Personal Democracy Plus Our premium content network. LEARN MORE You are not logged in. LOG IN NOW >

Blogging

Someday we'll probably stop talking about bloggers, the same way that no one refers to people who use phones as "phoners." But blogging deserves its own category because the phenomenon so clearly illustrates how the old boundaries between professionals and amateurs have fallen in this age of hyper-connection and hyper-empowerment. Political bloggers in particular are of special interest because of their ability to nurture communities of readers, followers and participants. The rise of the political blogosphere has disrupted traditional politics and journalism, and also presents some complicated challenges for the law. Below, a selection of our best coverage on bloggers, blogging, bloggers rights and sometimes, their wrongs.

In Oregon, Bloggers Aren't Journalists, Federal Judge Rules

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, December 7 2011

A Montana real estate agent in legal hot water for allegedly defamatory statements made on her blog isn't a journalist as defined by Oregon law, a federal district court judge has ruled. Read More

Are Blogs Done For?

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, July 7 2010

Via Jason Kottke, what we once might have blogged, now we tweet or status update: Read More

Blogs Are the New Back Fences--Especially for People of Color, Pew Study Shows

BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, June 15 2010

Research released last week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project indicates that the blogosphere is bringing people of color into conversations about neighborhood issues. According to the study, people of color ... Read More

Are bloggers press? The LAPD doesn't seem to think so

BY Morra Aarons-Mele | Wednesday, January 30 2008

I understand with every new medium there are some growing pains. There is debate to be had over which entities can call themselves "media" and which are not. Over what constitutes a "legitimate" news or information ... Read More

Blogging While Female

BY Morra Aarons-Mele | Monday, August 6 2007

Gender is seeping into discussion of the netroots in a major way. As today’s Washington Post quotes Yearly Kos Executive Director Gina Cooper on her conference: "It's mostly white. More male than female," says the ... Read More

Are Bloggers the New Pamphleteers?

BY Ari Melber | Monday, October 30 2006

Many people have compared bloggers to the pamphleteers who wrote political screeds during the American revolution. A new venture is taking that idea a step futher, turning a few bloggers into literal pamphleteers by ... Read More

"Elite Bloggers" and the Read-Write Web

BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, June 22 2006

Is there such a thing as an "elite blogger"? That's the question I'm mulling as I read through the storm of posts in the political blogs--right, left and center--that are discussing whether Markos Moulitsas and Jerome ... Read More

DOCUMENT: Online Coalition Response to FEC

BY Mike Krempasky | Wednesday, June 1 2005

The Online Coalition is pleased to release our official comment to the Federal Election Commission in response to the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking regarding political activity on the internet. This comment will be ... Read More

Online Coalition for Blogger Freedom Launches

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, March 11 2005

Read More

SEND TIPS>

Got Tips, leads, or suggestions for tech President? Email tips@personal-democracy.com

DAILY DIGEST>

Sign up to receive a daily debriefing from techPresident.

News Briefs

RSS Feed wednesday >

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

Brazil's Middle Class Protestors Take the Struggle Online, With Mixed Results

Protestors in Brazil have made their war cry heard all over social media and as a result, have received quite a bit of attention from the international community with popular hashtags such as #itsnotabout20cents and #ChangeBrazil. But while they have used tools like Facebook to organize and rally, the effectiveness of their Twitter use is harder to gauge. 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.

GO

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.

GO

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.

GO

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.

GO

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

More