Category: The Web and Technology

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Barack Obama The Web and Technology

The Serendipitousness Effect

I noticed over the weekend my site was getting a bunch of visitors from a site called wa6n.net. Curious, I followed the trackback (A poorly translated version here.) Apparently wa6n.net is a bulletin board registered in America by someone in the United Arab Emirates. With the poor quality of the translations and a lack of understanding of the background, it’s hard to see what type of site this is. There are arguments over whether Saddam Hussein is a martyr; there are arguments over whether Obama truly means to withdraw from Iraq; there are calls for revolution in the name of Allah.

And – here’s where my site comes in – a member of the forum posted a picture of Obama answering a phone upside down intending to ridicule him – a picture that was emailed around during the past year. This actually starts what seems to be a brief argument as the other members of the forum dispute the picture, and in the end, the matter seems resolved when someone posts links to – among other places, my blog – where the authenticity of the photo was challenged.

What I thought was noteworthy was the amount of interest in Obama on this discussion forum. Many of the members of this discussion forum even seemed somewhat sympathetic to Obama, though they did not believe he represents a true break from an American foreign policy they strongly oppose.

Looking through that forum, to the extent that Google Translate was able, was like some accidental insight into a world I would not ordinarily come across.

It is this type of serendipitousness that makes the internet so transformative.

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Politics The Web and Technology

Who’s Paying to Promote RFK, Jr. for Senate? (cont.)

I contacted Michael Pinto, the creator of the Facebook group “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for the US Senate” yesterday to follow-up my post asking who was paying to promote the group on Facebook. I had seen some ads – as had a few other people who had blogged about it. And the number of people in the group shot up significantly over a few days – which led me to presume that there was quite a lot of advertising.

But Michael Pinto assured me in a Facebook message that:

I’m paying for those ads out of my own pocket: I figured if I wasn’t willing to spend at least $100 of my own cash then it wasn’t a worthwhile cause.

Later, he offered:

PS If you need proof I’d be glad to share a screen shot of the ad campaign with you…

Pinto also tells me he was responsible for the “Red State Socialism” graph that made it onto Digg.

My key takeaway: It’s time to start advertising on Facebook.

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Law The Web and Technology

The Kingdom of Google

“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and a former scholar in residence at Google, told me recently. “One reason they’re good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it’s over for them.” Google’s claim on our trust is a fragile thing. After all, it’s hard to be a company whose mission is to give people all the information they want and to insist at the same time on deciding what information they get…

Given their clashing and sometimes self-contradictory missions — to obey local laws, repressive or not, and to ensure that information knows no bounds; to do no evil and to be everywhere in a sometimes evil world — Wong and her colleagues at Google seem to be working impressively to put the company’s long-term commitment to free expression above its short-term financial interests. But they won’t be at Google forever, and if history is any guide, they may eventually be replaced with lawyers who are more concerned about corporate profits than about free expression.

Jeffrey Rosen in an insightful look into how Google tries to balance local censorship and its’ commitment to the freedom of information.

I am a bit of a monarchist, in the Federalist sense, as long as there are checks and balances. I’m a big fan of Google, but I realize the problems Tim Wu and Rosen point out are real – and that an organization now that takes steps to protect individuals will not necessarily continue to do so. But Google needs some well-publicized Achilles heel that can be used if it turns evil.

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Barack Obama Politics The Web and Technology

Who’s Paying to Promote RFK, Jr. for Senate?

Wasting no time, ads are already running on Facebook promoting Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to replace Hillary Clinton as she leaves her Senate seat to become Secretary of State.

techPresident reported yesterday – before ads were running – that Michael Pinto, the creator of the Facebook group described it “an informal grassroots thing.” The group asks supporters of RFK, Jr. to write to Governor Patterson asking him to appoint the young Kennedy to his father’s seat in the Senate.

The group seems to be growing rapidly – from 17 reported as of yesterday to 135 as of this writing.

My question is: who’s paying to promote this?

And how long will it be before Andrew Cuomo and some of the other top candidates have their own Facebook groups?

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Reflections The Web and Technology

Subtle Connections and Far-reaching Implications

What blog type am I. Typalyzer answers the question. (H/t Andrew Sullivan.)

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

I think this type may be a bit too common though – as Daily Kos, Think Progress, and about a half dozen other sites I tossed in all came up as “The Thinker” too.

I liked the graph though.

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The Media The Web and Technology

The Best Designed Site on the Web

I have to agree with Stanley over at 37Signals.

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Barack Obama Domestic issues Politics The Opinionsphere The Web and Technology

Bringing Back the Fairness Doctrine

Marin Cogan in an investigative piece in The New Republic has trouble finding any media-reform liberals or Democrats who are actually want to bring the Fairness Doctrine back or are trying to do so.

As Kevin Drum points out at The Washington Monthly:

Given the collapse of the Republican Party’s electoral fortunes, folks like Limbaugh and Michael Gerson have to create a rallying cry, and there’s no better way to whip up the Republican base than to make far-right activists feel like victims. “Liberals are coming to take away your talk radio!” is, obviously, pretty effective.

At the same time, a conservative effort is underway to label legislation protecting net neutrality (which prevents the internet from being structured to favor certain sites over others and was one of the founding principles of the internet) a “Fairness Doctrine for the Internet,” which may be the only chance the big corporations who oppose net neutrality have to stop it – as Adam Reilly of The Boston Phoenix pointed out, citing me.

It seems the Fairness Doctrine is one of the key components conservatives will be using to keep their partisan backs up in the coming lean years – as well as being a potential fundraising tool.

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Barack Obama Election 2008 Obama Politics The Web and Technology

The Surge that Took Down the Red Cross

[digg-reddit-me]Evan Thomas of Newsweek has written up an excellent series of seven articles from the research of a team of reporters given behind-the-scenes access to the McCain and Obama campaigns on the condition that they not publish anything until after the election. At the end of the fourth article, he explains an incident that demonstrates the sheer organizing power of the Obama operation:

At the end of August, as Hurricane Gustav threatened the coast of Texas, the Obama campaign called the Red Cross to say it would be routing donations to it via the Red Cross home page. Get your servers ready—our guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, whatever, the Red Cross responded. We‘ve been through 9/11, Katrina, we can handle it.

The surge of Obama dollars crashed the Red Cross Web site in less than 15 minutes.

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Humor The Opinionsphere The Web and Technology

Self-Referential Social Bookmarking Blogging

Anyone who uses social bookmarking sites like reddit or Digg can appreciate this blogger’s frustration. 

Of course, sites and communities like reddit have a Matt Drudge-like appreciation for self-referenential material (I refer here to Drudge’s penchant for placing stories about himself and his vast influence next to breaking news as if both merited equal attention). This allowed the blogger in question to do much better with his post about his posts than with either of those posts themselves.

I think it would be interesting if someone with some expertise in sociology or some related discipline would do an analysis of the sense of community on social bookmarking sites.

Categories
Election 2008 McCain Obama Politics The Web and Technology

Fun Fact About McCain #7: McCain Will Destroy the Internet as We Know It

McCain will destroy the internet as we know it.

A bit of an exaggeration. But McCain, opposes net neutrality, one of the core technological foundations of the internet – and essential to its growth according to everyone from Google to the inventor of the world wide web. Without net neutrality, the internet will end up like this.