Mother Jones Questions Open Source Politics

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen harangues Mother Jones, the left-leaning investigatory magazine, for its feature package titled "Politics 2.0" in which it basically asks, "Are we entering a new era of digital democracy-or just being conned by a bunch of smooth-talking geeks?"

Rosen, an open source advocate, accuses that "The Mother Jones editors had a great story about politics and the web within their grasp,...

Candidates’ Message Driven Sites

Some of the 2008 Presidential hopefuls are campaigning on multiple official sites.  In these cases, the candidates are selecting issues on which they're strong.

This strategy has potential as it enables campaigns to make headway by creating a special site to build a community around a specific issue and to project a clear message that can standalone from the rest of the campaign platform. ...

Do you have a crush on Obama?

ObamaGirl supposedly has a crush on — wait for it — Barack Obama, and she has created a music video professing her love for him with lyrics like, "You're into border security…let's break this border between you and me…Universal health care reform…it makes me warm" (Hat tip: TechPresident).

I'm sure that Obama is blushing since ObamaGirl is hot and as part of the Barely Political website,...

Participation Inequality

Not everyone who reads blogs comments on posts or writes their own blogs.  That should not surprise anyone.  In fact, according to Jackob Nielsen's Participation Inequity: Encouraging More Users to Contribute post from last October, only about 5% of Internet users blog. (Hat tip: Suw Charman)

Nielsen explains that "In most online communities,...

Obama’s Facebook Application

I was writing a post about Project’s Agape’s new Facebook application that allows people to raise money for causes directly on Facebook (through the new Facebook Platform). Unfortunately, the application is still really buggy so I was unable to get the data I needed for the post. So while I was messing around in Facebook I decided to write a quick post about what the Barack Obama team is doing with their custom Facebook application....