Looking For Organizingforaction.com? Sorry, Domain's Taken
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Monday, January 28 2013
Obama supporters have developed a reputation for being tech savvy, but they may have dropped the ball on this one. Organizing for Action, the advocacy group founded to enable Obama 2012 campaign supporters to lobby ... Read More
News Briefs
RSS Feed tuesday >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.
GOFounder 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.
GOThe 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.
GOThe 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.
GOTransparency 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.
GOFacebook Seeks Approval as Financial Service in Ireland. Is the Developing World Next?
On April 13 the Financial Times
The Rise and Fall of Iran's “Blogestan”
The robust community of Iranian bloggers—sometimes nicknamed “Blogestan”—has shrunk since its heyday between 2002 – 2010. “Whither Blogestan,” a recent report from the University of Pennsylvania's Iran Media Program sought to find out how and why. The researchers performed a web crawling analysis of Blogestan, survey 165 Persian blog users, and conducted 20 interviews with influential bloggers in the Persian community. They found multiple causes of the decline in blogging, including increased social media use and interference from authorities.
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