techPresident

Clearing the Cache: Twenty Years, and Still a Thousand Words

Nancy Scola — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:10:34 +0000

The story behind one iconic photo of the fall of the Berlin wall.
Al Gore builds his own wall, this one made up of citizen-submitted Flash videos on energy reform. (via e.politics)
Google beefs up its lobbying work.
And Aravosis et al sponsor a DNC "pause" in response to the Obama Administration's progress, or lack thereof, on LGBT issues.

(With Micah Sifry and Nick Judd)

Defending Clunkers with a Data Dump

Nancy Scola — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:57:51 +0000

CARS.gov, the Department of Transportation's online home for its Cash-for Clunkers program, has posted the raw data on the nearly 700,000 cars that were traded in during the course of the month-long program. (via Paul Blumenthal)

There's an interesting subtext here that goes beyond a simple government data dump. Cash for Clunkers one of the financial revitalization projects that the Obama Administration is most desperately interested in having the public embrace as a proactive, forward-thinking, and innovative solution to a sticky economic problem. Cash for Clunkers is one simple, voter-friendly victory the Obama White House thinks it can reliably point to as evidence of its vision. What the Obama White House and the extended executive branch are really worried about is that what they see as the enormous success of the problem dies a death of a thousand cuts, slowly weakened by the blog chatter and other online doubting that "Clunkers" has attracted, particularly from conservatives. That accumulation of doubt is potentially as damaging as a direct hit, and the Obama White House sees Cash for Clunkers as an ally whose reputation it has to protect with all the tactics it knows.

That's why we see the White House blog going toe-to-toe with the automotive website Edmunds.com, not traditionally considered a worthy sparring partner of the President of the United States. Think of it as a "broken window theory" approach to the new media environment. And that's why we see the Secretary of the Treasury himself high-fiving the White House blog for challenging Edmunds' analysis of the utility of the clunkers program. "A big 'Thank you' to the White House blog team for a witty and perceptive account of Cash for Clunkers' real contribution to our economic recovery," blogged Ray LaHood.

Someone intimately familiar with the White House's thinking on its approach to the new media environment explained why the Obama Administration is pursuing such a tactic. Part of what makes the Internet valuable to the Obama operation, the thinking goes, is that suddenly the White House isn't quite so utterly dependent on the traditional press' interpretation of what the White House is up to on a day-to-day basis. Administration officials aren't so limited to giving a reporter a quote or delivering an answer at a press conference and then seeing what the mainstream media makes of it. That's appealing to an Obama White House that, like many White Houses, is skeptical of just how good the press' intentions are. The web doesn't just offer the benefit of spin. The Internet's environment of abundance and direct connection to its audience means that the White House can not only put out information into the new media ecosystem, back it with heaps of background materials, and then attach to it its own meaning of that data, or quote, or new policy change.

Take White House ethics watchdog Norm Eisen's recent blog post on the release of the White House visitor logs that contain the names of such politically-charged visitors as the minister Jeremiah Wright and the filmmaker Michael Moore. But with the podium of the White House blog, Eisen can not only make those records public but also craft what the White House thinks is the proper interpretation of them. There's less of a need today to rely on professional reporters to see things accurately, or to handle nuance correctly.

When Eisen released the first batch of the White House visitor logs, for example, he offered instructions on how to interpret the new abundance of information the White House was releasing into the world. "Given this large amount of data, the records we are publishing today include a few 'false positives' -- names," like those of Wright and Moore, "that make you think of a well-known person, but are actually someone else." When it comes to Cash for Clunkers, the Obama Administration also isn't taking any chances. Alongside the XLS and CSV files that the administration hopes will be used to bolstered its case about how successful Cash for Clunkers was is a "Note to Analysts" with helpful instructions on how to best make sense of the new information. (Photo credit: ThreadedThoughts)

"Ask U.S.": State Department 2.0 on Sudan, Darfur and Public Engagement

Micah L. Sifry — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:40:18 +0000

Tomorrow afternoon at 3:00pm EST, Special Envoy Scott Gration and Samantha Power, NSC Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs, are going to sit down at the White House with the leaders of the largest, most vocal advocacy groups on Darfur issue, Jerry Fowler of Save Darfur, and Layla Amjadi, the student director of STAND (the student-led division of the Genocide Intervention Network). Ho-hum, you might say, yet another behind-the-scenes meeting between administration officials and NGOs, what's new about that?

Well, two things. First, the meeting is going to be streamed live onto the web on not only the White House and State Department websites (in the latter case on their Facebook page, where viewers can comment along in real-time), but also on the Save Darfur and STAND's sites. So the conversation is hardly going to be behind-the-scenes. And second, since last week both groups have been canvassing their memberships to submit and/or select questions to ask Gration and Power since last week when Gration announced the event on the State Department's blog.

Clearing the Cache: Open Gov Down Under

Nancy Scola — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:51:43 +0000

The Aussie-ified version of Fix My Streets is, naturally, called It's Buggered, Mate.
New York City call on an algorithm in an attempt to help people find jobs.
Voters in Takoma Park, Maryland, get a chance to double check their votes online.
Russ Feingold wants a web-friendly annotated Constitution.
California Data Camp is taking place tomorrow in San Francisco.
Expect the release of the White House's Open Gov Initiative mid-month, says @opengov.
Senator McCaskill says that petition tweets to her don't work. (Thanks Shaun Dakin)
A crowd gathered in front of the Egyptian Cultural Bureau to push for the release of a long-imprisoned blogger.
The DSCC emails out an ask for Facebook, Twitter, and mobile followers.
A upcoming IPDI event: Trust and Authenticity in Social Media: The Case of the U.S. Military.
And Daily Kos goes green for an AFSCME-sponsored push for health care reform.

(With Micah Sifry and Nick Judd)

The Calculus of Mayor Mike's Online Ad Blitz

Nancy Scola — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:27:06 +0000

(With Nick Judd)

When it finally came time to tallying the votes late Tuesday night, New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg's victory over Democratic challenger and city comptroller Bill Thompson turned out to be remarkably narrow -- and surprisingly so, in part because of the gap the size of the Hudson between what the candidates spent on this race, some $81 million from Bloomberg's pocket to the $6.6 million Thompson dropped according to recent filings. What's particularly interesting for us here is how that difference in spending played out not only offline, but online as well.

PaidContent's Joseph Tartakoff reports that once and future Mayor Bloomberg poured some $2.1 million into online advertising though late October. And those records thus don't include Bloomberg's burst of web ads during the last week of the campaign, a blitz that made him nearly ubiquitous for online New Yorkers. A Google rep described that network-wide spending burst as "massive."

Indeed, spending records from the New York City Campaign Finance Board show that Bloomberg handed over more than two million dollars to Connections Media under the category of "Internet ads." Do the math, and it turns out that out of the whopping $145 that Bloomberg spent to pull each of his voters into the polls on Tuesday, just about $3.75 per voter went to buying Google ads and other online advertising. The DC-based Connections Media is headed up by web veteran Jonah Seiger.

Thompson, on the other hand, spent about $13 per voter, in his 46% to 50.6% defeat at the hands of Bloomberg, and while Thompson's spending records don't break down online advertising costs as cleanly as Bloomberg's do, the underdog Democrat laid out just $205,000 in consulting fees to the Obama-affiliated firm Blue State Digital. The one spending burst identified as going directly towards online ads came at the end of August, and rang in at just $10,000.

Both candidates, though, spent multiples more on television advertising than they did on online ad spots. Here too, getting Thompson's buying power anywhere in the neighborhood of Bloomberg's would require shifting the decimal point. Bloomberg handed over $29.5 million to the DC firm Squier Knapp Dunn, and Thompson spent $1.7 million in TV ads, directed to the Philadelphia and California admakers The Campaign Group.

When all is said and done, the number reflect just out outmatched financially Thompson was in his competition with Bloomberg, online and off. Thompson, for example, spent just slightly more on the web gurus Blue State Digital as Bloomberg paid in postage.

Health Care Reform>Obamacare: The Tide Has Turned

Micah L. Sifry — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:44:47 +0000

With the House about to vote on the Democratic health care bill tomorrow, I thought it would be interesting to check in on the pulse of the online debate over health care reform. This is of course an unscientific look at the public zeitgeist, but the popularity of certain key words on Twitter suggests that the tide has turned and anti-heath reform rhetoric has peaked, or at least isn't spreading.

Take a look at this trendline from Trendistic, looking at three terms: "obamacare", "public option" and "hcr". The first is used often by opponents of the Democrats' plans; public option is the battle-cry of the progressive base; and "hcr" is a generic tag that is mostly used by supporters of the Democratic mainstream.

The August peak on the chart is from the height of the townhall battles; the September peaks are from President Obama's joint address to Congress and more recent highpoints in the movement of legislation (the Baucus bill drop, etc). As you can see, the "Obamacare" meme has gotten weaker, not stronger, from its peak in the summer months.

A Bill That Big...

Nancy Scola — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:34:32 +0000

Why, it's nearly as good as having a seat in a House conference room, surrounded by congressional Republicans! The National Republican Congressional Committee is going full-on multimedia in its push to zero in just how long their Democratic counterparts' health care legislation is, and to make the point that processing all that legislation from scratch is a lot to ask for in 72 hours. On both Facebook and Twitter, the NRCC is progressively "reading" the 2,000 or so page hunk of legislation and providing real-time updates like "36 new government entities and we're only on page 1,089." Want to read H.R. 3962 while on the go? There's an app for that, says the NRCC in a new YouTube video that jokes about how a bill that big will bring your iPhone to a screeching halt.

Clearing the Cache: Hang a Left at the Red-Blue Split

Nancy Scola — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:45:26 +0000

A rather amazing block-by-block look at the results from New York City's mayoral race Tuesday between Mike Bloomberg and Bill Thompson, from the New York Times.
Interest in House Dems' health care legislation brings down Open Congress...
Interest that includes House Republicans using the site to vet the bill text.
The DNC didn't really want Mainers to get active in New Jersey on election day, and blames an email mix-up.
Ask the U.S. about Sudan strategy.
Draft legislation emerges on web-based voter registration.
Quiz time! Do you know your government innovators?
And Marc Ambinder encourages a deep reading of CharlieandObama.com.

(With Micah Sifry)

"Facebook Guy's" Thoughts on Campaigning

Nancy Scola — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:07:30 +0000

The Hill's Kim Hart has the story on Facebook's run for attorney general in California. Okay, so technically, it's Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly who is in the race, but Kelly concedes that he's well known as "the Facebook guy." His website is, as Hart notes, awfully Facebooky. And as the company's point person on privacy (and a public face for an industry that didn't even really exist a decade ago), he's been working with attorneys general in all fifty states -- putting him in a good position to know both sides of the policy debate on some of the more cutting edge issues a California attorney general is likely to face.

That said, Kelly says that he hasn't really embraced the idea of integrating the social tools he knows well and the digital megaphones he has before him into his statewide race. "You have to appreciate," Kelly told Hart, "that the cadence of a campaign is just important online as it is off."

Legally Open: NYS Senate Unveils New Legislative Portal

Nancy Scola — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:41:12 +0000

The New York State Senate's new Open Legislation portal launched this morning, meant as an upgrade to this. Among the new features on this beta version of Open Legislation: the dead-simple Google-like search interface you see above, and, thanks to the advent of permalinks, the ability for Google to actually crawl and serve up the site. Beyond that, the new portal has an assortment of options for tracking and pulling structured legislative information, either via API or data feed (XML, CSV, and JSON). What's more, there's built in commenting, so you can make your opinion known. Down the road, says state senate CIO Andrew Hoppin, the site will grow to be a tool for preemptive disclosure, as a home for documents and materials previously available only through Freedom of Information Law requests.

Give it a test drive.