techPresident - YouTube - Comments

Whether there will be more

Nancy Scola — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:52:38 -0500

Agree, it's powerful stuff. I've put the question to the Senate staff behind this, and will let you know what (if anything) I hear.

thank you

Silona — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:43:37 -0500

What a valuable insight.

Good I hope she keeps up with them. Any word on her doing these weekly?

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Silona.com
transparentfederalbudget.com
leagueoftechvoters.org
change.wikia.com (a versioning wiki of change.gov)

From a communications theory perspective ...

JonPincus — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:46:37 -0500

One way to think of it is that there are two signals being mixed together here. OFQ's user interaction encourages people to give their opinion of random questions, and with almost 50,000 people involved already that potentially creates a very diverse pool of participants that's a reasonable proxy for online opinion. At the same time, there are organized campaigns trying to influence the votes for and against particular questions or topics -- Bob's is one example, there's another here.

Whether or not links are permitted, it's easy enough to track how successful the various campaigns are and there's useful data about the relative influence of difference authors and sites. For example, Bob's idea was moving very slowly until Ari and then you picked it up. And since Bob's quesions recent rapid rise (from under 100 last night to almost 700 last time I checked, and a word-for-word copy in Foreign Policy has another 350 votes) isn't paralleled by the leading "special prosecutor" idea, it probably reflects the coverage more than voters' opinions. Useful stuff. But you don't need links for it.

And without links questions from those of us who don't have widely-read bloggers writing about us still have a chance. The extra work of having to type in the search term keeps "effective organizing/friends in the media" signal from overpowering the other one.

More generally, Ideas for Change on change.org has very different goals than OFQ on change.gov; and OFQ isn't a discussion system (although it would be very interesting to complement it with something like Yahoo! Answers). For the goal of discovering questions that a lot of people would like answers to, you don't need that extra functionality, and it would arguably get in the way. More is not always better.

jon -- http://talesfromthe.net/jon

re

cle50000 — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:25:25 -0500

thx for that interessting story. I am not realy suprised that besides Obama someone else uses social media for its PR. On twitter they are almost always in the search results 1st page when I look for #gaza, so they get attention. QassamCount is impressing to me.

www.clemens.blogs.com

Here's where I disagree...

Nancy Scola — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:22:47 -0500

Respectfully, of course, Jon. :) OFQ has so little internal navigation that providing links from the outside would, I think, be a way to wade through the sea of questions on any one topic. Take a search for "gay" that I just ran as a sample query. It returned almost five hundred questions -- more than I could reasonably be expected to evaluate. Add to that the fact that without a discussion mechanism like, say, Change.org is using for its Ideas for Change, there's little context for deciding which of the questions have merit. Social tools have flaws, no doubt, but it seems counterintuitive to what we know to respond by stripping them out, rendering us a bit blind in what's supposed to be a marketplace of ideas. I appreciate the idea that links open the possibility of winning through exposure, but OFQ is already online and the format's not immediately intuitive -- so it's not as if this is truly a mechanism for diving the will of the whole of the American people.

It depends

JonPincus — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:13:49 -0500

Organizing support for your interests is a hallmark of democracy, and Open for Questions would be well served by building in the potential to rally the troops.

The ability to link to an individual question would give disproportionate power to bloggers and organizations with large email lists, so if the goal of Open for Questions is to get a measurement of who can organize most effectively, then this functionality would be useful. On the other hand, if the goal is to get relatively-unfiltered input from internet users as a whole (as a proxy for Americans’ opinion), then it’s a good choice not to allow linking.

Even without the links, the pace of votes for Bob's question -- and the multiple copies that people have submitted in different categories -- accelerated significantly after Ari's piece and this post. If I were running OfQ, I'd be looking at the compare-and-contrast between this and other special prosecutor questions (for example, Kaija’s “Will you please have a special prosecutor investigate Bush and Cheney for the laws they have broken? Please don’t let this pass”, which has over 800 votes in the Economy section) as a way of assessing how broad the sentiment for a special prosecutor is. If Bob's question once again shoots to the top at the expense of other questions, that's potentially an indication of high-profile coverage and effective organizing rather than broad support.

jon -- http://talesfromthe.net/jon

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So many people just use

johannabartley — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 07:27:49 -0500

So many people just use logos they find on the internet without caring about any copyright law. When it comes to politics there have been fliers made up with a party's logo payed and printed by another party, used to discredit the image of the first party.
___________
Payroll Services

A strange design decision by change.org

JonPincus — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:57:03 -0500

Since yesterday, change.org got rid the list of top 10 user-rated ideas from their site, leaving the "featured ideas" (presumably chosen by change.org). Yesterday we could see that Get FISA Right, repeal the PATRIOT Act, and restore our civil liberties was up to #8; today there's no indication.

I must be missing something here. The whole point of the site is user feedback. Why not recognize it? And many of change.org's partners on this understand the value of transparency in other contexts ... why not here?

jon -- http://talesfromthe.net/jon

I don't understand the

rabq — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 06:23:06 -0500

I don't understand the essence of the problem here.

Devon
JibJab Member

YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle

stustu12 — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:18:14 -0400

Micah,

This is great stuff! I hope you will submit a paper to the workshop next spring in Amherst:

http://www.umass.edu/polsci/youtube/

--
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Massachusetts Amherst
http://people.umass.edu/stu/
stu@polsci.umass.edu

Editor, Journal of Information Technology and Politics
http://www.jitp.net

There is a more personal way coming soon ...

richsr — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:07:37 -0400

So, instead of using text messages (aka "SMS" for Short Message Service) you can use MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) for images, audio video & rich text. Soon we will see such announcements including images and a personal audio message, maybe even a short MMS video. -Rich Sr./Cellyspace.com

Barack just emailed me a link to Michelle's speech

stevegarfield — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:28:23 -0400

Barack just emailed me a link to Michelle's speech:

http://my.barackobama.com/michelle

The Google sponsored link still only goes to a preview.

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Steve Garfield
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Have you found a high quality version?

stevegarfield — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 05:41:27 -0400

Here's a verson on CNN with a pre-roll commercial:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2008/08/26/michelle.obama.long...

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Steve Garfield
http://stevegarfield.com