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: G20Voice

The Obama campaign's chief blogger and Blue State Digital vet Sam Graham Felsen announces on HuffPo that he's joining the growing Alliance of Youth Movements as its new Director of Strategy and Communications; Blue State Digital's David Nassar joined AYM as Executive Director in October. Besides being a bit of interesting hiring news, there are, we'll suggest, two additional little angles on the Felsen hire that really sum up the current state of digital politics and advocacy in their entirety. Or, short of that, they're just kinda telling...

It might lack the glamor of sending Ashton Kutcher to Moscow, but it's worth noting the degree to which Hillary Clinton's State Department has, as part of their "21st century statecraft" push, embraced the idea that telecommunications can be absolutely critical in life of death situations. In Haiti, we saw people texting from beneath rubble, but the Haitian telecom infrastructure's failings were a sad obstacle to relief there. It's a powerful lesson now being applied to the earthquake zone in Chile, where, at the request of the Chilean government, Clinton arrived this week bearing 20 satellite phones and a technician who knew how to set them up. From the Christian Science Monitor:

While clean water, food, medical support, and rescue workers are the priorities in the hours after a catastrophe, so too are phones – so that governments can properly assess the damage, dispatch officials to hot spots, and distribute aid to those most in need.

So, after opening up to foreign aid assistance, Chile’s first request to the US was communications equipment. And that’s what US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on part of a Latin America tour that was scheduled before the quake, has brought with her today as she visits Chile.

In other State Department news, tonight at 6 pm EST Clinton will participate in a live-streamed townterview (i.e., townhall + interview) in Sao Paulo, Brazil -- which we mostly mention because it's really fun to say "townterview."

Credit: Ustream.tv

Need a break from watching Eric Cantor and Barack Obama debate how heavy a bill should be? Well, you're in luck. Ashton Kutcher is live streaming from Moscow, sharing his thoughts on the State Department's tech delegation to Russia he's been a part of this week.

Credit: U.S. State Department

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing has just debuted a new online visa application form.

If all goes well, DS-160, as the embassy's new web application is called, will ease the process of getting a visa for the many students and other would-be visitors from China to the United States. And there are hopes that going digital will save some 3 million pieces of paper a year.

But yeah, we're mostly just posting this for the picture.

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, Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky, Delaware Democrat Ted Kaufman, Meetup founder Scott Heiferman, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin, the Atlantic's Jim Fallows, the State Department's new media team (Alec Ross, Katie Dowd, Jared Cohen), DC-based representatives from Facebook, and Oscar Morales, the Colombian man who used Facebook to rally millions in the streets to protest his country's leftist guerilla oppressors, it was a pretty good sign that you were in for an interesting day. It was perhaps because the crowd was itself so intriguing that it took some time for the audience to realize that Clinton had silently made her way to the stage; it was a split second before they began applauding for the Secretary of State.

What quickly became so attention grabbing about Clinton's speech, at least of our purposes, was how full-throated a defense it was of the potential of a fully networked society and fully networked world. We'll be pulling out some of the more noteworthy parts of the hour-long speech, but you can read the full text (or watch the video of it) here...

With all due sensitivity, the tremendous disaster unfolding in Haiti as a result of Tuesday's earthquake just outside Port-au-Prince is putting the new media and tech experts inside the Obama Administration in what is a familiar place for the many campaign veterans among them: raising money online (often from small donors) and using every tool they know to get word out as quickly and efficiently as possible. But much is new and untested about this situation. And like the rest of us scrambling to confront the Haiti disaster, they're also often making it up as they go along.

The Obama White House has, for its part, taken on the job of sharing the presidential perspective on the crisis, posting footage from briefings with President Obama and, for example, shooting YouTube videos with First Lady Michelle Obama. The White House is also acting as an online clearinghouse, attempting to point to work being done both in and out of government. The latter includes the work being done by the William J. Clinton Foundation to provide relief in Haiti.

Often the work inside government that the White House is pointing to is the efforts of Hillary Clinton's State Department, which perhaps has the most dense collection of new media innovators working in the federal government today...

The more cynical amongst us might have looked at Hillary Clinton's rush to embrace "21st Century Statecraft" when she landed in the Secretary of State seat as a chance to make up for all that wasn't done online and with technology during her '08 presidential bid. It wouldn't be a first time that a politician took the "just add Internet" approach to reviving his or her political fortunes. But it seems like every other initiative to come out of the Secretary's office these days has some networked component:

The U.S. Department of State announces the launch of the global “Democracy is…” Twitter Contest. Tweet what you think democracy is using the hash symbol: #democracyis. The goal is to provide a worldwide platform in which people can discuss the meaning of democracy and exchange ideas from diverse perspectives.

The global “Democracy is…” Twitter Contest begins today at 5:30 p.m. EST and ends January 21, 2010 at 11:59 p.m. EST. To join the contest, become a Twitter follower of @demvidchallenge and tweet what you think democracy is in 140 characters or less. The contestant whose tweet with the greatest number of unique re-tweets will receive a Flip Video HD Camcorder. The winner will be announced on the Democracy Video Challenge Facebook fan page ^[1] on January 25, 2010. Only one re-tweet per user will count in the official tally. Additional contests will be announced throughout the year.

Whether or not this social-networks-as-foreign-policy approach will bear fruit is still very much an open question, but it is bleeding into the broader foreign policy discussions, it seems. Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican has taken to Foreign Policy to heap praise on the Clinton State Department's focus on digital tools.

For at least an hour yesterday, Twitter was brought low by a group calling itself the "Iranian Cyber Army" in what might be ready as either a strike at how the communications platform was used to organize and publicize Iran's post-election protests this summer, or a more direct hit at how officials at the U.S. State Department called on the San Francisco-based company to bypass a planned downtime to aide Iranian protestors. The website of the Iranian opposition group Green Wave of Freedom was similarly hacked.

The attack, it seems, involved redirecting the DNS records of Twitter.com to point to a homepage that, according to the BBC, read in English translation, "USA think they controlling and managing internet by their access, but they don't, we control and manage internet by our power." (One way to think about how DNS redirects work is to think of tweaking phone company records so that instead of, say, 867-5309, ringing at Jenny's house, it rings at Susie's. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone commented on the episode on the company blog by writing that, "Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed.")

For a time during the attack, Google's search result for Twitter, reported TechCrunch, seemed to even more directly tie the DNS action to the contact this June between State Department Policy Planning Staff staffer Jared Cohen and Twitter chairman Jack Dorsey where Cohen, it seems, encouraged Dorsey not to go through with a scheduled maintenance period during the Tehran protests. "In the name of God," read the Google search result squib, "As an Iranian this is a reaction to Twitter’s interference sly which was U.S. authorities ordered in the internal affairs of my country…"

The Hillary Clinton-led State Department's technology-empowered 21st Century Statecraft Initiative has been getting a lot of press attention lately, and the State Department has attempted to frame the new approach to global engagement as coming from an open-ended desire to foster conversations and collaborations. During the June Twitter affair, a State Department spokesperson said, "We are proponents of freedom of expression. Information should be used as a way to promote freedom of expression."

It's clear that at least some of those who don't appreciate America's aims in the world see its involvement in social media as something potentially very political indeed. Twitter -- and the State Department -- might want to take it as a badge of honor that their nascent efforts are able to elicit such a targeted response as yesterday's episode. That said, if outfits like Twitter are going to be major players on the world stage, they might want to think about doing a better job of protecting their DNS. (Photo credit: Dalantech)

An interesting little practice we just noticed at play on the State Department's DipNote Twitter feed: since several different folks regularly tweet on behalf of the institutional behemoth, they try to put a more personal face on things by letting us know which of the State Department's 50,000 or so staffers is "on duty" at any one time.