EchoDitto - In The News

National Presidential Caucus set for December 7th - posted by Cristen Perks

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 12:46:27 -0700

Just when you thought your entire political life had moved online...reading news, scouring blogs, researching candidates... the National Presidential Caucus (NPC) launched a site today aimed at bringing those conversations back to the real world at a National Presidential Caucus on December 7th.

Never fear, EchoDitto and NPC haven't lost faith in the power of online organizing - quite the opposite actually. We both recognize the importance of harnessing these tools to facilitate one of our nation's most important processes -- choosing a President.

In 2004, about 5 million people organized online to participate in face-to-face political Meetups, town hall meetings and the like. This momentum sparked an idea that has now come to fruition as National Presidential Caucus - a day of face-to-face meetings with your friends, your neighbors, your community, and your country deliberating the issues that matter most - organized fully online. Working with NPC has been really exciting. I'm anxious to see what happens next.

Where do you get your news? - posted by Meaghan Lamarre

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:20:04 -0700

There's been a lot of talk lately about the demise of the traditional print newspaper, sparked by Eric Alterman's article in the New Yorker called "Out of Print". It's an interesting discussion that made me examine my own news-procuring habits.

Sorry, print newspapers, but for me you're already dead. I most recently touched newsprint this weekend while I was balling up pages of the Washington Post to help get my campfire started. Before that, I can't even remember. I know that there are many of you out there who can't live without your morning paper (or papers), but that ain't me.

In fact, I get most of my news these days from Twitter. On the one hand, I get updates from official news outlets by following the NPR News Blog guys, the New York Times and CNN. On the other hand, and often more usefully, I get links to news articles of interest from the people I am following. I know I'm not unique in this - Steve Gillmor admitted to the same thing on a recent edition of This Week in Tech.

I used to read the Express, the daily tabloid produced by the Washington Post and distributed at metro stations here in D.C. But since getting my hands on an iPhone, I don't even pick that paper up anymore.

I shouldn't leave out radio here -- I listen to NPR religiously every morning as I get ready for work. And since we're chronicling my news media consumption, I also pick up bits and pieces from the TV in our office that's always tuned to one news network or another.

I know I'm not unique. There's plenty of data out there about declining newspaper readership, especially among young people. And we know that people are increasingly relying on blogs for their news.

But what about you - where do you get your news? Twitter, Facebook or email? TV or radio? Or do you love the smell of newsprint in the morning? Please share in the comments!

Whatchya gonna do? - posted by Jason Yovanoff

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:24:44 -0700

One of my favorite clients through the years here at EchoDitto has been the Clinton Foundation. We've worked with them at their annual conference, helped them launch a book and inspired thousands of people make a commitment to change the world.

This week we helped them with the inaugural meeting of CGI University. CGI U is a project of the Clinton Global Initiative that challenges college students and universities to take on global problems with real, concrete solutions. For us, that meant helping them get those commitments on the web, as well as updating the site to emphasize some of those new commitments.

You don't need to be a college student to make a commitment - anyone, anywhere can give time, money, or resources to help solve global problems. So, what will your commitment be?

Thank you New Hampshire and Iowa, Clinton and Obama - posted by Meaghan Lamarre

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 06:42:49 -0800

After bitterly disappointing elections in 2000 and 2004, I took my leave of politics and decided I was no longer interested—if you'd asked me, I might have told you I was a registered cynic. This year's election, until recently, had largely failed to capture my attention. But as I watched the Iowa caucus results—and some caucuses themselves! How fascinating!!—I felt that political part of myself stirring again.

And after watching last night's primary results, I feel optimistic. What I'm feeling at this moment is the best of politics, that wave of emotion as the candidates remind you that we can make change, and we can make it together.

Let me say first that I honestly don’t know who I'll be voting for when my turn comes—not that it will matter much anyway. And in terms of this wave of optimism I’m feeling at the moment, it hardly matters. I will confess to having reservations about both Clinton and Obama—on the election quiz site Glassbooth.org, they only score about 80% similar to my beliefs (in case you’re curious, here's a shout out to Dennis Kucinich, who seems to match me most closely). But that said, the two of them tonight have captured my heart and my imagination.

To see Hillary Clinton win the New Hampshire primary—especially after she was predicted to lose by a double-digit margin, after the misogynist drivel thrown at her this week after her "emotional moment"—nearly brought me to tears. In my lifetime, this is the closest I've ever seen a woman come to becoming president of the United States. And as I watched her speech I forgot about everything else and just reveled in the possibility embodied in that moment.

And then there's Obama, who has embodied possibility from the moment he announced his candidacy—not just in his role as potentially the first African American president, but his entire campaign narrative is about possibility. Tonight’s speech was no different. With his “Yes we can” speech, again, I temporarily forgot about any differences on the issues and I was swept up in the idealism, the optimism, and, forgive the overplay of the word-of-the-week, but the idea of change.

This feeling may not last long, but for this moment when our political future looks bright, I say thanks to Senator Clinton and Senator Obama, and to the extraordinary turnout of voters in New Hampshire and Iowa.

Follow in Al's Footsteps - posted by Cristen Perks

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 06:10:43 -0700

As everyone was finalizing their weekend plans last Friday, it was announced that Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his "efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change."

Feeling left out? Want a piece of the action? Well, he can't do it all by himself. Check out one of our recent projects and do your part today to take action to solve the climate crisis - take the 7-point pledge - created by the Alliance for Climate Protection. If you haven't heard of the Alliance, find out more while listening to Gore speak about his award.

Al Gore being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is amazing and inspiring. So is the current movement to bring the environment to the forefront of issues being tackled by our leaders. Today, I've written this post as part of a coordinated effort of almost 20,000 blogs called "Blog Action Day" to help spread the word about the current climate crisis.

No iPhones in Vermont - posted by Scott Bulua

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:19:43 -0700

Vermonters have long resisted their membership in the United States, and some rebel separatists are still calling for an independent Green Mountain Republic. Furthermore, the international focus of my alma mater, Middlebury College, certainly adds to the international image. But Apple, and their iPhone partner AT&T, have abused Vermont's desire for independence: iPhones, which are only available in the United States, cannot be purchased or used by Vermonters. In fact, iPhone users who make more than forty percent of their calls in Vermont will be booted from their contracts. The real reason is that Vermont is the only state without AT&T cell service, so the company is forced to cover roaming charges, but the situation smacks of discrimination.

While this may upset Vermont's Apple fanatics, the state, which has been rapidly losing its young, can certainly use this discrimination to their advantage. By courting AT&T users who want out of their contracts, everybody wins. The winters may be cold, but the Verizon reception is excellent.

Yes, I'm one of those people with an iPhone .. and I love it! - posted by Harish Rao

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:26:10 -0700

It's been a bit over a month now, and I have to say that I love my iPhone. It's small--thinner than a Motorola Q, which I think used to be the thinnest smartphone on the market--and lightweight. It works a lot better than my Treo 650, even though the virtual keyboard took a little getting used to. I find that I'm using my mobile email a lot more often than on my Treo, probably because of my iPhone's ability to work well with IMAP folders. The iPod and phone features all work very well.

Much to a co-workers chagrin, the transfer of my phone number to my iPhone from Sprint, including the activation process, took all of 8 minutes. Smoothest phone activation that I've experienced.

Problems have been minimal so far. Aside from the obvious things that are left out (including copy and paste), it does crash sometimes when loading a particularly large webpage. Not enough to worry me though: I'm certain that Apple will continue to release software updates to resolve most of these issues. I find the speaker phone to be quite weak as well. I also dropped the darn thing down a metal staircase within a couple of days (clanging down all 12 stairs!), but it still works well, with nothing but a superficial scratch on the aluminum case. .

I'm now on the quest for accessories. And I know what I want for my birthday (hint): a wood case for my iPhone. In Padouk please.

EchoDitto featured in AP story on last night’s CNN YouTube debates - posted by Madeleine Perry

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 12:23:31 -0700

Many of us were up late last night watching the CNN YouTube debates, excited at the prospect of a different debate format. Finally, the voters, people like you and me, had the chance to ask a question directly to a potential presidential candidate.

While most of us were watching the debates, quietly judging the merit of each question and wondering what would come next, AP was calling our colleague Michael Silberman to ask his opinion on the effectiveness of the debates:

"The greatest innovation of this debate is that we're seeing candidates respond to real voters instead of polished TV personalities," said Michael … "It's a win for the candidates who are at their best when addressing voters. It's a win for democracy, since average Americans outside of the early primary states now have the opportunity to ask direct questions of candidates."

To read more, click here, here, or here!

Forget Shock and Awe... - posted by Gregory Cooper

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 08:23:51 -0700

So at one point or another, we’ve all heard the maxim that the digital revolution is going to change the way we do everything. Well... once again it has been proven right.

The next victim of the digital age? Ironically, it may be the art of war.

For a moment, forget Operation Shock and Awe and all the recent advancements in military technology… states have been getting better at killing people and blowing stuff up for the last hundred years. Much more novel is the concept of states engaging in “cyber-warfare", and what the implications of such actions might be. There is little doubt that an IT-savvy state could engage in cyber-warfare, but would it constitute the next ‘shot heard round the world?’ How should a state react when its websites are being shut down by another state? Complain? Crash their parliament website? File a brief with the International Court of Justice? Or maybe just bomb the bastards to hell.

Transition to a real world scenario:

Tensions recently flared up in Eastern Europe: Estonia, one of the Soviet Union’s former satellite states, moved a Soviet soldier memorial out of the city center of Tallinn. The Russian government was infuriated and provoked strong and forceful denunciations of Estonia by Russian ministers, who claimed that the removal of the statue discriminated against ethnic Russian citizens. Looting in Tallinn by Ethnic Russians ensued, and so… things got worse.

A basic international dispute over a policy slight- nothing new there.

Except…

On April 27th, a massive month long cyber-offensive began on the websites of Estonia’s banks, parliament, ministries, newspapers, and broadcasters, forcing many of them to shut down. Estonia is highly modernized and relies heavily on IT, and so the attacks remained serious problem. All eyes looked to Russia as the culprit, and the Estonian Foreign Minister even went on television to claim that one of the virus origins was from a computer in the Russian Presidential Administration and several from government computers. Nonetheless, many tech savvy Russian citizens found helpful instructions on how to conduct DDoS attacks on their own, and Estonia has been hammered now for nearly a month.

Whether or not Russia is actually ‘guilty’ is almost irrelevant given the nature of cyber attacks (they are just plain difficult to trace). I think what is most troubling is that there is still no clear idea in the international community on how to respond should a state be caught engaging in such an attack. The Economist was fortunate enough to quote a senior NATO official in Brussels: even

“If a member state's communications centre is attacked with a missile, you call it an act of war. So what do you call it if the same installation is disabled with a cyber-attack?”

Cyber-warfare is not going to replace regular warfare or change the entire international balance of power, but it does pose a new problem to an already troubled international system. As countries continue to modernize, it creates new weaknesses and vulnerabilities that can be taken advantage of… especially in cyberspace.

Owned by Google? - posted by Terrance Heath

Fri, 25 May 2007 09:48:25 -0700

I have a confession to make. I love Google. I also fear Google. But I can't leave Google. We've been together for so many years, and shared so much. It's given me so much, but it can take even more away. Don't get me wrong. Google's been very good to me. But I've heard that there are some people in its past, before me, that kinda got burned by Google.

And, to be honest, I'm not sure I like some of Google's friends. I'm know some of its friends don't like me, and I hate to think of Google telling them everything it knows about me. And, I never know if it will turn on me or not. So I can't walk out. Google has way too much on me. In a sense, you might say Google owns me. And what Google owns, Google can sell out.

It started out so well. When we met, Google was just a simple little search engine. Kind of plain, but willing to get just about anything for me, and all I had to do was ask. And it had a kind of charm about it, complete with a rags-to-riches success story. Yet, it stayed simple in spite of its success. On the surface anyway. Things aren't so simple now.

It's happened to all of us. Right? You start a relationship without really knowing what you're getting into, because the other person has some pretty cool qualities like the ones I mentioned above. How can you not admire someone who started out in a garage and ended up with a $319 million home? So, when I got an invite to try Gmail, I jumped on it. It didn't bother me much that Google could read my email. It was a new relationship, sure, but aren't all relationships built on trust? It wasn't long before I was using Google Calendar. OK. So now Google knew where I went and what I was doing at all times. But I was volunteering the information. Right?

From there, I just deeper and deeper in. Then came Google Reader. That's when Google had me. I knew I was in love. I handed over my feeds. Sure, now Google knows what I'm reading (and where I'm going, and who I'm emailing). But it's a relationship, right? Remember trust? My head was still spinning from Google Reader when Google Documents caught my eye. Now this was truly amazing. Nobody had ever quite understood my needs in that way before, how I needed to do everything all in one place, and from any location. And Google made it easy for me to do everything I needed. Without, I might add, every leaving.

Then Google started handing me things I didn't even know I needed yet, like Google Notebook. Now I had a place to put whatever I wanted. It was like an extension of my brain. Sure, it belonged to Google. But so did I. We were committed, right? And if I ever started to think about how much of my life belonged to Google now, there was always Google Video to take my mind off of it. The web became a television on my desktop, with as many channels as users. I'm pretty sure I was glued to the screen when I said yes to letting Google track my web history. Sure, now it new everywhere I went whenever I left Google. But, that's OK because we're...

Wait a minute.

Now it seems like Google wants to run my life.

Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.

Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.

“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

I know. I know. If we were chatting over coffee right now, while I went on about my nice-but-controlling boyfriend this would be the part where you'd say "Duh!" That'd be probably due to the fact that you were one of the people who tried to tell me a long time ago what Google was up to.

Privacy is a matter of perspective. Different people are concerned about different things. For example, cell phones allow the network to always know where you are. This is useful for sending targeted ads to your cell phone based on your location, like telling you about a nearby restaurant. Imagine if all data were available to everyone. It already seems to be true: random companies seem to know how much money I owe on my mortgage, and I've never heard of these companies. Based on information companies have about you, they can target specific ads (and make offers based on what I owe on my mortgage).

I think a big problem is coming. Google is not about searching; it's about collecting and mining data. Their purpose is to make money because this is a capitalist system. But where are the checks and balances?

…Google archives everything. You can't really delete anything. When data appears on the Internet, they are like a kudzu vine that covers everything almost instantly.

Think about Orwell's thought police and thought crime, and how history could be revised to suit political needs. Does Google have this power?

According to what I'm hearing, it does and it wants more.

Google's declaration of intent was publicised at the same time it emerged that the company had also invested £2m in a human genetics firm called 23andMe. The combination of genetic and internet profiling could prove a powerful tool in the battle for the greater understanding of the behaviour of an online service user.

…Privacy protection campaigners are concerned that the trend towards sophisticated internet tracking and the collating of a giant database represents a real threat, by stealth, to civil liberties.

That concern has been reinforced by Google's $3.1bn bid for DoubleClick, a company that helps build a detailed picture of someone's behaviour by combining its records of web searches with the information from DoubleClick's "cookies", the software it places on users' machines to track which sites they visit.

…Ross Anderson, professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University and chairman of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, said there was a real issue with "lock in" where Google customers find it hard to extricate themselves from the search engine because of the interdependent linkage with other Google services, such as iGoogle, Gmail and YouTube. He also said internet users could no longer effectively protect their anonymity as the data left a key signature.

"A lot of people are upset by some of this. Why should an angst-ridden teenager who subscribes to MySpace have their information dragged up 30 years later when they go for a job as say editor of the Financial Times? But there are serious privacy issues as well. Under data protection laws, you can't take information, that may have been given incidentally, and use it for another purpose. The precise type and size of this problem is yet to be determined and will change as Google's business changes."

Yikes. Plenty of people have already had that happen to them. That is, Google serving up their ill-considered utterances of days gone by, to anyone who asks. Just ask Kiwi Camara.

On Kiwi Camara's biographical Web site, the 22-year-old legal phenom lists several accolades -- his prestigious law fellowship, a coveted federal appeals court clerkship and, not to be forgotten, his graduation magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.

Perhaps emboldened by his accomplishments, Camara instructs readers to do something that, even for average people, could be considered career suicide.

"Google me!" the Web site says.

The results reveal something from Camara's past that has followed him throughout his brief career and that last week may have cost him a teaching job at George Mason University School of Law in Arlington County.

Camara, a native Filipino who grew up in Hawaii and enrolled at Harvard Law School at age 16, had been on track to become an assistant professor at GMU's law school. But his candidacy was derailed after the law school's dean, Daniel D. Polsby, publicized the possible appointment so he could hear what students had to say before making a final decision.

During Camara's first year at Harvard Law School in 2002, he fueled a controversy when he wrote racist remarks in a voluminous summary of a 1948 Supreme Court decision that barred restrictive covenants based on race. He then posted the writing on a Web site designed to help other law students.

In the five years since he wrote the racist phrase, it has surfaced from campus to campus, job interview to job interview -- a predicament that raises a broader question perfectly fit for these Google times: What's the appropriate standard for judging a teenager years later?

Of course, anybody can search Google for info on anyone else. But Google also has a habit of handing over information to other entities, like law enforcement and governments.

Google Inc., which refused in the past year to hand over user search data to U.S. authorities fighting children's access to pornography, said yesterday that it was complying with a Brazilian court's orders to turn over data that could help identify users accused of taking part in online communities that encourage racism, pedophilia and homophobia.

The difference, it says, is scale and purpose.

The Justice Department wanted Google's entire search index, billions of pages and two months' worth of queries, for a broad civil case. Brazil, by contrast, is looking for information in specific cases involving Google's social networking site, Orkut.

"What they're asking for is not billions of pages," said Nicole Wong, Google associate general counsel. "In most cases, it's relatively discrete -- small and narrow."

Google released a statement yesterday saying it was complying with the Brazilian court orders following a ruling Thursday by a Brazilian judge that threatened Google with a fine of $23,000 a day for noncompliance.

It's been an especially troubling month in our relationship, because in addition to all of the above Google seems willing to participate in censorship.

Google has agreed to block four video clips on its YouTube Web site that the government of Thailand said insulted its king.

But in a letter to the minister of communications, Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom, Google said two other videos that had angered Thailand’s military government would stay on the site, because they did not break laws against offending the monarchy.

“They appear to be political comments that are critical of both the government and the conduct of foreigners,” said the letter, signed by Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel. “Because they are political in nature, and not intended insults of His Majesty, we do not see a basis for blocking these videos.”

The government, which blocked access to YouTube last month when clips mocking King Bhumibol Adulyadej first appeared, gave copies of the letter to reporters on Friday. The company could not immediately be reached for comment.

But now I recall that this isn't the first time. There was the business of censoring searches in China last year. That was around the same time that Google started getting into politics, and making friends with people who have friends who also like to gather information on people.

Now, with a database already bigger than anybody else's and more information on more people than I can even begin to imagine, Google wants government records.

By providing free consulting and some software, Google is helping state governments make reams of public records that are now unavailable or hard to find online easily accessible to Web surfers.

The Internet search company hopes to eventually persuade federal agencies to employ the same tools -- an effort that excites advocates of open government but worries some consumer-privacy experts.

Google plans to announce Monday that it has already partnered with four states -- Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia -- to remove technical barriers that had prevented its search engine, as well as those of Microsoft and Yahoo, from accessing tens of thousands of public records dealing with education, real estate, health care and the environment.

These newly available records will not be exclusive to the search engines owned by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of more than 65 watchdog groups that advocate greater government openness and accountability, lauded Google's efforts. Since the September 11 attack on the United States, many public agencies have tried to restrict certain data from the Internet due to concerns about national security.

…Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, said many public health and financial records should not necessarily be widely available because they often contain citizens' Social Security numbers. Such information should be redacted from records regardless of whether they're viewed online or in person at a government office, he said.

Rotenberg also said Google has a "checkered past" on privacy, noting that the company tracks Internet search users who access government data in order to target ads at them. EPIC recently filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission urging it to investigate Google regarding such activities, as well as its proposed acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick

I think I'm beginning to see where this going, and what my future — our future — with Google could look like. And, of course, it's what someone tried to tell me much earlier.

IT HAS swallowed Amazon by 2008 and destroyed The New York Times by 2014. By 2020 its personal profiles of the shopping habits, interests and dark passions of every computer user on the planet has far surpassed the antique files of the CIA and the NSA.

It's a scenario that is diametrically opposed to Google's motto of "do no evil" but fears are growing that everyone's favouritesearch engine company is in danger of evolving into a sinister corporate Big Brother.

While executives at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California celebrated a 92 per cent increase in net income yesterday, computer users across the globe were busy downloading an eight-minute fake documentary that illustrates the concerns users have about the rise of Google.

The short video, available on www.robinsloan.com/epic, shows a possible future in which Google merges with Amazon and creates Googlezon, a vast conglomerate that unites an individual's consumer tastes and current interests. As a result it defeats old media such as newspapers and television and provides a personalised news service, but one riddled with errors and conspiracies.

They even drew me a picture.

So, to tell the truth, I should have seen it coming. Now I'm worried it might be too late. But then again, others before me have gotten away. And Google says I can leave if I want. So can anyone else. I can go back to my own place and lock Google out.

But I'm not sure I really can leave. Where would I go? After all, Google has a habit of buying up cool start-ups. Google can guy just about anything. They just bought my RSS feed along with Feedburner. So, chances are no matter where I went, Google would track me down.

Maybe it's time to face the truth. Maybe I really do belong to Google.

Maybe we all do, or will. Someday.

Eastern Market, Thanks for the Goat-Gouda - posted by Jess Paar

Fri, 04 May 2007 06:11:25 -0700

I opened the fridge door and peered in. Alone on the second shelf (yes, I need to go grocery shopping) sat a small, flat brown paper bag. There was no logo, no corporate tag line, nothing to distinguish it from any other brown paper bag. At 6am Monday morning, the bag was given new meaning…

It was about that time that I heard the terrible news that Eastern Market, one of my favorite spots in all of DC, had been damaged by a fire that raged for several hours, late that night and into the morning. I've heard the building structure will remain, but its contents are a total loss...and the market may never be the same.

But I consider myself lucky. As I usually do in the warm spring/summer months, I had just spent the day catching up with friends while wandering the booths, peering at handmade jewelry and antique furniture I can never afford. You can regularly find me hovering over the purses made from old books, the water colors and photography captured by local artists, taking apple samples from the produce section, trying to haggle the guy who makes those amazing chunky bead necklaces so they’re actually in my price range (never worked).

It was also that day that I felt inspired to introduce my friend to “the cheese guy”. The funny older gentleman in the market who wins you over with samples of wonderful cheeses (I’m partial to the sage cheddar), and let’s you sample a few before encouraging you to make a selection or make room for other customers. After at least three samples, I settled on a serving of an incredible goat-gouda. Wrapped in brown paper, I put it in my bag and moved on.

My sadness can’t even compare to the devastation facing the local artists and vendors who lost a part of their livelihood…their place of business. So I jumped at the chance to join Blue State’s own Clay Johnson, and others, to help support those who were displaced by the fire at Eastern Market. Using a Facebook group and EasternMarketRescue.com, we’re asking local bars and restaurants to donate proceeds next Tuesday (May 8th) to the Capitol Hill Community Foundation. So far the response has been great…but we’re not done yet. Have you asked your local watering hole to join?

It’s the least we can do to thank our market friends for the many gift ideas and fresh produce over the years…and for the cheese samples. I just can’t bring myself to eat that goat-gouda. As long as my roommate will let me, I may leave it in the fridge as a reminder to keep up the fight and protect the memory of our market.

Coping With Tragedy, 2.0 - posted by Terrance Heath

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 07:38:00 -0700

I don't like to think about it much, but I remember where I was for a number of disasters and tragic events. In some cases I remember who called to check on me when events happened closer to home. When the Oklahoma City bombing happened, my phone rang with family members calling to ask if I worked near a federal building. (I worked in downtown D.C., a few blocks from the White House.) I even got a call when the Heaven's Gate cult suicides were discovered.

The events of September 11, 2001, however, stand out in my mind as indicating how technology changed the way people cope with these events. Today's tragic shootings at Virginia Tech, the way students and faculty used social networks and text messaging to communicate during the shootings, provide another example.

Virginia Tech students and staff reported on what appeared to be the deadliest shooting on a U.S. college campus as it unfolded, using blogs, social networking sites, podcasts, and cell phones to do it.

With their Web server down, contributors to the campus newspaper the Collegiate Times filed blog entries on their parent company's Web site beginning at 9:47 a.m. as they attempted to confirm information about two Monday morning university shootings, which left at least 22 people dead and many more injured. ABC reported 29 dead by Monday afternoon.

…Students and faculty communicated with each other during the crisis through instant messaging and e-mail. A student captured the sound of several gunshots on campus.

By the afternoon, the university had posted a podcast of statements from its president, Charles Steger.

In addition, Nicco — our company president — started a Facebook group to show support for the students and faculty of VA Tech, and also created a sign that anyone who wants to show their support can print and display.

When the article above landed in my inbox, via the LGBTPOC listserv I'm on, it took me back to 9/11. I was at work, listening to NPR at my desk when I heard about the planes hitting the towers, and by the time the towers fell I was watching it on television in the conference room with the rest of the staff.

But when I got back to my desk, and for the rest of the day at home, I and countless others turned to email, online communities, and instant messaging to check on friends and family, as getting a phone connection was impossible for a while. I emailed friends in New York to get news on their condition, and watched my buddy list in AIM for my friends in New York to login. Everyone I knew was OK, though one friend revealed that he would have been in one of the towers that day, if a schduled office move hadn't been postponed.

In the meantime, I joined other members of a online forum I frequented on our virtual front stoop, where we exchanged updates while waiting for others to check in. Later we comforted those who'd lost people in the attacks, or who had friends and family missing in the aftermath.

I don't know how much comfort the students and faculty of Virginia Tech, or their families, received from being able to get updates so quickly, and to remain in touch with each other as events unfolded. But I can imagine, being a parent, that any information would be better than no information.

And as I human being I know that being able to connect with another human being — to be less alone in moments of fear and uncertainty — would make all the difference. However trivial our various emails, IMs, blog posts, and text messages may seem, when tragedy strikes, those connections — like anything else that lets us reach out to one another for comfort, strength, or just to share our grief and fear — may matter more than anything else.

"Cutting-Edge Campaigning" - posted by Michael Silberman

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 06:55:05 -0700

Great news! On Thursday night, two EchoDitto projects were recognized at the 2007 Golden Dot Awards Ceremony, sponsored by GWU's Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet.

We tend to get shy around here when it comes to talking about our work, but we couldn't hold back on this one. The Golden Dot Awards honor "innovative, revolutionary uses of the Internet as a political tool. The 2007 Golden Dot award winners truly represent the movers and shakers of cutting-edge campaigning.” Alright!

Since Sliced Bread was awarded the Best Online Community Response Effort, which is given to a "campaign that used technology to solve a local or civic problem." And Pearl Harbor Stories was honored for Best Podcast Series. You can read more about our work on these projects here and here.

We're really proud of our work on both projects -- they were truly successful partnerships with our clients and labors of love by our entire team.

So, a huge thanks to both the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) here in DC and the Pearl Harbor Memorial Fund out in Honolulu for their creativity and willingness to experiment with us. We're pretty darn lucky to be able to work with organizations like these, committed to surfacing and supporting the greatest citizen-generated ideas for America and, in the case of the Pear Harbor Memorial Fund, to creating a much needed oral and living history of the attacks on Pearl Harbor.

Also, a special shout out to PRsolutions and MacWilliams Robinson our talented media partners on SinceSlicedBread. And the same to both Trellon and our friends at Brodeur, without whom the Pearl Harbor project wouldn't be nearly the success it is!

No Citizen Journalism, Please. We're French - posted by Terrance Heath

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 07:45:31 -0700

Imagine this. You're standing, waiting for a bus when you hear a commotion; screaming, yelling, gunshots, etc. You turn around and witness someone being dragged in to a van-- kicking and screaming -- by several armed, hooded individuals.

Instead of diving for cover, you whip out your mobile phone and start capturing video at the precise moment one kidnapper shoots a security guard and foolishly rips off his mask before jumping into the van as it speeds away. You have his picture. You have video evidence of his crime. Being a good citizen, you take your video of the crime to the police, and they arrest you. Because what you did is a crime. Or it could be, in France.

That is, if France criminalizes citizen journalism.

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.

Appropriately enough, the council's announcement came on the anniversary of the Rodney King beating; a watershed moment in American life, stemming from the increased availability of video cameras, which became a powerful media tool in the hands of citizens who took them into the streets to "police the police." Had the proposed French law existed in the U.S. then, George Holliday -- who captured the incident on video -- would have been a criminal. (But not Bob Tur, the reporter who captured video of Reginald Denny being attacked during the riots that erupted when a jury failed to convict four officers for the King incident, and later sued YouTube for copyright infringement when the video was posted on the site.)

Of course, then even if you had video it wouldn't see the light of day beyond your living room unless you found a television station willing to air it. Fast forward to the present, when even more of us have the capacity to capture video, and it seems like every day there's a new website where we can upload, edit and broadcast that video without having to persuade a producer or station manager.

How has it changed our culture? It's an old story, and we're just living in the latest chapter.

Forty years ago last Monday, Americans saw television footage of the attack on civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. It became known as "Bloody Sunday," and so incensed Americans that demonstrations were held in 80 cities within 48 hours, and Martin Luther King Jr. led thousands on a march across that same bridge two days later. Had ABC not interrupted Judgment at Nuremberg, most Americans wouldn't have see it what happened in Selma that day. That was the power of media then.

Television footage from the Vietnam brought war into America's living rooms, given them a view of the battlefield most would never have seen otherwise. It's said to have been a major factor in turning the tide of public opinion against the war.

No, the great difference between the Vietnam War and its predecessors lay not in its conduct, but its perception, an image that was shaped by a powerful new influence-- television. It was this medium, more than any other single factor, which was instrumental in the shift of American public and Congressional opinion from a position strongly supporting to one strongly condemning the American defense of South Vietnam.

...As the size of the media in Vietnam expanded, so did its impact back home. In 1963, NBC and CBS doubled the length of their national news coverage (from 15 to 30 minutes) and in that same year Americans reported that, for the first time ever, most of them received the majority of their news from television instead of newspapers and magazines.12 Technology kept pace during this period also, with a steady increase in the number, size, and quality of color television sets in American homes. Transportation time of news footage was originally about twenty hours from Vietnam to New York, although this would be decreased dramatically with the availability of communications satellites later in

the war.

That, too, was the power of media then.

The King video gave Americans a look at the kind of violence most wouldn't have seen otherwise, and that wouldn't have been reported beyond its locale -- if at all -- had there not been a citizen with a video camera nearby. Last November, cell phone video footage of a UCLA student being repeatedly tasered by campus police was posted to YouTube. It became one of YouTube's most discussed videos of all time, rocketed around the blogosphere, and caused an outcries against police brutality both online and on campus. Video of Los Angeles Police arresting William Cardenas helped launch an FBI investigation after it was posted online. In another time, news of these incidents wouldn't have spread very far, let alone video footage.

The trend is not limited to the U.S. A video of Malaysian police humiliating a young woman (recorded by another policeman, on his cell phone) also found its way online, causing citizens to demand an investigation.

The clip began circulating phone to phone, e-mail to e-mail. Eventually it was posted on YouTube and other Internet sites, to be viewed by millions. What started as cheap voyeurism escalated into an unstoppable cyberspace phenomenon, which forced the prime minister to establish an official inquiry that led to changes in police practice. The episode also underscored the growing power of amateur video, shot on cellphones and ever-tinier digital cameras, to hold the powerful to account.

The digital revolution is helping to throw light into some of the world's darkest corners. The photos of naked and shackled Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison -- images taken on soldiers' personal digital cameras and made public in 2004 -- focused a global spotlight on abuses there. Ordinary people going about their daily lives are now the first to document historic events.

That is the power of media now, in the hands of "ordinary people."

Beyond crime and acts of violence, the political implications of the kind of law proposed in France should be obvious by now, to anyone who's heard the word "macaca" or seen Michael J. Fox's campaign ads, both of which made APs "Top YouTube Videos of 2006" list.

The case of blogger Josh Wolf is another example. Wolf was jailed in July 2006 for failing to turn over video footage he shot of a San Francisco protest against the G8 summit 2005. In an interview last month, Wolf explained his refusal to comply with

Amy Goodman: On Friday, we spoke with Josh Wolf from his jail cell in Dublin, Calif. I began by asking him why he's in prison.
Josh Wolf: I'm here for refusing to comply with a subpoena demanding that I both testify and turn over a tape of a protest that occurred on July 8, 2005.

AG: Why are you refusing to comply?

JW: Well, there's a number of reasons. It's been viewed that the tape is central to the issue, but it's also the testimony. Essentially, what the government wants me to do, as we can tell, is to identify civil dissidents who were attending this march, who were in mask and clearly did not want to be identified, but whose identities I may know some of, as their contact that I've been following in documenting civil dissent in the San Francisco Bay Area for some two and a half years now.

Meanwhile, CNET Editor Charles Cooper suggests another reason why Wolf's incarceration isn't getting the as much attention as, say, the jailing of New York Times reporter Judy Miller.

Civil liberties-minded folks are upset about the press freedom issues raised by Wolf's imprisonment. But Wolf's self-proclaimed status as a video blogger also opens a Pandora's box the fourth estate would just as soon see remain shut. More than any case I can recall, the Wolf case reflects the changing way journalism is being practiced in the age of Internet bloggers.

Changing the way journalism is practiced, by essentially making journalists of any anyone with cell phone and a broadband connection, has the potential to change much more. It did in South Korea where OhMyNews -- which daily posts tens of thousands of articles by citizen journalists -- was credited with influencing the election of a president. Founder Oh Yeon Ho described the site as a powerful space to coalesce "people power."

“OhmyNews is a kind of public square in which the reform-minded generation meet and talk with each other and find confidence. The message they find here: we are not alone. We can change this society.”

By contrast, the French law would establish government-approved sources of information and bar most citizens from contributing.

The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet.

The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules. The journalists’ organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for a free press, has warned that such a system could lead to excessive self censorship as organizations worried about losing their certification suppress certain stories.

"Freedom Fries" aside, it's no stretch of the imagination to consider how much folks on this side of the Atlantic might appreciate a law like this one. In fact, the French law might not go far enough. After all, national security could be at stake and suppressing some of the stories mentioned above would have spared some powerful people a bit or grief, and maybe even helped them hold on to that power.

But that probably wouldn't happen here without some protest. That is, if anyone would risk reporting it.

Making Every Moment Count - posted by Gisele Toueg

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 12:04:25 -0800

This morning, I opened up my New York Times where, amidst coverage of President Ford's funeral, was a front page story about a construction worker and Vietnam Veteran named Wesley Autrey. Mr. Autrey was waiting with his two daughters on a subway platform in Harlem yesterday when a man nearby had a seizure. The man, named Cameron Hollopeter, managed to stand up after the convulsions ended; however, he stumbled and fell onto the tracks.

Now, as a native New Yorker, I know that every single one of us has thought about what we would do if we fell onto the subway tracks. We've formulated escape plans, measured the distance from the tracks to the platform, calculated how long it would take to run to the other side of the tracks. But as we all know, no matter how much you plan, instinct usually takes over in minutes of extreme stress, and most people just act according to their gut.

Mr. Autrey saw the bright lights of the train approaching, and made a choice--he jumped down into the platform, covered the other man with his body, and shielded both of them in a trough while five cars passed over them. Once the train stopped, the first thing Mr. Autrey did was shout up to the platform that they were both ok, but that his two daughters were standing on the platform, and "let them know that their father's ok."

Mr. Autrey stopped by the hospital to visit Mr. Hollopeter on his way to work in Brooklyn, where he is helping to build a library.

OK, can we pause for a minute here? This guy jumped into the subway tracks while a train was approaching, saved a man's life, literally, and then went to visit him in the hospital before he went to work that night. Now, I'm sure the media is doing a good job of highlighting the fuzzy, warm aspects of Mr. Autrey's life to make people like me swoon, but I don't care. I've bought it, and I'm grateful for this story, especially on the third day of the New Year.

So my New Year's resolution is to believe in people like Wesley Autrey, to trust that when faced with a difficult decision, some of us will go above and beyond what we imagine ourselves to be capable of doing.

Happy new year everyone.