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...)