Adrift.

July 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Where do things go from here?

That’s a question I have been asking myself a lot lately – both from a personal front and a political one. Personally, I am in the middle of a job change and honestly don’t know yet where I will end up. “Communications and media” and “content that matters” are my focus, but what that means is still anyone’s guess. I’m adrift, but it’s not a bad thing. (By the way, if anyone wants to weigh in on where I should go that actually fits those two phrases, feel free.) I’m adrift, but I have a paddle, and look forward to exciting destinations.

But the political drifting is a little more troubling. I can’t tell you how many conversations I have had over the past few weeks with smart people who have thrown up their hands with our government. I’m not talking about people on the extremes of either party, who see no need to reach deals and to my mind, seem to value beating the other guys over addressing issues. I’m talking about the 50% in the middle, who actually want to see solutions – to the debt crisis, to health care woes, to the job problems we face, to the housing crisis. These are people who aren’t saying, “Hell no, I won’t pay a dime in new taxes,” or “Hell yes, we need to spend ourselves into oblivion to address all that ails us.”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Featured Posts, Politics

No Labels?

December 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Citizen Leaders Issue a Call to Put the Labels Aside, Do What’s Best for America

Today. Posted by No Labels.

MORE THAN 1000 AMERICANS FROM ALL 50 STATES CHECK PRECONDITIONS AT THE DOOR

More than 1000 people are gathering this morning in New York City at the founders meeting of No Labels.  Republicans, Democrats and Independents – from many backgrounds and all 50 states—who concerned about the excessive polarization and hyper-partisanship of American politics, are coming together to ask their leaders to put the labels aside and do what’s best for America.

We are united by a commitment to encourage our leaders to work together and develop practical solutions to our nation’s problems.  Today is just the beginning.  No Labels will create a space where ideas can be judged on their merits, not their conformity to pre-fabricated stereotypes.  It is the creation of a new voice—one that has been missing from the current political system, a counterweight to ideological extremes.

Today’s event will feature citizens, civic leaders, politicians, academics, business leaders and college students from over 90 different universities.

The event will be live streaming from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm EST on NoLabels.org (direct link to the live stream: http://bit.ly/LiveNoLabels).



via nolabels.org

Sometimes, there are things that you really want to see turn out well, but while you are optimistic or hopeful, you are careful not to expect too much. It’s why I am a Boston Bruins fan. But it’s also why I’ll be keeping an eye on the recently-launched nolabels.org, which held its official opening today.

It wouldn’t break my heart to see issues trump party politics in the news – but whether any group can help reset the focus is something I wonder. In any case, I think the more groups like No Labels that can make noise for tacking issues over partisanship, the better our shot that the next two years won’t be gridlock.

Regardless, I’ll be keeping an eye to see if No Labels can get any traction.

Posted via email from Yankee 2.0 on Posterous

Filed Under: Politics, Random Thoughts

The revolution will be tweeted…

April 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The world is paying more attention to the former Soviet republic of Moldova – and they’re doing it 140 characters at a time.

Thousands of people in Moldova and its capital, Chisinau, have taken to the streets in protest the Communist government’s win in elections on Sunday – and they’ve used social media to power and raise awareness of the protests.

First, a little background – in elections on Sunday, the Communist party won about half of the votes, which is enough to give them control of Parliament and the ability to elect a new president, Communist Vladimir Voronin who is required by the Moldovan constitution to step down. The results were better than expected for the Communists, and there have been accusations of voter intimidation, harassment of opposition leaders and voter fraud. (Independent observers have preliminarily concluded the elections were fair, although they did cite a number of problems.

But the situation began getting worldwode attention once opposition groups began using Twitter, facebook and other social media to organize and draw attention to their concerns. The New York Times is among the worldwide media writing about this today. The small number of Moldovans (estimated at as few as 200 when the protests began) created a hashtag on Twitter – #pman, which is shorthand for the name of the central square in the capital of Chisinau, and have used the tool very effectively to generate worldwide interest.

(To see more images of the protests like this image above, visit Unimedia.info).

The protests inspired young people from across Moldova to come to the capital, and encouraged young Moldovan workers who were living in Romania and elsewhere in Europe, to come and join the protests.

And yesterday, those protests turned violent, with fires in the central square, rocks being thrown and riot police using water cannons to fight back. Romanian television and other media are sharing their images of the events on YouTube and elsewhere. By Wednesday morning, the square is quiet, but Twitter was still buzzing, being used to share stories of border closings, and accusations that government agents actually incited the violence in an effort to make the peaceful protests of the election look bad.

A great way to follow it all is on the application Twitterfall, which I have discussed before, to follow the #pman and Moldova streams.

Is this a “Twitter Revolution”, as Evgeny Morozov titled it in Foreign Policy? Hard to say whether protesters actually are using Twitter to communicate (especially once Internet service failed in Chisinau on Tuesday), and there are skeptics.

But there is no doubt that Twitter and Facebook are driving interest in a part of the world relegated to the back pages and the world briefs of many publications.

And we should be paying attention – noting not just where Moldova is on the map, but how what is happening there affects politics both there and worldwide. Right now, social media is helping to do that.

Filed Under: Featured Posts, MediaTed, Politics Tagged With: , , ,

Not now dear, there’s this great White House livestream…

April 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

(NECN: Ted McEnroe) – So what were you doing at 5:20 ET this morning? You could have been watching President Obama live in Turkey on your own live White House feed.

The White House continued its determined effort to make its workings directly accessible on the Internet, with a livestream of the President’s Town hall meeting with about 100 university students, which in itself was a pretty impressive event – an American president taking live questions from an audience in one of the world’s most critical Muslim countries. White House bloggers spent much of last night promoting the event, and the White House live channel at whitehouse.gov/live.

The video channel is one thing, but the Obama administration is going one step further – taking a page from the YouTube (or NECN.com) book. The live feeds are now embeddable on any webpage or blog, via the embed code seen at the bottom of the player. All you have to do is copy the code, paste it onto your site or into a post, and you have your own White House channel – albeit at a lower quality than the one available on whitehouse.gov.

As I mentioned – this is something NECN.com has been doing for some time – when we do livestreaming you can also embed that stream on your site, as Matt Noyes has a number of times – and create your own NECN Live channel. The embed codes are also available for any stories we post on the site. Help yourself – we’ll keep serving it up.

But back to the White House – they’re also reaching out to social networks worldwide in an effort to engage young people – the Turkish event was publicized on yonja.com, the Turkish social networking site.

It’s a start, but there are still more opportunities for the White House to truly engage. The White House still picks and chooses what speech texts and transcripts are made available – and if there is any disagreement or discussion on policy within the White House, you wouldn’t know it from the site. There is a notable lack of critiquing possibilities, no independent analysis available and still fairly limited opportunities for user-generated feedback. In short, it is still a relatively one-way street.

But it’s a start for a White House that is trying to reach its audience – both with and without the media’s help.

Filed Under: Featured Posts, MediaTed, Politics Tagged With: , ,

@rdsahl + @massgovernor twitter Q + A ok!

February 12, 2009 By 4 Comments

Yesterday’s announcement that the Massachusetts Governor’s office was setting up a Web portal to let taxpayers see how any economic stimulus money that comes to Massachusetts is being spent is just the latest effort by the Patrick Administration to get ahead of the governmental curve on technology.

Things are far from perfect, but the Governor’s office has stepped up its efforts to reach out with personal and office pages for Governor Patrick on Facebook, frequent video updates of Governor’s events on YouTube, and most recently, a stronger social networking presence on Twitter, as @massgovernor.

NECN’s R.D. Sahl put that presence to the test on Twitter last week, and got some interesting results.

Gov. Patrick: WashPost blog floats your name for HHS. Are you in the mix? Would you take if offered. Thanks.

(He also DM’d the Governor’s office with this question.)

Typically, the routine for reporters would be this:
Pick up the phone.
Call the Governor’s office.
Tell the nice person on the other end of the phone that you need a comment. In this case, on this report that Gov. Patrick might be considered for HHS secretary. The nice person takes a message.
Wait.
Wait.
And then, a few hours later – usually after another phone call, or if you don’t call, about 5 minutes after your story airs – get the response in an email.
Total time: A long wait (at least it always seems long), and a little stress.

Instead, because he used Twitter and the Governor’s Office is social media-savvy (@massgovernor), something different happened. Fifty-eight minutes later this appeared in the public Twitter stream:

@rdsahl As the governor has said countless times, he is staying put and running for re-election. - Kyle Sullivan, Press Secretary

OK – I’ll admit now that I didn’t expect a response at all. I’m not sure R.D. did either. But after Adam Gaffin user oddjob60 posed the question on Universal Hub, I asked R.D. why he did it. He replied, “It was the most direct way to ask the question.”

It was also something anyone could have done – it didn’t have to be R.D., or any journalist. It could have been anyone out there.

It was also far more immediate – total time of the Q and A – 58 minutes, and the audience to the discussion had the answer at the same time as the journalist who asked the question. And anyone could have jumped in for a followup @ reply, if they wished. Adam and a commenter on Universal Hub said it takes the media ‘middleman’ out of the equation. But after thinking about it, I give it a little different spin.

What Twitter did in this situation was make the process wholly transparent. R.D.’s job is to be plugged in to what’s going on in the world, and that’s a valuable role. He’s already all over the web, pulling together the interesting tidbits from all over the globe as part of his job. But instead of being solely a media filter, the Twitter set up lets him be a unfiltered purveyor of thoughtful questions.

Now, it should be noted that you might not get as quick a response. If everyone in Massachusetts who is on Twitter submitted a question to the governor’s office (and odds are we could all come up with one), it would be an avalanche that could take months to deal with. But it can still be a great way to build a connection between the state’s people – and it’s chief executive.

You may want to check out the Governor’s office on Twitter. Whatever you think of his policies – it’s good to know there are a few ways to get a little attention.

Filed Under: Featured Posts, Journalism, MediaTed, Politics Tagged With: , , ,

Is wordle a verb?

February 10, 2009 By Leave a Comment

If it is, I wordled the Obama news conference transcript.

The future’s uncertain – and the end is always near. Obama thinks more than he knows.

Wordle: Obama news conference

Filed Under: Politics, Random Thoughts Tagged With: ,

Obama camp unveils Organizing for America… I think

January 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Barack Obama presidential primary campaign, 2008
Image via Wikipedia

For those of you, including me, who had asked what would happen to the community-level power that was harnessed by the Obama campaign through BarackObama.com, I have an answer. Ummm, sort of.

In an email to supporters and a video, Obama for America director David Plouffe introduced Mitch Stewart as the head of Organizing for America, which President Obama alluded to in his last weekly video statement as President-Elect.

Stewart ran the President’s Iowa caucus and Virginia presidential campaigns.

In the six-minute message, Plouffe and Stewart thanked supporters for their past help, and promised the new site would engage supporters and be built on getting “friends talk to friends and neighbors talk to neighbors about the issues they care about.”

The campaign collected a half-million surveys during the transition, and got more feedback from Obama house parties, and in the end… we’re not sure what’s next.

Plouffe thanked supporters for their financial help for the transition and inauguration, and noted “It’s going to be a little trial and error” for the new organization.

We’ll now just have to see what’s in their first trial plan.

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , ,

Nice party. Now let’s get Barack to work online

January 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment

So, it’s a new era. Did you enjoy the inaugural? Because it’s time to forget about that stuff and get the people back to work.

The administration of Barack Obama is already making some steps toward taking its new technology initiatives to the White House, but plenty of challenges remain.

Right at noon, the Obama team rolled out the new White House website at whitehouse.gov – folding in many of the features from change.gov (except the actual user comments and content – is that all gone now?), including a blog and the Office of the Public Liaison, where users can submit their comments for the Administration in 500 words or less.

In his first post as White House Director of New Media, Macon Phillips noted there would be more changes to come, and announced that the White House would post all Executive Orders and Proclamations on the site. He also noted as has been widely reported that the President would post all non-emergency bills passed by Congress on the site for five days to let users comment on them before he considers signing them.

Will there be issues that public opinion could sway the White House? Will we have a news conference where the President says, “The people spoke up, and so I am vetoing this bill?” It seems a little hard to conceive of – but even giving people the chance to get their voices on the record (and one would assume this record must be preserved) is a step toward openness, and a noteworthy one.

But the White House site is just one route to continuing the conversation online. There are a number of other sites that could be folded into a new entity. There’s MyBarackObama.com – the big kahuna in all this – with millions of members and more importantly, a way to let users engage each other. There usaservice.org – the site launched for the Day of Service on January 19th, that shares the localization and event planning features of the campaign site – but neither of these sites have been significantly updated on Day 1.

And, there’s the “Organizing for America” initiative that Obama mentioned in his weekly address last Saturday. The White House will somehow partner with the Democratic National Committee to launch this new initiative, but the announcement shed little light on it.

With an estimated 13 million people signed up with the campaign, re-energizing this base to stay involved will be a critical challenge. Whether it can be done within the restrictions and requirements of the Presidential Records Act and other laws is something we’ll be watching.

But it only seems to make sense that Obama would look outside the White House to move this powerful coalition of the people forward. No matter how much he wants to make the White House more open and transparent, the only way to build an effective network for change will be to ply the role of running water, and flow around the obstacles.

Filed Under: Featured Posts, MediaTed, Politics Tagged With: , ,

Cautious Obamaptimism

January 18, 2009 By 1 Comment

I’m watching the Obama concert, and totally hooked in on the one hand – but on the other, I’ll be glad when this week is over.

Watching the Obama Express travel to DC, and the concert today, and seeing the breathless excitement on the faces of so many millions of people who are traveling to Washington to witness history from a mile away, just to say they were in DC when a new era dawned, I am touched – and nervous.

The emotion is touching – Bill Clinton was from Hope, but it appears Barack Obama is perceived to be carved from it. And in that hope, there is the burden of expectation. It is as though we expect to wake up on Wednesday, January 21 in a new place, with our sins redeemed – our toxic loans disinfected, our transgressions overseas forgiven, our 401(k)s reinstilled with value.

And that is my fear. We all seem to get on some level how big the economic problems we face are – but do *we* have the gumption to actually fix our problems? Do we understand not just that the key word in the slogan “Yes we can” is *we*, but that the most critical is “can?” It’s not, “Yes, we will,” or “Yes, we shall.”- it’s yes we can. And inherent in that phrase is the acknowledgment that we might not.

And the problems are daunting and personal. We have real issues – after I finish this post, my wife and I will be reworking our budget to account for the pain of a layoff, and the expectation that the next job will pay substantially less than the one just lost. And those problems won’t be solved at 12pm on Tuesday. In fact, we will just begin a new chapter – after two years of campaigning and planning, two years of words – it will be Barack Obama’s first day for action.

In some ways, The Obama Express didn’t begin in Philadelphia on Saturday – it departed in 2007, and slowly gathered speed and momentum as more people climbed aboard. Now it faces the climb uphill – and it is a climb that charisma, charm and personal brilliance cannot make happen. Instead, all of those who rode this train, it is time to step off, get behind and push. Because the only way the train will make this climb is with the strength of many hands. And if we don’t do our part as a people to pick ourselves up and move forward, then we will have failed, not Obama. Presidents do not fix, they provide opportunity. Only we as a nation can turn that to solutions.

In the end, to borrow a conservative phrase, we need “A hand up – not a hand out.”

Only this time it is not a Presidential hand that will help us up. It is our hands, reaching skyward, that must support and carry him.

(Photo by: Alex Brandon/AP)

Filed Under: Featured Posts, Politics Tagged With: ,

A Congressional critique generates some heat

January 15, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I complained yesterday about Congress on the web, and took a little heat on global warming.

After my segment yesterday, in which I called out Congress and the Senate for their overall pathetic showing on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, I got a call from Jeff Sharp, a Senior Communications Adviser for Rep. Ed Markey. I had mentioned Markey specifically – saying that as a senior Democrat on the House Committee that oversees internet issues – he could be farther ahead of the curve on Congress 2.0.

His message (and I’m paraphrasing) – “What about the Congressman’s award-winning global warming site?”

And you know, he was kind of right. While the House Committee on Commerce and Energy’s site is weak, and inexplicably, the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet is even worse, Markey’s Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has a lot to offer. There are interactive graphics, lots of information, links to a calculator to measure your carbon footprint, and much more.

You know what? It’s a good site, slickly produced, and I tip my hat.

And Sharp also politely reminded me of Markey’s other efforts – taking video questions from constituents and using them, creating an Avatar in Second Life and even using it for an event in Bali. That puts him at the head of his Congressional class. But Congress as a whole is still way behind where they need to be to engage their constituents.

Sharp acknowledges that with the ban on outside web presences for members removed only four months ago, there’s not much change to be seen. But he says that Markey’s office is working on a system for comments from users on YouTube and his other sites, and says Rep. Markey WILL be on Twitter soon.

He even graciously accepted my offer of the Twitter name RepMarkey.

Congress still needs a social media strategy – or at least a way to manage comments? – and Markey is in a position to keep pushing that effort forward. But I have to give the man from Malden his due.

So having rattled on about the Democrats, a tip of the hat to some members of the GOP, too. Some web-savvy Republicans are building a grassroots effort on the social networking platform Ning. Rebuildtheparty.com is dedicated to recognizing that Republicans need to take a page from the Democrats playbook if they want to see a little more red in their future. It’s worth a look, too.

And they are living a little of what they preach – fiscal conservatism.

Ning is free.

Filed Under: Featured Posts, MediaTed, Politics Tagged With: , ,
« Older Posts