The backlash begins

From Slate.

America's unprecedented showing of financial and emotional support helped the Obama campaign win the Oval Office. It was a beautiful thing. And I really am going to miss seeing "Barack Obama" in my inbox three times a day. But it's high time for us voters to get back to panicking about our 401(k)s. So please stop e-mailing to ask for money. You're president-elect now, Barack. Consider yourself cut-off.

The Audacity of E-mail: Dear Mr. President-elect, please take me off your spam list

Say goodbye to the fail whale?

Twitter downtime has been less of an issue lately, and Wired is claiming that the record site-usage during the election season might mean the site has corrected some of it’s technical problems.

Proving itself capable of handling traffic on one of the biggest days of its existence is an important step for the site, which has yet to nail down a revenue model but is growing rapidly and becoming more mainstream.

The service faced episodic downtime earlier this year, but Stone says they’ve developed a strategy that has been successful in preventing visits from the notorious "fail whale."

“Our approach over the last several months has been to find the weakest point of the system, fix it so it's no longer the weakest, move to the next weakest point and so on. This simple technique has vastly improved performance, reliability and capacity,” said Stone.

Another Election Result: Twitter Comes Through

Obama buys ads in video game

Interesting.

Obama ad appears in Xbox 360 car racing game

Analysis of convention speeches

Chris Wilson at Slate has posted an analysis of the speeches delivered by the candidates for president and vice president at the recent Republican and Democratic conventions.

Conventional wisdom holds that Democrats smile while Republicans attack—and that the speeches at the just-ended conventions reflect that. Yet the four major speeches of the last two weeks—those of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, and John McCain—paint nearly the opposite picture.

The Democratic ticket mentioned McCain far more often than Republicans mentioned Obama. Obama aimed far more barbs at McCain than McCain did at him. And both Biden and Obama paused for applause less often and spoke for less time (though much faster). Meanwhile, both Palin and McCain were careful not to mention the incumbent president's name—or that of his vice president—a single time.

I'm not sure about the methodology of the study and I’m not convinced that mentioning someone else’s name in itself constitutes an attack. Additionally, the information above ignores the fact that Palin led all speakers in the categories of “Barbs aimed at opponent.”

Anyway, it’s a nice start; hopefully more detailed analyses will start popping up elsewhere soon.

Machine translation

When I first started using Yahoo Pipes last year, I set up a Pipe to translate the RSS feed from Le Monde to give myself some practice with the service. It was easy to do, but the machine translation Yahoo offers often leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes the headlines make sense, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes they’re inadvertently humorous or ironic. I think this headline from a few days ago is an example of that last case:

The white House lunatic any agreement on the departure of the American troops of Iraq

Let the Swiftboating begin!

From The New York Times:

Mr. McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr. Bush’s television advertisements.

Here’s the video in question (via the Huffington Post):

"What we decided to do is find the top three international celebrities in the world, and I would say from our indications, Britney and Paris came in second and third," said campaign manager Rick Davis. "Will people think of this as negative advertising? Look, it is the most entertaining thing I have seen on TV in a while." He went on: "It is not our campaign that is trying to make him into an international celebrity. It's his campaign... I don't know Paris Hilton and Britney Spears but they are international celebrities, so, you know, apples to apples."

I would like to think this is going to backfire on the McCain campaign. (Just for the ineptness alone: could the inset shots of Hilton and Spears be any more ham-handed?) Perhaps this time the press won’t let the Republicans control them quite so blatantly.

Tom Brokaw on new media

From this New Yorker profile of Keith Olbermann.

Brokaw calls this moment in the news media “the second big bang.” “We are creating a new universe, and it has all kinds of new laws and science and physics coming into play as well, in this information world,” he told me. “And you’ve got planets out there colliding with each other, new life forms taking shape; others have drifted too close to the sun, and they’ve burned up. And we don’t know how it’s all going to settle down. And it has, now and forevermore, a radiant effect.”

The cries of the Naderesque

One day I hope to be able to unpack an idea like Larry Lessig. In this blog post, he explains his very level-headed reaction to Obama’s vote on the FISA bill.

It was a political mistake for the reasons I’ve already explained: it was self-Swiftboating. This shift is fuel for the inevitable "flip-flop" campaign already being launched by the Right. Their need to fuel this campaign is all the more urgent because of the extraordinary "flip-flops" of their own candidate. So anyone with half a wit about this campaign should have recognized that this shift would be kryptonite for the Barack "is different" Obama image. Just exactly the sort of gift an apparently doomed campaign (McCain) needs.

But again, to say it was a political mistake is not to say it was a mistake of governance. To do right (from the perspective of governance) is often to do wrong (from the perspective of politics). (JFK won a Pulitzer for his book about precisely this point.) So at most, critics like myself can say of this decision that it was bad politics, even if it might well have been good governance. Bad politics because it would be used to suggest Obama is a man of no principle, when Obama is, in my view, a man of principle, and when it is so critical to the campaign to keep that image front and center.

And finally

please, fellow liberals, or leftists, or progressives, get off your high horse(s). More on this with the next post but: it is not "compromising" to recognize that we are part of a democracy. We on the left may be right. We may be the position to which the country eventually gets. But we have not yet earned the status of a majority. And to start this chant of "principled rejection" of Obama because he is not as pure as we is, in a word, idiotic (read: Naderesque).

The immunity hysteria

Restricting Congressional Tweets?

Texas Congressman John Culberson has posted a link to a letter by Michael E. Capuano, the Chair of the Congressional Franking Comission and Congressman from Massachusetts, which Culberson claims will require prior approval for posts to non-governmental websites resulting in

No more live [Qik] videos - no more live Tweets from the House floor or anywhere in the Capitol - no more www communication w/o prior approval

Here is a link to the document. I’ve posted the relevant recommendations below:


I like Culberson, and I wish more of our governmental officials would embrace web communication technologies in the way that he has. However, I wonder if he is overreacting to this document. Unless he is referring to some other as yet unpublished communication, it’s difficult to find the rules he is complaining about in the actual document. The document itself refers explicitly to online video, advocating the establishment of a dedicated congressional channel on a web video site (YouTube, I presume, although the letter isn’t specific) for House members to publish video content. The first and third recommendations would require the videos to be compatible with existing House communication rules, while the second encourages (it doesn’t require) the channel to not show ads, and the fourth suggests the establishment of some kind of rules for posting on non-governmental sites. Those rules all seem sane to me, but here’s Culberson’s take:

Dem "Supreme Soviet" leadership of House would have to approve every Twitter before I could post it!!

I just don’t see that in this document (although more documents might be forthcoming). And, frankly, I find the name-calling and the implication that there is some sort of conspiracy of silence being put in place by the “Dems” a little hard to take from a member of Dick Cheney’s party.

Update: Culberson says:

Look at page two - note each Twitter etc must meet "existing content rules and regulations" that means prior approval/rewrite

However, Culberson notes that this rule applies to almost anything he says, acknowledging that his phone conversations should be censored. Of course, they aren’t censored, making it difficult for me to see how this new ruling about video posts will lead to censored Twitter streams.

Summary of Lessig political reform speech on CNET

CNET’s Caroline McCarthy has posted a summary of one of Lawrence Lessig’s speeches associated with his Change Congress initiative.

“Even though today the individuals [in Congress] are better than the individuals who populated our government in the past, the problem of this corruption is much worse,” Lessig explained. “And it’s much worse because government today is much more significant. It’s first more critical to core national problems...and second, it’s more pervasive. The government’s fingers are everywhere.”
...
But the other big difference between the 19th century’s politics and today’s is what’s making possible Lessig’s mission at Change Congress: Daniel Webster’s America didn't have Wikipedia, WordPress, or Twitter. (It would’ve been kind of cool, though: “Wig shopping with @henryclay, then out to eat. WTF is with these tea prices?”) The Web’s tools have made it possible for far more information to make it into the hands of ordinary citizens, and those citizens in turn can use the Web to band together and work toward democratic action.

The post made me think of George Lakoff’s new book The Political Mind. According to Amazon, the book seems to be a rhetorical look at politics over the last decade or so, focusing on the ways in which pure rationality has failed progressives. I bought a copy yesterday, and I’m excited about reading it.

Political appropriation: “Barack Hussein Napoleon Pol Pot Obama”

I’m in the middle of reading Jeff Rice’s The Rhetoric of Cool, and the section on appropriation made me think of this bit from last Wednesday’s Daily Show:

Writing about appropriation, Rice notes that while it often associated with advertising and commerce—such as the appropriation of youth culture by corporations to sell products—it can also be used

to learn the methods of persuasion conducive to new media (61).

I think Stewart and Co.’s riff on Obama’s “Hussein problem” is an example of this persuasive appropriation. The method is typical of The Daily Show: by taking the right-wing smear campaign aimed at Obama’s middle name to a ridiculous extreme, they show that it is merely ridiculous.

In other news, I’m excited that Stewart and Colbert are on Hulu now. It retrospect, it is easy to see why Hulu beat Jotspot. The service that makes linking and embedding easy is much more likely to catch on online.

Wikipedia joke on 30 Rock

30 Rock had a pretty good Wikipedia joke in its last episode, Subway Hero. Here’s the setup: Tracy sticks a screwdriver in his CD player and has a near-death experience. While in the netherworld, Tracy meets Richard Nixon, and the spirit of our 37th president convinces him that a black man can, in fact, support the GOP. The scene below comes after Tracy and Jack preview a PSA that Tracy has recorded for Jack’s PAC, the Committee to Re-invade Vietnam.

The great thing about the joke is that Nixon seems like the kind of person who would have been really, really worried about what was on his Wikipedia page. And, of course, Tracy is the kind of guy who would try to update Wikipedia with a screwdriver.

Twitter everything, nothing at all

The back story:

UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck was arrested on April 10 without any charges in Egypt for photographing a demonstration.

He used his mobile phone to twitter the message “Arrested” to his 48 followers, who contacted UC Berkeley, the US Embassy and a number of press organizations on his behalf.

The TechCrunch story by Michael Arrington is titled “Twitter Saves Man From Egyptian Justice.” Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider disagrees:

We’re glad James is out of jail, but it seems that Twitter probably didn't spring him—being an American, with access to a cell phone, was probably more important.

So, did Twitter free Buck, or is the hype around the story merely hype? I think the reality is somewhere in between. While I agree with Kafka that the key here is that Buck is an American, it certainly helped him out a lot that he had a cellphone and was able to quickly notify his friends about his situation. He could have done this a number of ways, but he chose to use Twitter. It isn’t clear why he made this choice—maybe a call wasn’t possible?—but he did.

So what role did Twitter actually play in this situation? First, it broadcast the message of his predicament to a number of people at once, making it possible for all of them to agitate for his release and contact others—UC Berkley—who could also agitate for him.

Second, and I think perhaps crucially, Twitter made a permalink of Buck’s cry for help. As they passed on his story to larger organizations, Buck’s friends could point them to the archived version of his post, a fact which I imagine would have made their pleas for help on his behalf more convincing (of course, I have no proof this happened).

Although Buck clearly benefitted from his American citizenship, if Twitter helped him at all, I imagine it was in these two ways.

Nader gets pwned

From Figaro:

The rumpled crusader maintains that that his campaign shouldn’t affect the outcome at all. But it’ll jack up his ego like a pimped-out Corvair.

Figaro interviewed Nader in 2000, months before he denied Democrats a win in the crucial Florida balloting. When Figaro asked if someone put a gun to his head and told him to vote for either Gore or Bush, which he would choose, Nader answered without hesitation: “Bush.” Al Gore, he said, had “totally betrayed” his environmental stand. “If you want the parties to diverge from one another,” Nader continued, “have Bush win.”

Mission accomplished.

Lessig ‘08

Lawrence Lessig has launched a website, Lessig08.org, featuring a video where he explains

the launch of two exploratory projects—first, a Change Congress movement, and second, my own decision whether to run for Congress in the California 12th.

via O’Reilly Radar

More on Lessig for Congress

From TechCrunch

With the death of California Representative Tom Lantos on Monday, a special election will be held in April to fill his seat in Congress. Will Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig run? Already on Facebook, a “Draft Lessig for Congress” group has formed (with 554 members as of this posting). Lessig, who has long been a champion of Free Culture as a lecturer, intellectual property lawyer, and CEO of Creative Commons, has recently turned his attention to corruption. (He has a wiki about corruption here). In fact, his last lecture on Free Culture, which he has been giving for ten years, was on January 31.

People are making lots of hay out of the fact that Lessig registered the domain name “Change-Congress.com,” but to me this just sounds like preparation for his new work on government corruption.

Although I’m a fan of Lessig’s and I think he would make a great legislator, I wonder whether he would be interested in this post. It seems to me that he could have more influence on government as an outsider, and he wouldn’t feel the constant pressure to campaign that would hound him if he were an elected official.

Lessig gossip

Rumor has it Lawrence Lessig might be running for congress.

Lessig on supporting Obama: Character and integrity

Jim Brown at the Blogora recently posted a link to this video by Lawrence Lessig on why he supports Obama over Clinton. One of the main reasons Lessig prefers Obama is that he conducts himself with more character and integrity than Clinton. That point reminded me of Paul Krugman’s repeated comments on Bush’s lack of integrity during his 2000 campaign

Do you remember all the up-close-and-personals about George W. Bush, and what a likeable guy he was? Well, reporters would have had a much better fix on who he was and how he would govern if they had ignored all that, and focused on the raw dishonesty and irresponsibility of his policy proposals.

Lessig makes a pretty convincing argument Obama is running a more credible campaign than Clinton.

Texting for democracy

The CNET News Blog posted this story on a report by researchers from the University of Michigan and Princeton that claims text-messaging young voters before an election makes them “significantly more likely to vote than those who didn't receive a text message reminder.”

According to the description, in the study students were text-messaged reminders before the election, and in the group that received reminders participation was up 4.2%. However, there is no indication that the researchers called or emailed control groups to see what role text-messaging actually played in the increase. Another point: according to the press release, the real authors of the study were the Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project, a nonprofit, and Working Assets, a cell phone company; the two were assisted by doctoral students from Michigan and Princeton. All told, the buzz around this story strikes me as ill-considered. Even though the headline reads “Texting boosts young voter turnout,” the substance of the report seems closer to “Reminders boost young voter turnout, but only by a little.”