Online video

I wanted to talk a little about the online video our guest speakers talked about. I was really amazed at the quality of videos it's possible to put online at this point. The availability of easy-to-use video editing software is clearly an important innovation, but one of the things that has really made online video possible is the incredible growth of broadband internet access. This goes back to the articles we read about the spread of different technologies in third-world countries. As technology improves and spreads, the role that technology plays in democratic processes will grow. However, the digital divide between those that have broadband and those that don't will grow as well. As political managers, we should be careful that we don't become so enamored of shiny new technologies that we depend on features that are inaccessible to most of our voters.

Social pressure to follow the law

One interesting aspect of the Lessig/IP law issue is one studied extensively by sociologists and legal scholars: what forms of influence lead people to follow laws? Fear of punishment is one, of course, but many laws (like traffic speed limits) can be difficult to enforce without a prohibitively large law enforcement presence.

IP laws are of this type. The prospect of actually catching even a significant proportion of law breakers is miniscule. Sure, you can punish a few people severely (12-year-olds sued for tens of millions of dollars), but people may be willing to take the chance that they won't be in the .0001% of law breakers punished. This makes laws like speed limits and copyrights hard to enforce.

One non-law enforcement way to get people to follow a law is through social pressures to follow laws because, well, they're the law. Sociologists have seen this most clearly with seat belt laws. People feel a duty to wear their seatbelt because it's illegal not to. Sure, there are still people who don't buckle up, but seat belt laws have done far more to increase belt usage than public safety ad campaigns about how seat belts will save your life.

For this reason, the RIAA and MPAA to publicize the illegality of piracy may be one of the most effective ways to get people to stop piracy. Most people don't really like breaking the law, and will go through a legal route if they can. Emphasizing the illegality of the process may further deter people from downloading music illegally. An understanding of the most effective ways to get people to follow the law is critical to reducing piracy of intellectual property.

IP law saves lives (sometimes)

As discussed in the previous post, the original goal of IP law was to encourage innovation and creativity for the good of society. When we think about IP these days, we mostly think of copyrights for artistic creations: movies, music, books, etc. However, some of the greatest benefits of intellectual property laws comes in the realm of scientific and technological innovations. The incentive provided by the possibility of profiting from tremendous advances in engineering, medicine and information technology has produced some of the greatest achievements of our modern society. One of these achievements is modern pharmaceuticals to help treat and even cure terrible diseases.

However, we must remember the original goal of IP laws: the benefit of society. Patents for new medicines encourage companies to invest in finding new drugs to treat diseases. But when those treatments are so valuable that the market price for them makes them unattainable for most people who need the drugs, are society's interests really served by maintaining an absolutist stance on the inviolability of intellectual property? How are society's interests served by the deaths of 17 million Africans, when we have the AIDS drugs to treat them? Are our current laws really fulfilling the goals of IP law, or just filling the pockets of big corporations?

The purpose of IP law

I've always found Lessig's explanation of the history of intellectual property law to be quite persuasive: that copyrights were not invented to ensure that artists make as much money as they can off of their creations, but rather to provide enough of an incentive to create new ideas that the creative process does indeed continue. Fundamentally, copyrights are not for the benefit of the artist (or distributor, or whatever); rather, they are for the benefit of society. Providing limited ownership to creative products provides that incentive; however, copyright law shouldn't be extended past the point at which it increases the creative output of society.

(This is certainly very different than our typical capitalist approach to property rights, but I think Lessig is right that this was the original rational for IP law in the western legal tradition.)

Inflammatory campaign rhetoric: nothing new

Reading through the IPDI report on online political videos, my only thought is that, fundamentally, this isn't anything new. Yes, it's in a new medium, and has a further reach, and is therefore a revolution in the scale of such things. However, the rhetoric described in the article is nothing you wouldn't see in a direct mail piece, or an anonymous flier distributed the weekend before an election. American politics has a tradition of inflammatory, hurtful, and destructive rhetoric in its campaigns, much of it in mail or other forms that rarely catch the attention of the media, and so are rarely scrutinized. Just because such messages are put online does not herald a new low in American politics.

Another thought on censorship

Thinking further about the Chinese censorship study, one line in the conclusion caught my eye:"The state employs a sophisticated infrastructure that ... tolerates overblocking as the price of preventing access to prohibited sites."

This reminds me of the battles in the 1990s over censoring obscene material from the internet in order to prevent children from finding it. Some schemes involved some sort of age verification requirement; others required libraries and other public computing facilities to put filtering software on their computers to prevent patrons from using them to look at lewd material. Inevitably, these filters filtered out too much--there were stories about people not being able to find information about cancer because the webpages had the word "breast" on them. In the end, the filtering schemes failed because Americans weren't willing to "tolerate overblocking as the price of preventing access to prohibited sites."

Internet censorship

I was surprised by the level of censorship the OpenNet Initiative found in China. Not because I didn't think the Chinese government was that interested in limiting its citizens' access to information; clearly, every totalitarian regime wants to ensure that its citizens only know what the regime wants them to know.

No, I was surprised because I didn't know that the Internet was that censorable. We hear all of these claims of "free information" and the decentralized nature of the internet making it impossible to control. Well, clearly, the Chinese have found a way to control it. How can we be sure our own government will never decide to do the same? PATRIOT Act III, anyone?

Credit card market failures

There's an interesting market failure at work in the micropayment credit card situation, as described in Big Bucks in Micropayment. The problem is that the incentive to minimize the number of credit card transactions (transaction fees) is not paid by the person deciding how many transactions to make (the customer). I go to Starbucks every day at spend $1.87 on a cup of coffee, and pay with my debit card. How much money does Starbucks actually make off of that? Not much--but what incentive do I have to remember to re-fill my Starbucks card on a regular basis, minimizing the number of credit company transactions? Not a lot.

The rise of micropayment-focused companies fixes this failure of the market, because they act on the merchant side. The customer rarely sees the micropayment company (except for PayPal). When I buy a song off iTunes, I use an iTunes interface to do it. The customer doesn't have to do anything differently, while the merchant saves a little money. The free market does work eventually, even if it's sometimes a little slow.

Micropayments

The first problem I see with Jakob Nielsen's micropayment for webpages scheme is that I, and probably many other people, are pretty unwilling to pay for something I haven't seen yet. Yeah, it's only a few cents, but if I'm doing research for a school paper, I'm sure I can go through a couple hundred webpages, if only quickly clicking there to see if it has any information I need. I suppose pages could have a summary that a reader could look at before deciding to pay, but that puts a significant extra step in the browsing experience.

Personally, I prefer the Salon model, where you watch a 30 second commercial for a pass for the whole day. I probably look at Salon once every couple of months, and if I follow a link there I'm usually happy to let the commercial play before viewing the site. Once I have a day pass, I can read as much as I want for 24 hours. No worries about whether the content I'm going to get is worth letting a commercial play in the background before viewing the site.

Obsolete industries

Clearly, the story of RCA's involvement in the history of FM radio as discussed in Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture bears similarity to the role of the RIAA and MPAA in this century's battles over digital media rights. The business of the distributors of movies and music are threatened by new distribution channels, whether legal or illegal. Who needs a music label when you can sell your new CD online yourself? RCA is no longer a major force in American radio; someday the major record labels will have been made obsolete by emerging technological developments.

Um, y'all realize this is satire, right?

There seems to be some confusion about the "The African-American Blogging Thing" post on XX Blog. You all know it's satire, right? I wouldn't point it out, 'cause it always sucks to be the person pointing out a joke everyone else already got, but it's listed under the category of "Race and Ethnicity" in the syllabus, and the other posts I've read on the topic seem to take it seriously.

The post is satire. Go back and read it. Now go read this post on BOP News titled "The Woman Blogging Thing". The latter was written during the most recent (but surely not the last!) kerfluffle about why there aren't any women bloggers. (Answer: There are plenty of women bloggers, men just don't bother to read them. Mmmm....sexism....)

This piece from XX Blog isn't about race and the blogosphere. It's about gender and the blogosphere. The author's point is that Matt Stoller's musings on gender are sexist, but it's hard to notice the sexism unless it's placed in a context in which we're all more attuned to bias and discrimination, like racism. The same sentiments which are taken as legitimate arguments when said about women seem deeply insensitive and out of place when said about African-Americans. Nothing in this post should be taken as opinions or thoughts or facts about race.

Agree or disagree with the blogger, but that's what this post is about.

How'd I figure this out? Well, first, I'd read the "women blogging" piece when it was first written lo these many months ago, and this one seemed a little familiar. But mostly, I read the first two comments on the assigned post. Commenter one notes the similarity and politely asks about plagiarism, commenter two points to the satire.

The value of professionals

Jakob Nielsen's article points to an important aspect of why, despite the easy availability of 16 year old volunteers around to build a campaign website, campaigns should use professionals to design their online communications tools. A volunteer may be free, but how many amateur designers know everything they need to know about designing an accessible website? For political campaigns, it is vital that all voter, of all ability levels, feel valued and heard by the campaign. A professional web developer (should) know how to build a website that makes it accessible for all users. The chance that a volunteer will do the same is quite slim.

Rural Electrification redux

The Economist article about mobile phones vs. internet access confirmed for me something I've noticed about American efforts to improve internet access, both in rural America and in the third world.

America is one of the most wired countries in the world. And when I say "wired", I mean literal wires--we all have several different kinds of wires going into our houses. Most have electric, telephone, and cable.

All of those wires are very expensive, especially the "last mile" to individual houses in low-density communities.

All these wires are a vestige of early 20th century public policy--FDR's Depression era rural electrification project, the Bell telephone monopolies, created as an incentive to lay telephone lines to every house, etc.

Because we already have wires leading to our houses (specifically, cable and telephone wires) that can carry digital signals to our computers, Americans assume that this is how all telecommunications happens--over wires. It's cheap for Comcast to add cable internet as a service, because the wires, the infrastructure, is already there.

This is not true for most of the world. Technology has reached a point that we do not need wires to carry digital information. Cellular, WiFi, and soon WiMax make wires obsolete. Sure, there are infrastructure requirements for each of those, but they don't require a physical connection between every computer and a wire in a wall. The "last mile" can now be reached with one cellular tower, rather than wires to each home.

As the Economist article demonstrates, the most useful telecommunications advances in the third world are going to be those that rely on modern patterns of infrastructure. We don't need another "rural electrification" scheme to wire up Africa. Africa can skip the wires all together and go straight for cell phones and wireless internet. First-world investment, while necessary, should not be focused on recreating American-style patterns of technology usage. Better to let Africa develop on its own path without wasting money on outdated infrastructure.

Blogging the Virginia races

The Post has an interesting article up on its website tonight about blogs focusing on the Virginia 2005 campaigns. These blogs function as "influentials" for the Virginia political community. Voters and activists go to them to find out what they should think about the campaigns in their own communities. One candidate, David Englin, credits the blogs with helping him win his primary, but has also been a victim of a smear campaign by one of the local blogs. The campaigns realize that getting the influentials of the blog world on board with their candidate is a key step towards winning the November election.

Influentials as information filters

The idea of "influentials" has always fascinated me. It's one of those concepts that, upon learning about it, seems relevant to nearly every aspect of our information-saturated age. Of course, that's probably not quite true, but I think the concept of influentials is particularly relevant to those parts of our lives that require large amounts of detailed information in order to make a decision. Need to know what kind of mp3 player to buy? Well, my boyfriend knows a lot about computers and gadgets, and he loves his iPod, so it's probably a good one. Wondering who to vote for? Your daughter or friend who works in politics and follows the campaigns closely knows a lot about politics and has a lot of the same values as you, so might as well ask her.

In a way, influentials act as human information agreggators, not unlike a search engine. The internet exploded in both complexity and usefulness with the advent of search engines, especially Google, because they were a way to get only the information a web surfer was looking for. The best search engines are those that figure out what pages are relevant and which aren't, and deliver helpful information to the user. Influentials are those people that their friends and family members know that they can go to for useful information about everything from consumer electronics to politics. Influentials must be good at figuring out what information in relevant to the person looking for their advice, and must know the most helpful way to present it. In our information-saturated lives, people who can help us sort through it all play key roles in modern life.

Congressional Portals

One idea for making Congressional website more relevant and useful to their constituents is making them portals to the federal government's online presence. This is similar to the way congressional offices function in the real world--as advocates and guides for navigating the federal bureaucracy. A good congressional website should do the same thing in cyberspace, providing constituents guidance in finding information online from the federal government. This would encourage people to see congressional websites as places they can go for useful information.

Congressional email: an intern's view

Needless to say, Congress could do much to improve its handling and use of constituent email. When I was a congressional intern last year, I got to spend many quality hours with our office constituent email system. Two necessary changes jumped out at me:

• Take advantage of the paperless nature of email
  At our office, we printed out every email that came into the office through the constituent feedback form on the website and distributed the paper copy with the rest of the regular mail. The mail database system was set up in such a way that emails could be automatically filed electronically, but no, each one was printed out on paper and handed to an LA.


• Answer an email with an email
  These days, email is an acceptible way of communicating a message, even a formal one. A representative obviously shouldn't respond to a handwritten letter with an email; he would seem as if he couldn't take the time to make a proper reply to a letter. But it is perfectly polite to respond to an email with another email. At the office I worked in, however, we responded to every communication, even email, with an actual physical letter. We could have save a lot of time and money not printing, folding, sealing, and mailing a response to all of the emails that our office received. As email has become a common way of communicating, congressional offices should use the effeciency email provides to communicate with their constituents.

Effective Synergy

One thing that surprised me in the CNN piece about voter mobilization was the anecdote from the Kerry volunteer about having previously unknown volunteers show up at his office to phone bank. It turns out that the national campaign actually sent an email to the local volunteers and told them about this opportunity.

This blows my mind. I was signed up for Kerry's email list for at least 18 months, and never got a locally focused email. I definitely received announcements from the VA coordinated, but never anything from the national campaign targeted to me as a Virginia voter. Now granted, Virginia wasn't a swing state, but I would think that the DC area would be rich with volunteers for phone banking and road trips.

Perhaps things in Ohio were different, but I never saw any evidence of online-offline coordination during my time on the Kerry email list.

Low-tech problems

The problems in the Kerry campaign that James Verini describes in his Salon article are remarkable in their low-tech-ness. According the Verini, the campaign didn't fail because it didn't have the capability to automatically update it's voter targeting database every day, or the webpage was poorly designed, or his online outreach strategy was faulty. No, the biggest problem was uninformed and directionless volunteers. Anyone who has coordinated volunteers for a campaign knows that this is a common problem. However, it's a failure of people, not of technology.

The solution to bad volunteers is better training, more staff, and a good volunteer coordinator who knows who to send door-to-door, who to put on the phone, and who to keep in the back corner stuffing envelopes. Technology will only solve so many problems for campaigns; an experienced and competent staff will take care of far more.

Technology changes fast...But not that fast...

I'm a little baffled by the Frank Watkins piece. It contains a good discussion of targeting, which is quickly becoming far more sophisticated and integral to good campaigning than it was even four years ago. However, most of the other discussion of the Jackson campaign's use of technology is incredibly dated. He hopes soon to create a "HomePage" for his congressional office? They used a database of phone numbers to do phone banking? Good things in 1995, and I assumed that the piece was written shortly after that campaign. But the link to the piece from Emi's homepage says it's from a 2004 publication.

Surely a republication, right? This wasn't really written last year? If it was, our party is in far more trouble than I thought.

Assuming this article is indeed from the dark ages of the mid-90s, the most interesting thing is the speed at which different techonologies have developed. 2004 was the first year that a campaign's targeting scheme varied much from the Jackson campaign's. The kind of thinking Watkins reports going through was quite similar to the strategies I saw used by small campaigns' direct mail campaigns in 2004.

Electronic communications, however, have been revolutionized in the last decade. Faxes? Do people use faxes any more? Watkins discusses the usefulness of bookmarks in an internet browser? Uh, great...but if you asked a modern computer user to name the 50 most useful things about their computer and the internet, I doubt bookmarks would make the list. It's interesting that some elements of campaigns can stay so constant while other change so rapidly.

Cell phone privacy

I thought our discussion in class tonight was interesting on the topic of what information is appropriate to ask of supporters and volunteers. Emi seemed to think that a campaign should ask for more than an email address, but when we got to the Bush site, the consensus seemed to be that it was unreasonble for the campaign to require supporters to enter their house addresses. So what should a campaign ask for?

Personally, I'm perfectly willing to give an email address (that's what my extra Gmail account is for) and my home address--I get a ton of political mail already, what's a little more?

But a phone number? Absolutely not. Like a lot of people in my generation, I only have a cell phone. And I hate--hate!--getting calls from people I don't know on it. I would never enter it on a form on a campaign website. If it was required, I'd enter a fake number.

So, what's the right balance between asking for enough contact information to make it worthwhile, without asking for so much that people begin to give fake (and thus worse than useless) answers?

"You don't really need to worry about your website"

I spent my day today at Campaigns and Elections Magazine's annual campaign training seminar. At the direct mail seminar this morning, one of the speakers (from the Republican firm of Political Solutions) was reviewing the various campaign media and their strengths and weaknesses. TV is OK if you have a lot of money and a general message you want everyone to hear, radio is good for a low-budget campaign, etc. The last one he mentioned was the campaign website, as an afterthought, and said, "As far as your website, not many voters will see your website and emails are only as good as the list you've got, so you really don't need to spend much time or money on your website."

Now, there's a serious debate to be had about whether the internet is a persuasion medium or just a mobilization medium, but I was shocked to hear a consultant from a prestigious consulting firm dismiss websites so cavalierly. Not just "websites have their weaknesses", but "you don't need to worry about your website or spend much money on it at all."

So, Emi, I see what you're up against in the real world :) With luck, perhaps it will be better by the time we're all out there running campaigns...

Dear Senator Kerry: Stop begging me for money!

I know others have mentioned this in the past, but I was reminded of the unbelievable annoyingness of the Kerry campaign's fundrasing appeals last fall while reading Jacob Neilsen's review of the Bush and Kerry newsletters. He mentioned that both campaigns spent most of their content on asking for volunteers and money, which is fine, but my memory of the Kerry emails is that about 80% were focused on asking for money. They might mention a speech Kerry made before, but they got down to the business of begging for bucks within a few sentences. I remember many people mentioning that they felt like human ATM machines.

The Kerry campaign's biggest mistake, I think, was in failing to connect donations to any particular goal. The DNC recently held a fundraiser to send professional staff to the state parties of four particular states won by Bush in 2004. Supporters were told that if they raised $250,000, they would send a certain number of staff to help build state parties in these states, a big priority for many Democrats. They blew through the goal, doubled it, and blew through it again. Democrats support building state parties, so they were willing to give money to that particular need.

Kerry's appeals tended to be of the "Did you see what outragous thing Bush said yesterday? We need your money to beat him!" without telling supporters exactly how they were going to reach that goal. Donors, especially small donors, are much more willing to donate when they feel like their money is being used wisely. The best way to assure them of this is by telling them how it's being used.

(Assuming, of course, that you're spending your campaign budget wisely. If you're not, probably best not to mention it...)

Young donors

One interesting aspect of online fundraising that the IPDI report mentions is the fact that, overall, internet users are younger than the general population, heavy internet users are even younger, and your typical off-line political donor tends to be older than the population average.

One might interpret this data to mean that the internet would be a poor medium for fundraising, as the people who tend to donate money to campaigns do not use the internet in large numbers. However, recent experience with online fundraising shows that this assumption would be wrong.

The internet didn't just make it easier for anyone with a credit card to donate to a campaign; it brought the idea of donating to a new audience of young citizens in the medium with which they are most confortable. I'm as likely to buy a book from Amazon.com as from my local Border's. I get nearly all of my news and information from the internet. Communicating with my generation through TV ads or direct mail may work to a certain extent, but doesn't it make sense to reach a community throught the medium they spend the most time with? Online donation systems meet young donors where they are, making it far more likely that they'll choose to become involved.

Money Money Money

I'm continually blown away by the amount of money candidates and parties and outside interests can raise on the internet. After the recent kerfluffle about top Democratic fundraisers deserting the DNC because Howard Dean wasn't paying enough attention to them, Atrios put up a fundraising link to raise money for the DNC, with the message being that Dean still has significant fundraising prowess, even if it's not with the party's traditional high-dollar donors.

Between 9:00 on Wednesday evening and 1:15 Saturday afternoon, he and other bloggers linking to his DNC ePatriots page raised $53,925.72 from 1213 people. That's over $50,000 dollars in less than 72 hours, with an average donation of a little over $45 dollars. No plan for the money, or particular motivation, except to support Dean's chairmanship. And, of course, about 7 months after an incredibly expensive presidential campaign that raised record amounts of money from these same low-dollar donors.

$50,000 isn't a huge amount in politics, of course, but it's nothing to sneeze at, either. And the effortlessness with which it was raised is a key part of the efficiency of internet fundraising. No direct mail pleas, no fundraising dinners with bad catered food, no phone time, nothing. Just some computer servers and credit card processing fees.

The DNC deserves credit for enabling this sort of organizing and donating with its ePatriot pages, which allow people to set up their own fundraising pages to send friends and family to, and to track the amount of money they've raised. It's a good way to get people involved in the party, even if they're just raising a few hundred dollars from some friends. Or, if they have a widely read blog with readers who like Howard Dean!

Blogging in the Park

OK, this is pretty cool: Alexandria is opening a free wireless internet network for the King Street corridor. It's geared to people who want to use their laptops at outdoor cafes or public parks. There are apparently plans in the works to do similar things in Arlington, Montgomery County, and on the National Mall.

Other cities, like Philadelphia, have drawn up plans to blanket an entire city with wireless internet, and sell access to it to residents like a public utility. It would cost much less than high-speed internet from current commercial sources (I've heard about $10-$15/month for a subscription) and would be available anywhere you went in the city.

I'm absurdly excited about this. The prospect of sitting in a park and doing my homework? Some day, having a wireless connection anywhere I go? Who would oppose that?

Well, Congressman Pete Sessions, for one. He's introduced a bill that would prohibit any governmental entity from offering a telecommunications service to residents if a similar service is available from a commercial source. He claims it's "unfair competition".

My feeling is, if Arlington County can provide me with wireless internet anywhere in the city for less than what I pay Comcast right now for broadband internet just in my house, why shouldn't voters be able to choose to allocate our tax dollars in that way? If Comcast offered a subscription to wireless anywhere in Arlington, or the DC area, for a reasonable price, I'd pay for it, but they don't.

A government shouldn't prohibit private companies from offering whatever services they'd like for whatever price they can get, but I want my cheap, universally available internet now, damn it!

Kos v. IPDI: The Smackdown Part II

OK, this is getting ridiculous. Kos' response is here.

Threatening emails? Tattling on bloggers to the FEC? This is one of the things that bugs me about the blogosphere (yes, I realize that Carol isn't a blogger, but this is a classic blogosphere spat). It seems like bloggers spend half their time getting in ridiculous little feuds, and the longer they go on, the less they matter, and the less mature the participants become. Yes, Kos said a bad word. Bad Kos. But did Carol really need to go to the FEC? I think Kos' email was dumb, but couldn't she just have posted a response on IPDI's website?

The blogosphere has a lot of potential to revolutionize politics, but not if it keeps getting bogged down in stuff like this.

Dean's Demise

I was very interested in Jonah's comments about Dean's campaign last night. As an occasional Dean volunteer (with family members who were much more involved) I would say that the biggest weakness was the lack of geographical local-ness of the Dean network. The Meetups were great--they were a chance to talk to your neighbors about Dean and the issues in your community. The letter-writing and bus loads of volunteers to Iowa were a disaster--Iowans don't really care what New Yorkers think. More importantly, local volunteers have a real credibility advantage when it comes to talking to voters. People always trust a stranger more if he or she seems like "someone like me".

The campaign's greatest strength, I think, was the level at which it made supporters feel truely empowered and listened to. My mom has voted straight Democratic tickets for as long as she could vote, and comes from a very liberal family. Politics is important to her. But she'd never given money to a campaign, never volunteered, never canvassed, never gone to a local party meeting. But she did all of that with the campaign, and was a Dean delagate to the state nominating convention. She's continued her involvement after the campaign by becoming an active (as in, attending meetings and volunteering) member of the local ACLU.

The Dean campaign changed my mom from a solid Dem voter into to an activist. That's the true value of non-hierarchical campaign models.

People networks

I found Grimmelmann's article comparing file sharing networks and terrorism networks to be quiet interesting, particularly in its metaphor of people as a computer network. Just as a hacker disrupts safegards on computers and infiltrates computer networks, terrorists disrupt the people-network of daily life and infiltrates our human communities.

As technology has developed over the last 20 years, computers have moved from being machines that complete tasks that would take humans a long time to do otherwise (complicated math problems, word processing, data management) to machines that allow people to get information from physically distant sources. Computers don't do much "computing" anymore--perhaps a more accurate term for them would be "networkers".

Ahead of my time!

Well, I already blogged about organizing through text message here, but one interesting thing I found about the Economist article about the money-making possibilities of mobile phones was the issue of advertising to phones.

Now, I am second to no one in my hatred of email spam. But the only thing that could be more annoying than spam? Ads on my cell phone! Because when I get that new-message beep, I'll definitely have warm and fuzzy feelings for the company or campaign that felt the need to interrupt my day with their message. It's one thing to advertise to people when they're actively using a medium for communication or entertainment, but to bother them when they're going about their daily lives? There's a reason telemarketers are universally reviled...

I fervently hope that campaigns never feel the need to jump on this bandwagon. Actually, I hope the bandwagon breaks down before it makes it to the end of the driveway....

(Ah, the beauty of bad metaphors...)

Kos vs. IPDI: the smackdown

Yesterday, Kos had a couple of posts up that hit a little close to home: criticizing GSPM's own Carol Darr's comments to the FEC on whether bloggers should be regulated as political expenditures under campaign finance laws. You can read her comments (submitted on behalf of IPDA) here, and Kos' comments here, here, and here.

I have to agree with Kos on this one: I can design my own fliers promoting the candidate of my choice, print them up at Kinko's, and stand on the street corner handing them out to passersby without any government regulation--how is that different than having a blog? Payments from campaigns to bloggers must be disclosed in the campaign's quarterly expense reports, just like payments to any other consultant. James Carville and Paul Begala consulted for Kerry while hosting "Crossfire" on CNN. If a blog is run by a campaign, than it should be treated as any other campaign expenditure. But independent bloggers that declare their support for one candidate or another should be treated the same as any private citizen doing the same on the street corner.

There's also an important difference between television and the internet when it comes to regulation: access to television is limited by the amount of broadcast spectrum set aside by the FCC for television, and the monopoly rights that stations hold on that spectrum. The internet, on the other hand, has very low barriers to entry. There is no practical limit on the number of websites that can exist, and starting a page is a low-cost (or free!) task. I can't start my own TV show tomorrow--but I'm a blogger!

The Mystery Meat Plague

I'm glad I finally have a name for what annoys me so much about this site.

It shouldn't take me 10 minutes to find the locations of your stores! Please, Chipotle, free us from mysterious rings of tortilla chips and avocados!

Rapid Response

One of the more interesting uses of new technology in the political world I've seen lately sadly (or, well, maybe not so sadly) did not get to be implemented. (At least not yet, anyway.)

In the run-up to the Senate nuclear option, PFAW asked its members to sign up for text-message notification at the exact moment that Frist pulled the trigger. The messages would have included the Senate switchboard number, and with a push of a button, PFAW members would have been immediately linked to their Senators' offices, ready to register their opposition to the Republican majority's actions.

Having worked with the software that many advocacy groups here in DC use for their email Action Alerts, I can understand why PFAW decided to look for new technology for this particular need. Depending on the complexity of the message (how many pieces of information like the name of the recipient's Senator or a phone number that have to be pulled from a database and matched by zip code) it can take up to 12 hours to send 120,000 email messages. Moreover, many people only check their email once or twice a day. As long as the "rapid" in "rapid response" means "in the next week or so", email can be an effective way to mobilize an interest group's members.

However, PFAW clearly needed something quicker. The key events of the nuclear option were going to happen quickly, within a few hours, and PFAW needed to show how many people felt strongly about preserving the filibuster within that time frame. The use of cell phone text messaging, with an automatic link to the Senate switchboard, was an inspired use of technology for political communication.

Too bad we didn't get to see it in action...

Diversity online

While many of Sunstein's observations seem intuitively reasonable, Jenkins does a good job of showing how "broadcast" and "narrowcast" media will work together to expand the ways that information is communicated. One problematic part of Sunstein's analysis, however, is his evaluation of diversity in the real world, as compared to online diversity.

While it may be true that the internet allows people to filter out opinions that disagree with their own, Sunstein overestimates the exposure that many people have to opposing viewpoints in other parts of life. Indeed, many people who live in homogenous communities, especially small or rural communities, may find more intellectual and political diversity in their internet wanderings than they would walking down the street, talking to their neighbors, or reading the local paper. National news takes a broader view, of course, but can three corporate networks really be considered "diverse"?