Press Control Shift

Politics Faces Sweeping Change Via the Web

2006-04-09T21:34:00.000-07:00

The New York Times published a piece that acknowledged the many ways the web is changing politics.

However, the power of the offline consultants over this article is still clear in quotes such as this one:

And while the Internet is efficient at reaching supporters, who tend to visit and linger at political sites, it has proved to be much less effective at swaying voters who are not interested in politics. "The holy grail that everybody is looking for right now is how can you use the Internet for persuasion," Mr. Armstrong, the Warner campaign Internet adviser, said.

I would argue that the persuasive power of the web has been used in many instances, especially where the Man (or woman), Machine, Message and Moment have come together to generate a fundraising windfall.

Politics for the iPod Generation

2006-03-04T16:05:00.000-08:00

Politics is not just about words and ideas. For an upcoming generation that takes its music seriously, politics is also about the sounds.

Pat LaMarche, running for Governor in Maine, understands the importance of inviting the younger generation into her campaign. A local musician has agreed to hold a free concert that will support the Maine Clean Elections Fund, with some of those $5 Clean Elections checks possibly going toward the 2,500 $5 checks Pat will need to qualify as a Clean Elections candidate.

To make sure as many young people come to this concert as possible, Pat has created a page on her website that features not only pictures of the singer, Dave Wooley, but also snippets of his songs on an iPod-like music player.

It's not clear how effective this will be in generating fans at the concert or $5 checks for the Clean Elections Fund, but her strategy certainly gives younger supporters a reason to visit her website and send the URL to their friends.

WikiPolitics on Capitol Hill

2006-02-04T13:15:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post reports that the ability to anonymously revise entries in the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia has proved too tempting for partisans on Capitol Hill. Wikipedia has thrived as a community-based resource that has almost a million entries in English and millions in 119 other languages, from Norwegian to Nahuatl. It's too bad that political partisans in the United States don't have more restraint and cannot stop themselves from casting aspersions on opponents in their Wikipedia entries.

Bloggers Keep MSM's Feet to the Fire

2006-01-21T13:06:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post Ombudsman, Deborah Howell, tried to tell the world that the Abramoff pay-to-play scandal was a bipartisan scandal. Unfortunately, she was caught repeating GOP talking points and refused to acknowledge that she had her facts wrong.

According to Georgia10, a blogger over at DailyKos, the Washington Post received over 700 messages trying to correct the error. Rather than face the inquiries, the blog was shut down. Washington Post Executive Editor Jim Brady lamented that although "[t]ransparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture," his paper disabled the reader comments feature on its blog "after several comments containing personal attacks, profanity and hate speech were posted."

Later, the Post put 198 of the comments back up, saying it had "blocked" or "removed" others that were profane.

Unfortunately for Ms. Howell and the Post, alert bloggers had saved the messages before the blog was taken down. Still other bloggers noticed that when the Washington Post "restored" 198 of the deleted messages, at least 42 messages had been taken out. The fascinating thing is that almost none of the 42 messages the Washington Post removed contained profanity. Read them over and decide for yourself whether profanity was the issue.

Bloggers claim the 42 deleted messages contain mainly serious, well-researched and well-reasoned queries as to why Ms. Howell was not doing her job as an independent journalist. The Post was finally forced to admit that Howell had been wrong about the Abramoff scandal being bi-partisan.

This episode illustrates three things:

Get your facts straight.

When you make an error, get a correction out there right away.

Don't try to play "hide the evidence." It is too easy to find things on the Internet.

Evaluating Political Websites

2006-01-13T08:22:00.000-08:00

Evaluating political websites for effectiveness is now being done routinely. The current Canadian election season was just evaluated by Hillwatch, an Ottawa-based company. Their report finds that many of the campaign sites are merely static billboards that have not fully utilized the interactivity possible on the web.

Sounds like a good way to summarize the campaign websites found in the U.S. during 2004. Hopefully we all can do better in the 2006 campaign season!

Jib Jab and the Humor Quotient

2005-12-20T17:00:00.000-08:00

Humor has always been a good way to get a message across. It allows you to simplify your message and reach people who might not listen if all you want to do is send facts and figures their way.

Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, the owners and creators of JibJab.com, have been especially good at finding humor in politics. Their animated cartoon, "This Land," which lampooned both Bush and Kerry, was one of the hits of the 2004 campaign season.

Now they have released their latest take on the political scene, "2-0-5," which is a two minute spoof on the travails of President Bush during 2005. It is well worth the ad and two minutes of your time.

Despite their success, the Spiridellis brothers are still in search of revenue, selling "preroll video" ads (short ads for Ford cars, for example) that play before each online viewing of its animated productions. They took eight weeks to do "This Land," and refuse to compromise on the quality or integrity of their messages, so they are both still living in rental apartments.

How will these humorous messages affect Campaign 2006? Given the deep passion on all sides of the issues these days, and the deadly serious way many of us approach the current political scene, humor will probably serve as a leavening and galvanizing tool for campaign strategists who know how to utilize it effectively.

Until then, happy holidays, everyone!

Kazzoom it!

2005-12-12T07:06:00.000-08:00

There is always some new development on the World Wide Web, but a new search engine seems far-fetched, given the popularity and usability of Google.

However, a new "turbo-charged" search engine called Kazzoom has arrived which markets itself as being able to search beneath the surface of the web to get into archives and places that Yahoo and Google might not find.

I did a search on my own name and found the usual stuff I see if I do a Google search, but then I also saw a few things I had never seen: Danish website selling Winning Campaigns Online, an old piece I had written in 2000 for Schwabonline, and copies of my articles that had been posted on websites I never heard of.

Overall, the usability of Google still has me won over, but at least I know that there is a new tool out there in case I want even more on a topic.

Splogs Bring Spam to the Blogosphere

2005-11-05T05:58:00.000-08:00

The blogs set up by the students in Emi's "Politics and the New Media" class have not been used by many of the students since the class ended. However, they continue to have postings from visitors to their blogs. Here is a typical posting:

Hey, you have a great blog here! I'm definitely going to bookmark you!

I have a freshtraffic.com targeted traffic traffic unlimited site/blog. It pretty much covers freshtraffic.com targeted traffic traffic unlimited related stuff.

Come and check it out if you get time:-)

This entry is part of a phenomenon that is known as a "splog" — a combination of the words "spam" and "blog." These thinly disguised sales pitches make comments that are unrelated or marginally related to your previous blog entry, and then attempt to steer you to another blog or website to look at cell phones, porn, video games, or whatever else they are pushing.

As the Washington Post reported, this problem is making it hard for legitimate bloggers:

Ben Popken, keeper of a blog called TheSpunker, recently searched the Internet for Swiss army knives and found himself stymied by splogs. Every time he typed in the topic on a blog search engine, he kept pulling up a site that appeared to be a legitimate blog but was filled with links to other Web sites.

How to police these robot bloggers? Some blog vendors have started requiring verification before you can create a blog or write a comment on an existing blog. Ultimately, however, the need to maintain the openness of the blogosphere necessitates that they do more. As Anne P. Mitchell, president and chief executive of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy and a law professor at the Lincoln Law School of San Jose said:

"It's rarely worth the resources and time it takes to find [splogs]. [However,] from an ethical, moral, good Internet neighbor perspective,... if they have the ability to do so, they should do so."

Blogs Going Local

2005-10-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

Daily Kos, the progressive blogsite, had a fascinating diary today from the owners of a Pacific Northwest blog. These regional blog owners acknowledge their debt to the national focus of DailyKos, but also encourage the development of regional blogs.

Their new blog, Pacific Northwest Portal, has the following features:

It syndicates thirty of the region's finest progressive blogs — thirteen each from Washington and Oregon, and four from Idaho.

Provides a directory of ALL known progressive blogs throughout the region. In addition to the 30 syndicated blogs, there are 154 others listed in the Regional Blogs Directory, for a total of 184 progressive blogs.

Provides a directory of major media outlets, with almost two hundred links to local newspapers and television/radio stations.

It provides newsfeeds searching the mainstream media for political news.

It contains a listing of all the regional Air America stations on every single page.

It displays recent business and labor news, as well as traffic and weather information.

Another innovation is a Highlights page, which is divided into two major sections — Today in the Pacific Northwest, and National Blog Headlines.

If this concept of regional portals takes off, we will know that Tip O'Neill's adage about all politics being local is true on the Internet as well!

Folksonomy

2005-10-10T19:25:00.000-07:00

According to Wikipedia, a folksonomy is:

a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams and hierarchical organization. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population's conceptual model of the information.

The most popular political blog, Daily Kos, has just started going with this collaborative system of "tagging" blog diaries and comments, which will make it easier for people to find content that is useful for them.

In the past, the creator of a website could choose the keywords that were most meaningful for them, with educated guesses as to what those searching for the website would type into Google or other search engines. Now, with Folksonomy, everyone accessing the blog can add descriptive tags. I might tag a blog entry as "Valerie Plame" and "Joe Wilson," but you can add the tags "CIA," "Karl Rove," or "Scooter Libby" if you want to.

A recent article from Wired magazine offers these tips for tagging:

Use combinations of simple tags rather than inventing complex ones. For instance, use tags CIA, LEAK and INVESTIGATION, instead of CIA-LEAK-INVESTIGATION.

Use at least two tags for each item. More tags is better (up to a point).

Try to think of what tags people might use to search for something and use those. For example, PLAME, ROVE, FITZPATRICK, NOVAK, TREASON, OUTING, OPERATIVE might all be good tags for an entry on the Valerie Plame outing.

Try to re-use existing tags.

Keep it simple. Don't use tags that are redundant.

I guess as visitors start to add tags to your websites and blogs, you will see how others view your information and how it gets categorized in their minds. This sounds like the ultimate in feedback for writers, and a great way for politicos to see if their message is being received by their target audiences.

Take the survey!

2005-10-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

The Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet at George Washington University is conducting a survey of donors who contributed to presidential primary and general election candidates in the 2004 election. The institute is particularly interested in donors who contributed $400 or less, and donors who contributed over the Internet. The survey takes about 10-15 minutes to complete.

The Institute conducts cutting-edge research that analyzes how the Internet affects American politics, with the goal of improving democracy.

Please take a minute to assist in this worthy effort. You can click on the survey here: www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=865121395347.

Watch those blog entries!

2005-09-28T10:31:00.000-07:00

Today's Washington Post reminds us how important it is to have a senior staffer monitor and approve the information posted on a candidate website. In the NYC Mayoral race between Democrat Freddy Ferrer, Republican Mike Bloomberg, and other candidates, a posting on the Ferrer website said that he was a product of public schools when in fact he was a product of Catholic schools. This is no small issue in a city where Catholic school families want to vote for one of their own, and where the public schools also have staunch defenders.

[His spokesperson] maintained that Mr. Ferrer did not write the blog entry attributed to him.

"An item submitted by Freddy Ferrer was inaccurately edited regarding Freddy's education," Nick Baldick, the campaign manager, said in a statement. "We apologize for the mistake and have corrected the entry."

Yet even that explanation was not quite right. Jen Bluestein, a spokeswoman for the Ferrer campaign, said the candidate did not submit a written item but rather "passed on some ideas" to an aide, who then wrote three paragraphs and posted them in his name. The prose has a quality that could be confused with Mr. Ferrer's speaking style, but in whole it reads like a news release.

Asked why Mr. Ferrer was credited for words he did not write, Ms. Bluestein offered an everyone-does-it defense. "This happens in political campaigns all the time," she said. "In this case he called in some ideas, and someone got a little loose with the editing."

Another important issue raised by this dust-up: timing. The Bloomberg campaign noticed the error 23 days ago, but waited until Howard Dean was visiting to leak the fact to the press. This then led to many embarrassing questions during the Ferrer-Dean news conference yesterday.

Is there any ethical or other constraint on when an error like that can be revealed? Should there be?

Photo uploads

2005-09-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

The anti-war protest march held in Washington on September 24 involved an estimated 300,000 people and therefore 300,000 perspectives on the event.

In the past, newspapers put a few shots (or sometimes just one) that summarized the event for the many who could not attend. This, of course, introduced the biases of the photo editors, who were forced to summarize a massive event they often had not attended while working on tight deadlines.

Today, a paper such as the Washington Post starts with an online article which then contains links to a video and even a javascript link to a gallery of 20 photos.

While that is a wonderful way to give a greater variety of viewpoints, the Internet now allows EVERYONE to be a photojournalist. Sites that encourage photo uploads from cell phones and computers such as Flickr allow you to attach tags to your photos so that they can be searched. Photos also can be searched by "Most Recent" and "Most Interesting," which, in the case of the anti-war photos leads us to 30 pages of photos, 594 in all as of this writing).

What a wonderful way to make sure that a variety of viewpoints are seen and heard.

Blog Power

2005-09-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

Peter Daou, who pioneered some internet strategies for the Kerry 2004 campaign, has written a piece for Salon.com called The Triangle: Limits of Blog Power. One of his key observations:

[W]ithout the participation of the media and the political establishment, the netroots alone cannot generate the critical mass necessary to alter or create conventional wisdom. This is partly a factor of audience size, but it's also a matter, frankly, of trust and legitimacy. Despite the astronomical growth of the netroots (see Bowers and Stoller for hard numbers), and the slow and steady encroachment of bloggers on the hallowed turf of Washington's opinion-makers, it is still the Russerts and Broders and Gergens and Finemans, the WSJ, WaPo and NYT editorial pages, the cable nets, Stewart and Letterman and Leno, and senior elected officials, who play a pivotal role in shaping people's political views. That is not to say that blogs can't be the first to draw attention to an issue, as they often do, but the half-life of an online buzz can be measured in days and weeks, and even when a story has enough netroots momentum to float around for months, it will have little effect on the wider public discourse without the other sides of the triangle in place.

Ironically, while mentioning the limits of the power of the blogs, he also describes the extent of their power:

The triangle construct also explains rightwing bloggers' relentless attacks on the "MSM" and on anyone who contends that the media is conservative. In a nation dominated by shrill rightwing voices, with all branches of government in the hands of Republicans, and an ineffectual press corps, the "liberal media" myth is so absurd that it requires no rebuttal. But the right desperately needs to keep the media from doing what they did in the aftermath of Katrina: tell the unvarnished truth. They need to block the left from building the kind of triangle that Katrina generated, where outspoken left-leaning bloggers are joined by leading Democrats and reporters who have no choice but to describe the catastrophic results of Bush's dismal leadership. The result in Katrina's case is a major political crisis and a dramatic shift in public perceptions, a body blow to the long-standing conventional wisdom of Bush as a "resolute leader" and a protector.

Blogs are continuing to grow in power and scope as a grassroots news source, which can impact on mainstream journalists and politicians. Only time will tell if Daou's descriptions are accurate.

Politics to Go

2005-09-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

The Institute for Politics and Democracy on the Internet is sponsoring a conference tomorrow from 8:30AM to 1:00PM on Politics to Go: A Guide to Using Mobile Technology in Politics. It will be held in George Washington University's Media and Public Affairs Building, 805 21st Street, NW, Jack Morton Auditorium.

Here's how the conference organizers describe it:

Politics to Go connects sophisticated politicking with innovative mobile technology to produce more effective and efficient campaigning. Politics to Go will introduce some of the latest mobile technologies, examine their current uses and political successes, and consider future possibilities and challenges for implementing these new technologies into your next campaign.

The event's two panels will be comprised of visionaries, analysts and practical implementers who will address these topics and facilitate an open question-and-answer dialog with the audience. Whether you're a politician, campaign manager, activist, government staffer, concerned citizen, or fascinated with the possibilities of mobile technology, you don't want to miss this event and the release of The Politics to Go Handbook: A Guide to Using Mobile Technology in Politics.

If you can't make it, be sure to check out the Handbook and the list of resource organizations and agencies. The chapter addressing how websites can be made compatible with handheld technologies was written by Emilienne Ireland and Phil Tajitsu Nash.

Members of the press can get more info by emailing Lanny Cardow or calling (202) 994-3219.

See you there!

Wikis and Decentralized Action

2005-09-07T04:55:00.000-07:00

The Gulf Coast disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina and the ineffective leadership during the follow-up is being addressed by many top-down organizations such as the Red Cross and the Pentagon.

A good example of a bottom-up response that shows the potential of the internet to help grassroots campaigns is seen on the PeopleFinderVolunteer page at Wikipedia. This decentralized effort allows individuals with a few hours of time to be part of the massive data entry job of entering names of lost people or people seeking loved ones into a database.

The goals of the project were:

Enter unstructured data on refugees from forums across the web to the highest data quality standards possible with volunteers giving a little as one hour of their time.

Enter data from databases across the web into the central database via the PeopleFinder Interchange Format

Minimize duplicate records

Support other organizations in implementing the PeopleFinder Interchange Format

Make the central database avaliable to be searched

Use the Salesforce API to implement innovative technology solutions to the missing persons problem

Within a few days, the project was successful. Here are a few stats:

Within 24 hours of the storm, more than 15,000 records were entered into the database.

To date, over 85,000 records have been manually entered into the central repository. Great Work! All 85,000+ records were entered manually from forums and other sites by volunteers.

Over 2100 people have created accounts in the wiki, one can assume that a vast majority of these accounts correspond with active volunteers.

The data from scraped sites has been parsed into PFIF, but has not yet been entered into the database. We would prefer that other sites implement PFIF so that survivor data can be exchanged among sites.

Instead of having these 2,100 people sit at home unable to help, they were able to pitch in and provide a valuable service. To see the overall Wiki response to the hurricane, visit http://192.122.183.218/wiki/index.php/Main_Page.

Mayor's Blog is MIA (from Phil)

2005-08-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post reports that D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams has forgotten that a blog is not just a once-in-a-lifetime proposition.

On August 15th, Mayor Williams decided to "do a cannonball dive into the new world of blogs" by posting his first installment, Getting Started: What Button Do I Push?

Forty-four people posted comments on his blog over the next nine days, and the Mayor has posted only one follow-up blog entry. Summarizing the mood, one "bjones" said:

"Mr. Mayor: You really need to make some comments so we can know what your views are. How long do you think folks will stay tuned?"

While the Mayor is just getting his digital feet wet, D.C. Council member Jack Evans from Ward 2 has put together a spiffy website that includes an RSS feed, weekly podcast archive, and more.

Whether just getting started, like Mayor Williams, or at the cutting edge, like Councilman Evans, it is great to see elected officals using the latest online tools to stay in touch.

Using the web in D.C. Politics (from Phil)

2005-08-21T09:31:00.000-07:00

Instead of waiting for the D.C. political establishment to speak, a bunch of twenty-somethings launched www.runtonyrun.com to encourage current Mayor Tony Williams to announce that he will run for re-election.

While they plan to pass out flyers and do things offline as well, an article in the Washington Post said that the biggest issue facing the young politicos was whether to have a blog or a website.

Committee to Protect Bloggers (from Phil)

2005-08-16T20:27:00.000-07:00

In what looks like a blogosphere equivalent of Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Bloggers has set up shop. Its tools include petitions, a list of Endangered Bloggers, a way to "adopt a blog," and a list of resources.

Given the precarious nature of press freedom all over the globe, this looks like a worthwhile project. There are editors supervising the oversight of blogs in different countries, and one recent report on the State of the African Blogosphere included this insight:

There is no telling how many blogs there are in the African blogosphere. There are indications that some African countries have several hundreds of bloggers. The Kenyan, South African, and Egyptian webrings boast over 350 blogs each. However, some African countries do not to have blogs dedicated to them.

BlogAfrica, Global Voices, and My Africa are good in roads into the African blogosphere.

Many African bloggers do so at great personal risk. Since they write from countries whose leaders are intent on prohibiting public knowledge of their nefarious activities, some of Africa’s bloggers are forced underground.

Aside from helping to protect bloggers, this CPB blog looks like a good place to learn more about the state of civil liberties around the globe. Check it out!

How Big is the Web? (from Phil)

2005-08-15T20:12:00.000-07:00

Yahoo and Google have gotten into a scrape over the size of the Internet, which matters to companies whose reputations depend on being able to search it. As reported in the New York Times, the story started when

Yahoo announced at an Internet search engine conference in Santa Clara, Calif., that its search engine index — an accounting of the number of documents that can be located from its databases — had reached 19.2 billion. Because the number was more than twice as large as the number of documents (8.1 billion) currently reported by Google, Yahoo's fierce competitor and Silicon Valley neighbor, the announcement — actually a brief mention in a Yahoo company Web log — set off a spat.

It looks like Google's number is closer to the truth, based on a report by one neutral organization:

On Sunday, researchers at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications attempted to shed light on the debate by performing a large number of random searches on both indices. They ran a random sample of 10,012 queries and concluded that Google, on average, returned 166.9 percent more results than Yahoo. In only three percent of the cases did the Yahoo searches return more queries than Google. The group said the Yahoo index claim was suspicious.

However, it may be impossible to certifiably document the size of the Internet, because

Neither Yahoo nor Google makes public the software algorithms that underlie their collection methods. In fact, those details are closely guarded secrets.

Google's Copyrights (from Phil)

2005-08-14T13:58:00.000-07:00

Google, the Internet search engine company, had planned to scan all of the books in the Harvard, Michigan, and Stanford libraries to facilitate their being accessible on the Internet, until the Association of American Publishers cried foul.

The New York Times summarizes the key issues this way: copyrights, ad revenues, and control.

Google executives, on the other hand, view it this way:

[They view] the scanning project as a largely altruistic endeavor that will make it easier for people around the world to read the valuable — and often rare — material stockpiled in libraries.

In a related issue, "Google News" has triggered a copyright infringement suit from Agence France-Presse, which says that Google News's compiling and reposting the AFP stories on thousands of other websites is a form of copyright infringement.

Once again we are confronted with one of the key issues of the Internet age: how to make sure that the creators of content get paid a fair amount while also making sure that their work gets into the public domian in a timely fashion so that others can use and build on it.

Blog Weddings (from Phil)

2005-08-13T13:42:00.000-07:00

I guess everything else has moved to the Internet, so why not this? On August 5th, Kathleen and Eric in Texas fulfilled the witness requirement of their marriage process using fellow bloggers:

The state of Texas has a little known law governing "informal marriage." For a marriage to be legal, we must publicly declare that we consider each other as spouses and this fact be known to other residents of the state of Texas. We got our certificate this afternoon and have now fulfilled the requirements as there's bound to be a Texas resident or two amongst our joint readership. Feel free to witness our marriage here."

Legally speaking, either of them might be able to contest the marriage's legality in the future if no Texas-based person could vouch that they had "known" of this marriage. But let's not intrude on their bliss.

Instead, let's ponder the issue of how the Internet has allowed us to create communities where people feel like they know their fellow bloggers very well, even if they have not met them in person. Quite a phenomenon, I'd say.

Citizen Curators (from Phil)

2005-08-12T12:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's blog entry asked whether citizen journalism could devolve into sensationalism. If it is done in an organized and respectful way, however, capturing a variety of perspectives can be both interesting and significant.

The Tate Museum, an institution that houses over 500 years of British art and antiquities, has organized an Our Picture of Britain project, where 1,300 school-age children from 250 schools were asked to explore their local landscape over a three week period.

Nadia Arbach, e-learning curator at Tate, calls the project a success:

"The participating schools approached this project with unbounded creativity and enthusiasm. The collaboration was the most rewarding element — many teachers have commented that it was a brilliant opportunity for their students to learn about others in different parts of the country. One of the aims of this project was to use digital media to get people communicating with each other, and it has worked out so well that some schools have plans to continue their partnerships in the next school term."

Sounds like the best possible use of new media for school-age children, and perhaps for other age levels as well.

Citizen Journalism or Sensationalism? (from Phil)

2005-08-11T12:20:00.000-07:00

A new report on Politics Online looks at the recent London bombings and the "citizen journalist" response.

July’s London bombings provided one of the first examples of world news documented by unintentional journalists — bystanders and survivors who utilized camera phones and other wireless technology to document their experience. This was only the latest and most vivid example of the global trend of 'user generated content' (UGC) that is beginning to have a radical impact with the news media worldwide.

According to Pete Clifton of BBC News Interactive:

"We often get pictures from our readers, but never as many as this, and the quality was very high. And because people were on the scenes, they were obviously better than anything news agencies could offer."

On the other hand, not everyone saw the cell phone-generated pictures as positive. Freelance technology journalist Xeni Jardin said:

"It's like the behavior when you see with a car wreck on the highway. People stop and gawk. There's a sense that this is some sort of animal behavior that's not entirely compassionate or responsible."

I personally like the idea that there are others outside the mainstream media who are keeping their eyes and ears open as events unfold. At the same time, however, I can understand the privacy concerns and the fears that gawkers will vie for photos of victims that they can sell to the daily papers instead of offering aid during the critical first moments after a violent attack.

New technologies alone will not make us more compassionate and other-oriented human beings.

Progressive Blogosphere Report (from Phil)

2005-08-10T20:22:00.000-07:00

The New Politics Institute has issued Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere: A New Force in American Politics." Aside from analysis, it includes an Appendix on "How to Engage Bloggers In A Local Campaign" and an extensive list of left and right wing blogs.

It is another touchstone document on our way to universal blogging and Internet use.