EchoDitto - The District

Come Pimp Out a Nonprofit - posted by Matt Stempeck

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:39:47 -0700

If you're in DC tonight and you're not afraid of a little rain, come join us in Adams Morgan, where we'll be pimping out Our Voices Together's online presence.

"Pimp my Nonprofit" is NetSquared DC's regular bi-monthly brainstorm session. Instead of installing black lights in an El Camino, we help a featured nonprofit elevate their game.

Through this case-study oriented conversation, everyone will have a chance to learn vicariously from some of the leading technology and communications experts in DC. Thus we encourage any consultants and geeks in the audience to show up and strut your stuff.

Join us to meet, swap stories and ideas, and build new relationships.

About Our Voices Together:

Founded by 9/11 families and friends, Our Voices Together helps empower individuals to take actions that diminish the hatred fueling terrorist tactics. We bring together organizations and individuals who choose to foster greater understanding, deal with underlying issues and negate the popularity of extremists.

And a big thanks to this month's sponsor:

Reconnecting The Circle is now accepting bids for the redevelopment of their website, http://www.reconnectingthecircle.com.

The mission of Reconnecting The Circle (RTC) is to encourage people to learn about contemporary Native American people and cultures, and to develop a more meaningful and complete perspective on Indian Country*. Last year, RTC launched with a National High School Essay Contest to high schools in all 50 states. We awarded 10 students (5 Native and 5 non-Native) $2,500 each in scholarships. We are looking to improve our website, offer additional programs, and incorporate Web 2.0 technologies to reach and retain our audience of students, teachers, parents and others interested in learning more about Indian Country. Please contact Danielle Gaines at 703-816-5125 for more information.

* Indian Country is the collective reference for Native American Tribes and communities, which include American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians.

Putting Nonprofits on the Map - posted by Matt Stempeck

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 12:49:56 -0700

I use Google Maps all the time. Housingmaps.com, which mashes Google Maps up with Craigslist listings, has found my last two apartments for me. The GPS built into my Helio Ocean has saved me from getting lost countless times in the short time I've owned it.

If mapping software can do all of this for me, imagine what it can do for nonprofits with causes slightly more noble than geo-tagging my Flickr photos. That's what we aim to find out at this month's NetSquared DC Meetup, Mapping for Nonprofits. Details after the jump.

Not everyone realizes that the backbones of the sites I listed above are Geographic Information Systems. I almost completed a GIS citation in college, but my efforts were thwarted by the University of Maryland's decision not to offer any of the final courses my entire senior year. I didn't get the citation, but the prerequisite courses did leave me with an extensive vocabulary with which to describe rivers (did you know billabong is Australian for an oxbow lake?).

Anyway, GIS can help nonprofits do some neat, useful things. Relief organizations can act on data uploaded by the masses in times of emergency, such as in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In calmer times, data can be overlayed onto maps to target donors and discover complex patterns.

If you're still reading, you should join us at NetSquared next week to hear more. We meet monthly at the Affinity Lab in Adams Morgan. Come for good times with great people (and free snacks and drinks, thanks to our sponsor Care2).

This month we're fortunate to have three expert speakers, Dr. Timothy Foresman, Dan Zimble and Robert Cheetham.

Dr. Forseman pursued a career dedicated to devising strategies and contributing to improved systems to better cope with environmental threats facing humans and the planet. Among his many accomplishments, Dr. Forseman is also president of Global Water, and author of, "The Last Little Polar Bear."
Dan is a member of the Washington D.C. Technology Center team at Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), the world's leading software provider of geographic information systems (GIS). Dan's passion is in advocating for sustainable approaches to ecosystem management through the application of GIS.
Robert is the founder of Avencia, a software development firm that specializes in creating web-based GIS systems. Avencia is a Philadelphia-based firm that works with non-profits and other organizations to build software tools that use geographic data to research, analyze and make better decisions.

See you Tuesday!

Yes Sir Officer, I Will Join Your Group - posted by Jess Paar

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 14:33:48 -0700

After living in the DC suburbs for a little over three years, I finally moved downtown to Capitol Hill. If you’re not familiar with the geography of our fair city, I’m in the Southeast corner near the wonders of Eastern Market, Union Station, Barracks Row and all the other exciting places The Hill has to offer. But with all of these great attractions and historical beauty also comes the threat of crime.

Much like my colleague, Chris, I too have been mugged. I’ve also had my car stolen and torched, and had my cell phone lifted on Christmas Eve. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not playing the victim. I know urban living is unique no matter what city you’re in.

So when an officer approached me this morning on my way to the bus stop, I was certain he was going to ask if I had been witness to some crime the previous night. Instead, he introduced himself and handed me a flier. Officer Holland of DC’s 1st District is using Yahoo Groups to create a “Public Safety Community Group” in my neighborhood as part of a new safety campaign. A self-professed “amateur internet junkie”, Officer Holland wants to incorporate new technologies to engage and inform the community.

I know my enthusiasm surprised him, but it struck me as such a cool example of how anybody can use the community-building technologies available in new ways. He knows that the groups functionality, if successful, can be a very powerful tool for sharing safety tips between neighbors while connecting residents to the District police. I'm signing-up and have encouraged my roommate to do the same. Stay tuned for updates!

Now if only I could trade industry advice for unpaid parking tickets….

Useful Widgets - posted by Matt Stempeck

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:24:18 -0800

Being the early-adopting nerd that I am, I've gone through my share of widgets. I've tinkered with every site- and PC-based widget engine from Konfabulator to Yahoo Widgets to Google Desktop. At work I use a Mac, so I got to experiment with those guys, including an ill-fated Christmas Countdown widget. But as much as I love fun technology, the overwhelming uselessness of widgets thus far has tainted my expectations for the platforms that enable them. The fact is, I've never had any stocks to check. If something's really important, I'll place the RSS feed or bookmark somewhere prominent within Firefox. And don't get me started on how many different ways I can check the weather.

Which is why I owe Katya Andresen thanks for her Net Squared DC presentation last night for changing all of that and making me realize their potential again. The Six Degrees project
has done something genuinely groundbreaking. They want people to do good in the world, but they don't really care if you go to their website to do so. They're doing what we've grown hoarse repeating: If you let go of your message a little and empower your supporters, big things can happen.

Six Degrees allows users to make badges for their cause and take their fundraising elsewhere: their blog, their MySpace, and so on. In doing so they've essentially enabled individuals to become their own charities, in the same way that tools like Wordpress allowed people to become their own publishers.

And it works. Think about it, when is the last time you gave to charity? Chances are, it was for a friend or family member who was running a race or otherwise soliciting donations for a cause. And you gave. You do support Save the Baby Zebras, but you gave to them because your friend or family member asked you to, and what's important to them is important to you.

Six Degrees keeps things interesting with a Top Six Badges contest for matching grants that judges based on how many donators you've attracted rather than how much money you've accrued.

Oh, and I almost forgot the best part of this whole thing: It was started with the help of Kevin Bacon, who bought the Six Degrees domain after realizing that most mentions of him on the Internet were about the six degrees from Kevin Bacon game and not his stellar performance in Footloose. The celebrity tie-ins continue with Celebrity Badges from Jessica Simpson, Kanye West, Nicole Kidman and others.

Anyway, thanks again to Katya and to everyone else for coming out and making this another great NetSquared event. Join us next month on March 20th at 7pm!

Happy New Year! Now Give Me Your Wallet. - posted by Chris Jones

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 23:43:24 -0800

What a drag.

Still, it was sort of exhilarating.

Tonight was my one year anniversary of moving to Washington. I spent it at some friends' house a few blocks north from where I live. We ate excellent spinach lasagna while watching some crumby sitcoms. Something about Julia Louis-Dreyfus sleeping with Andy Richter. Everyone had had an intense work-filled weekend, so our brains were throughly switched off. Soon I said goodbye to head home and do a little more work.

I stuck in my earbuds and a few blocks south arrived at my street. By this point I had "Hanningfield Window" by Squarepusher blaring away ( which by the way is an excellent track to get mugged to). I noticed a guy hanging out in a dark, little staircase at the beginning of the street. It wasn't really a spot many people would choose to hang out in, so I thought "man, this guy looks a little sketchy, I'm going to cross the street." So I did, and I figured it was nothing. There are always people hanging out on my street. Either way, my place was about three houses up from where I was.

After passing a couple houses, I saw a black thingy sort of go to the right past my head. I turned around and there's a dude with a gun on me. He pointed it in that sort of elbow up, angled down, gangsters-in-the-movies sort of way. Anyway, he said "Don't move. Give me all your money," which I only mildly understood above the sound of my ipod. I handed him my wallet and he said "that everything? give me everything," and I said, "dude, that's it, really. Want my ipod?" I tried to hand it to him and guy went "I don't want that shit," and stepped back a little. Since when were 4g ipods not good enough for thieves? We had a quiet, paused moment where it seemed like neither of us knew what to do. What's the protocol for the post-mugging anyway? I just turned around and walked to my house. He walked back across the street. I got to my porch and I saw him get in a new silver Cadillac DeVille with tinted-out windows and big chrome wheels. Off he went. What a blast that was.

Anyway, I called the police and a few of them came pretty quickly. Honestly, that part was kinda fun. I sat in a car with a detective who asked me a bajillion questions about the guy with the gun. The detective was amazed that the mugger would let me see him walk back to his car. Apparently our street's gotten a little crappy recently, so he suggested avoiding walking around there. Unfortunately, the other side of the street is pretty crumby too.

The detective asked me to get in a police car with an officer to drive over to the scene of some accident involving a car with the same description as the car I saw drive off. That was Officer Graves I went with. Rad dude. He had a little pig statue on his dashboard. Anyway, it wasn't the same car, and it looked like no one got hurt in that accident, so that's cool at least.

We didn't catch the bad guy. Oh well. At least no one got shot.

In the end, the thing I'm happiest about is that the mugger didn't take my bag, which had a gift my friends had made me for Christmas. It's a mirror with plastered-on images of architectural screens by Erwin Hauer. An excellent gift for a geek like me:

Stay safe, everyone!

RootsCampDC: A WikiConference - posted by Jason Rosenberg

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 13:47:51 -0800

Michael and I attended RootsCampDC this weekend. It was an amazing conference with an equally exciting vibe. The attendees were all remarkable people with great stories and experiences to share. They included 2006 campaign workers fresh off the trail, a candidate for U.S. Senate and leaders of the netroots community.

The idea of the conference was to bring these ideas together to progressive ideas to reality, and I think it really worked. The sessions I attended were filled with lively discussion and some great ideas were shared.

Everyone I spoke with told me that this was one of the best conferences they've attended. One person told me the reason they enjoyed RootsCamp so much was because this conference didn't have a room full of vendors trying to sell their services. This was a conference of ideas not of products.

What I found the most interesting was how the sessions were formed. On one of the floors of the building was a giant cork board. People that wanted to host a session could simply post a piece or paper with the vital information: Name of event, topic, time and place. The conference was truly a wikiconference.

RootsCampDC was a great success and should serve as a model for other progressive conferences.

Check out RootsCampDC's Flickr pics.

NOI/RootsCamp modeling good organizing (of course!) - posted by Michael Silberman

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 14:40:31 -0800

I shouldn't be surprised, but I can't help but be impressed with how we heard back from the RootsCamp DC organizers only moments after signing-on as sponsors. It wasn't just the typical 'thank you' that you might expect. Instead Roz told us exactly who we were enabling to attend through our sponsorship -- the real name of the real internet director coming off a campaign in CA who wouldn't otherwise be able to participate in this post-election debrief.

The email we received is exactly what we try so hard to emphasize across all of our projects and client work: making clear the true, real-world impact of every action or contribution that we ask of others. And following-up as quickly as possible to close the loop and show how every person's contribution is part of something larger than themself. So Roz's note brought a smile to our--ok, my--face.

RootsCamp, if you haven't already heard, is a post-election debrief happing in cities across the country in the very un-conference bar-camp tradition. Ours in DC is happening this weekend. Bar camps are open-source, self-organized geek gatherings organized online to take place in real-space, usually around big tech convergences like SXSW, and organized transparently via a basic wiki.

Needless to say, this is right up our alley, so we're psyched to be involved. Between politics, online organizing, and the open sourcing of technology and ideas, RootsCamp is essentially the perfect merger of our greatest obsessions. (There's even one happening every Wednesday in the SecondLife metaverse!) See you this weekend!

Bringing Our Best Practices Home - posted by Justin Pinder

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 07:54:56 -0700

Back in the days of Howard Dean, I spent many late nights with our own "Meetup" Michael Silberman building the tools we would use to organize and empower the leagues of Dean supporters at events in all 50 states and at hundreds of venues. It was a lesson in community building not easily forgotten, and I soon found myself anxiously looking for more opportunities in online/offline organizing. The one I found was both obvious and surprising all at once.

My apartment building is big. Really big. It's actually two buildings, with a combined 800 units between them. When I first moved to DC, I had never lived in a building large enough to warrant a laundry room, much less a gym, and I when I first moved here, I marveled at the density of urban living.

What I found to be so intriguing was that—despite our close proximity—I rarely spoke to anyone who lived around me. This wasn't intentional, but it turns out that with 12 floors, 3 tiers and 24 hours in a day, you just don't run into your neighbors all that often.

Suddenly, I had a fertile ground to experiment with the lessons I'd learned about online organizing and put some of EchoDitto's best practices to the test. With little to lose, I whipped together a Yahoo! Group, snapped up a domain name and slapped them together. But I had a problem: How do I build an online community of people I've never seen or spoken to? Thanks in part to the lessons learned on the Dean campaign, I came up with the most rudimentary of solutions.

I quickly printed up a stack of flyers with the Web address and ventured throughout the building posting them in every mail room, trash room and public space. I next turned to my fellow coworkers for help seeding the list, making fellow dittos Michael and Emily the first (and only?) non-resident members of my budding online community.

Then, I waited.

One by one, they came. A few in the first week, a few in the second, and after a few more flyerings I was at 30, then 40, then 50. Today the list stands at a respectable 70, and that doesn't include the second building—in which I have yet to post a single flyer.

Over the past two years, the list has featured a variety of lively discussions—ranging from how to hang pictures on the thick concrete walls to where to find a trustworthy housecleaner. Of course, we also see the occasional "stuff for sale" or complaints about the building or management.

In one amusing exchange entitled "Hall Screamers!!", one member writes about a particularly loud and enthusiastic couple's extracurriculars:

"We're on the 11th and are also getting fed up. We first thought
someone was getting murdered, but we are now gradually
wishing more and more it really was the case.."

Sure, from time to time we've dealt with the occasional spammer (such is the price of an open community), but by in large it's been self-moderating and generally neighborhood-appropriate discussion.

A number of free services have come and gone offering tools to organize residents online, but today a search by Google with keywords "apartment building online community" returned nothing tailored to this specific need. Perhaps this is because of the difficulty in building these communities, or—in the case of management sponsored online services—the desire to keep residents from publicly discussing things such as rent (or even worse, rat sightings!)

I think I'll stick with our little Yahoo! Group for now. For me, it has represented a great opportunity to bring the members of my residential community together, and ultimately created a lobbying power the management can't possibly ignore. (It wasn't long after I established the group that our leasing manager quietly subscribed.)

Recently, a new member suggested a happy hour for the members of the list. Perhaps the next evolution of this community won't be online, but offline where it began. Wouldn't that be something?

Video Killed the Blog Star - posted by Nicco

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 12:28:17 -0700

For a long time I've been skeptical of the role of video online. I always felt like people just liked watching videos on their television sets - not their computers. Evidence about online video use seemed to support my anecdotal conjecture.

But the last few months have delivered some major blows to my theory. Apple introduced the video ipod and started selling television shows through the iTunes store - and people took to it in droves. At the same time, YouTube seems to have become completely ubiquitous, allowing video publishing and video sharing to completely explode. And I was with a friend recently who now watches the Daily Show via his cell phone every day using Verizon's V-Cast.

Given the emerging ways of delivering video - vcast to mobile phones, ipods, TiVo/DVR, web-based services like YouTube - what's the right length for video? or is there even a "right" length? Does anyone over 30 (i.e. likely voters) watch online video? How do they consume it? Does it affect their attitudes and actions? Can online video be used effectively for political persuasion?

Making the right call - posted by Mike Carvalho

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 15:02:24 -0700

Riding up the escalator at Farragut North this morning, I heard someone hawking at the top of the stairs and immediately started thinking about how to avoid them. Even though it was a little early for the LaRouche supporters to be out, I took a defensive stance: eyes down, holding my phone as though I needed to make an important call.

As I got closer, I realized there was something different about the people handing out fliers today. "We only recycle 2% of cell phones! We need to do more," said the friendly but earnest voice. It was enough to get me to look, and by then I'd been handed a flier promoting a cell phone recycling program for Earth Day. The flier explains that cell phones contain "lead, mercury and arsenic" and that tossing them in the trash pollutes our air, land and water with these hazardous and toxic materials. A further scan showed it had a catchy URL — www.recyclemycellphone.org — so it was a keeper.

The Recycle My Cell Phone campaign is a project of Earthworks, and they're marking the program's one-year anniversary by sponsoring collections for used cell phones as well as issuing a report card for the wireless industry which gives the big four carriers a well-deserved "F" for their recycling efforts to date. There are opportunities on the website to take action and encourage your provider to do more to keep old phones out of landfills.

But it doesn't stop there. Thanks to the efforts of those working on this campaign, you can drop off your cell phone, beeper or PDA — along with accessories and chargers — to be recycled during Earth Week. Right outside my Metro stop, there will be a collection at Farragut Square this Wednesday through Friday, and collections are planned across the country. Can't find one near you? Use the handy form on the website to print out a postage paid mailing label and send your phone off to be recycled free of charge.

I know I've got a few old cell phones and maybe even a Handspring or two that I need to dispose of properly. Thanks to those intrepid activists at the escalator, now I know how to do it. Next time I see you guys, I'll be sure to make eye contact.

"e-government": it only takes an email listserv - posted by Michael Silberman

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 20:05:56 -0800

Too many people assume that using technology to bring regular citizens closer to the political and democratic processes requires expensive tools and big thinking. For example, Andrew Rasiej built WeFixNYC.com during his campaign for NYC public advocate to demonstrate how easy it would be to create a dynamic map of the city's potholes (with photos!) as reported by citizens on-location with their mobile phones. But it gets much easier than that.

Today I received a great email from my DC commissioner, Stephanie Zobay, who used a simple community email list to get some feedback on her proposed traffic/parking solution:

Neighbors,

I would like to take an unofficial poll and see what you all think of closing the service road in Cleveland Park, replacing the lost parking with back-in, angle parking (like in Adams Morgan) which would be available during rush hour. If the service road were
closed, there is the possibility of widening the sidewalk.

Feel free to weigh in here, so I can get a better sense of what our neighborhood wants.

Stephanie Zobay
Commissioner ANC3C-03

It took just a few minutes for Stephanie to write and send this message, and she's already received a few constructive replies. Everyone wins—Stephanie gets rapid feedback and establishes credibility, and the rest of us get to stay involved and informed without attending a meeting.

To state the obvious from a political perspective, participating in local community email discussion lists is a great way for local politicians and officials to establish both their name recognition and demonstrate their commitment to actually representing constituents and getting things done.

While our local community listserv is still in its infancy, the neighboring Cleveland Park list contains an impressive 3,400 members, and there are micro-community lists popping up for specific apartment buildings. JP started an email list for his building almost a year ago, and just last week I noticed a flyer in my building's laundry room for our own list.

If you start following the traffic on these community lists, I think you'll be as amazed as I still am at how large a void these email lists fill—they help connect a network of strangers in a very powerful and constructive way. Neighbors warn others about crime incidents, volunteers update the group on local construction plans and P&Z cases, and individuals organize ad-hoc campaigns to get building management to pay more attention to certain problems... if the building managers aren't already on the list!

If your community has a good email listserv going, please post a link to it in the comments here.

For the record, Andrew Rasiej's campaign engaged EchoDitto for internet strategy prior to the election.

Whaddya think now? - posted by Mike Carvalho

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 08:56:21 -0700

About a month ago, my buddy Joshua wrote a blog post about the Think Cropp signs which had cropped up (no pun intended) across D.C., seemingly overnight. He praised the nontraditional nature of this campaign effort, and he wasn't the only one who noticed. DCist blogged about it, and as a D.C. resident with a front door that leads onto the street I'd taken an interest as well — especially because someone had surreptitiously stuck one of the signs into the patch of grass right out front just as I happened to be looking out the window. Actually, because I live in the Columbia Heights neighborhood, the sign deliverer had used a Spanish Piensen Cropp sign which made the message that much more cryptic.

The only thing I really knew about Linda Cropp was that she had been the target of the Drop Cropp campaign last year when the negotiations for a baseball stadium here in D.C. got complicated. So after the guy with the signs left, I did what any self-respecting web geek would do: I Googled everything I could think of. A URL on the sign sure would've helped, but there was none to be found. I searched for the phrase "Piensen Cropp" and found nothing. The bottom of the sign listed something called the "Think DC PAC," so I checked for that. Nope. And there were no results for "Think Cropp," either.

A few days later, the City Paper shed a little more light on the situation: the signs were, indeed, put up by a PAC and were unaffiliated with Cropp or her campaign. What wasn't clear, though, is what the signs were meant to accomplish. They weren't a show of grassroots support — unlike the signs which had sprouted up earlier this summer across the city announcing support for Adrian Fenty's campaign, the Think Cropp signs were not put up by supporters. The Fenty campaign claims to have distributed over 2,100 signs to city residents for placement in their yards. Most of those signs are still in place. By contrast, the Think DC signs were not in yards but along the street on public property — and just about all of them seem to have disappeared.

Even worse, the lack of any sort of web presence or a way to find out more information about this campaign left even curious city residents like me completely in the dark. I wanted to know what the signs were asking me to think about, but there was no way for me to find out.

Linda Cropp has her own lawn signs now — they're the red ones, scattered throughout the city — and her campaign website is up and running. Justin even ran into her campaigning near the Metro. Mayor Williams recently announced he's not running for reelection, so the campaign to fill his shoes has started in earnest. In the grand scheme of things, the Think Cropp effort will be just a blip in an election which won't be decided until November 2006. Had they thought of a few things, though, it could've been much more successful:

While the value of lawn signs is up for debate, when signs are displayed by supporters on their lawns they are an indication of a some sort of grassroots campaign. Also, they'll be around for more than a couple weeks.
If you're going to run a quirky advertising campaign for anything, always buy the domain name. It's really simple and only costs a few bucks — this blog post, for example, can be reached by visiting www.thinkcropp.com.

Those are just my thoughts. What do you think?

Cropp Has Me Thinking - posted by Joshua Shimkin

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 14:26:47 -0700

I orginally posted this as a comment to a DCist post, but I thought I would repost my comment. The background is that Linda Cropp, the DC City Council Chairman and candidate for DC Mayor, has just launched her first advertising in the form of posters. DCist covers the story here. My comment follows:

I think the signs are great. They will stand out and separate her from the pack of Mayoral hopefulls. The signs also begin to position her campaign as the insurgent campaign already because she is using untraditional message strategy. This plays to her strength as the only woman in the field.
I'm interested to see what she does online and whether she continues this theme with some community building tools that encourage the public to "think" with her campaign.

The most interesting part of this race is that the incumbent, Mayor Anthony Williams, hasn't decided whether to run again. Are the rest of the candidates going to take their cue from Cropp and run some untraditional visibility campaigns? Who is going to step up to the plate and do something interesting to grab some "untraditional" attention?

Blogging, Mayoral Style - posted by Jennifer Powers

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 09:14:33 -0700

I was delighted this morning to receive an email about D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams' new blog. It launched on Monday and has one entry and eight comments so far, from D.C. residents and one from as far away as Wisconsin. Most of the comments are asking the Mayor questions about particular issues they are concerned about in D.C., but some are just fun like the one that asks: "What is your favorite bottle of wine and where is it produced?"

The first entry from the Mayor assures readers that the views expressed really are his, and the tone of the entry sure makes me think he at least wrote it, if he didn't actually physically post it. I wish more officeholders would get into blogging — it is such a natural and easy way to touch base with constituents and make them feel like they are being heard.

The only thing missing from the blog is an RSS feed — nowadays people don't have time to keep going to websites and hitting reload, so we rely on RSS technology to bring the posts and comments to us. For now I will have to check in on the blog when I can and hope I don't miss too much.

Great job Mayor Williams — you are setting a standard I hope others follow.

Just a Minor Threat - posted by Tim Jones

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:31:26 -0700

Here's another example of how grassroots are using the internet to fight back.

Earlier this month, Nike stole the album cover from Ian MacKaye's 1981 punk/hardcore classic Minor Threat to promote a new line of shoes. Nike's advertisers have been courting American skater culture and subculture in general for a long time now, but ordinarily they at least ask for a celebrity's permission before using him/her as a spokesperson.

In this case, Nike apparently decided to just bypass permission-asking altogether and steamroll over copyright law. MacKaye is a notoriously hard-nosed and principled businessman, known for saying things like "no amount of money is worth losing control of our music". He's shrewdly held onto the copyright for all of his albums, and it's unlikely he would have cooperated had he been asked.

Last week, Pitchfork Media publicized the rip-off, along with a scathing statement from MacKaye's Dischord Records:

"They stole it and we're not happy about it. Nike is a giant corporation which is attempting to manipulate the alternative skate culture to create an even wider demand for their already ubiquitous brand. Nike represents just about the antithesis of what Dischord stands for and it makes me sick to my stomach to think they are using this explicit imagery to fool kids into thinking that the general ethos of this label, and Minor Threat in particular, can somehow be linked to Nike's mission. It's disgusting."

Blogstorm! Starting from EchoDitto's initial discovery of the fracas Friday afternoon on DCist, our operatives monitored hundreds of outraged and hysterical blogposts and forum comments from skaters and activists worldwide, as well as a speed-update of Nike's Wikipedia page and a Photoshop contest that's already received a couple hundred mashups of "Nike and other evil corporations ruining famous album covers," like the Wal-Mart one at the top of this post. (Because- have you heard?- Wal-Mart is the new Nike.)

Yesterday, inevitably, the story entered the mainstream media. Even though it had been brewing all weekend, Nike failed to react quickly enough to get a quote in MTV's coverage. (Note to Nike's PR firm: Use Technorati.) By the end of the day, though, they had issued a surprised and hasty apology promising to recall the flyers and proclaiming their deep respect and admiration for Dischord, though it doesn't look like it's made anyone less angry at them.

Of course, no there's been no major change here. Nike's profits are higher than ever, and- protestations of responsibility aside- they're not going to stop depending on indentured servitude any time soon. But for a few days anyway, they've given the netroots a new anthem:

Make do with what you have

take what you can get.

Pay no mind to us-

we're just a minor threat.