of Twitter's importance for politics. Read More

Bai on "Digital Democracy": Not Fairytale, But Not Quite True. Yet.

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, March 12 2009

Over on the demurely-named Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, New York Time Magazine political writer Matt Bai has a review of Matthew Hindman's new book, "The Myth of Digital Democracy." Hindman's argument is that ... Read More

Losing Language Control, Not Message Control

BY Alan Rosenblatt | Thursday, December 27 2007

Colin Delany's comments on Matt Bai's recent NYT article reminds me of so many conversations I have had about how Google killed message control. For a long time, I have argued that campaigns cannot control their message ... Read More

The Rise of the Democratic Philanthocracy

BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, September 25 2007

Google the words “DailyKos” and you’ll get about 2.6 million results. Google the words “Democracy Alliance” and you’ll get about 44,000 hits, and from them you won’t find out much. That's why I'm writing to ... Read More

Daily Digest: 9/24/07

BY Joshua Levy | Monday, September 24 2007

Jose Antonio Vargas reviews Matt Bai's The Argument; according to CBS Evening News, the majority of Americans still get their political news from the newspaper; the Huffington Post/Slate/Yahoo "Mashup" debate was viewed ... Read More

Daily Digest: 9/4/07

BY Joshua Levy | Tuesday, September 4 2007

Profiling the passions and energies of Ron Paul supporters; buzzing about Matt Bai's "The Argument"; seven post-Labor Day questions about the presidential race, plus a few suggestions from us; and catching up with Mitt ... Read More

Daily Digest 8/8/07

BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, August 8 2007

The open-sourcing of debate planning; the debate on the online Right; the demographics of the online Left; the ongoing decline of newspapers; another exploitative video; and whose website is winning the most attention... ... Read More

Daily Digest 8/6/07 [UPDATED]

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, August 6 2007

The bigfoots of the press were all in Chicago this past weekend for YearlyKos, and they churned out lots of coverage. So did the littlefoots of the web. Plus, Ron Paul beats Barack Obama on YouTube! Read More

News Briefs

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"Power Politics in the Age of Google"

TechPresident's editorial director, Micah Sifry, will be speaking this afternoon on a panel at Harvard University called "Power Politics in the Age of Google," alongside Susan Crawford, Nicco Mele, Elaine Kamarck and Alexis Ohanian. The panel will be moderated by Harvard Shorenstein Center Director Alex Jones, and will be live-streamed here. GO

House Republicans Get a Jump on the Budget

Via Politico's Mike Allen, the House Republicans are out with a video — this one attributed to Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy — getting the drop on President Barack Obama's next federal budget, expected Monday. GO

What Twitter Won't Tell You About the Election

A new study released on Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press on Tuesday offers the opportunity to get real about what the political conversation on Twitter and Facebook can — or can't — tell you about the progression of the 2012 political campaign. Pew has found that even among users of Twitter and Facebook, a paltry percentage of people use social networks to get news about politics: Only 24 percent of Twitter users in the sample and 25 percent of Facebook users said they "sometimes" got campaign news through that network, while a full 40 percent of Twitter users in the sample and 46 percent of other social media users reported "never" getting campaign news through either Twitter or Facebook. GO

Navigating New York's "Road Map for the Digital City," One Year In

In May 2011, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg revealed a "Road Map for the Digital City," a plan to use technology to make city government more and participatory, and to leverage the city's tech sector for economic and civic gains.

New York City Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne will join our editorial director, Micah Sifry, on a conference call this Friday afternoon to discuss the progress on that road map so far. The call is free and open to anyone to join. You can sign up here.

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Pete Hoekstra's Campaign Website's "Offensive" Source Code Changed After Outcry

As if "chop suey fonts" and obvious graphic allusions to the stereotype of the Chinese as the Yellow Peril weren't controversial enough, the group that created an incendiary microsite for former Rep. Pete Hoekstra's campaign has managed to further fan the flames with what it's calling a mistake in its code. GO

Fidel Castro Loves the Internet

“The Internet is a revolutionary instrument that permits the receiving and transmission of ideas, in both directions, that is something we should know how to use,” Fidel Castro told a crowd of supporters on Feb. 4, according to the state-owned Cuban newspaper Granma International. Castro, who made his first public appearance since April 2011, launched his two-volume memoir, “Guerilla of Time,” and took the opportunity to discuss issues of importance to him. Earlier this week, Miranda Neubauer reported that one of these topics was the need for the Internet. Castro has been a proponent of the Internet as a tool for the exchange of ideas since 2003, but the average Cuban citizen faces great difficulty getting online. GO

Claire McCaskill Hires Blue State Digital's Alex Kellner As Digital Director

Missouri's senior Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill has hired Blue State Digital's Alex Kellner as its digital director. GO

Controversial Hoekstra Microsite Targeting Debbie Stabenow Created By The Prosper Group

Michigan Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra has caused a firestorm in the past 24 hours with a new campaign ad that depicts China as a young woman riding a bike in a rural area speaking in broken English. The thirty second spot aired in Michigan during the Super Bowl on Sunday, and it accuses Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow of aiding ... GO

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