New Tools

As promised in our monthly newsletter, here is our Public Media 2.0 Field Report: Building Social Media Infrastructure to Engage Publics --Twitter Vote Report and Inauguration Report 09 --two projects that demonstrated the potential of microblogging formats for election monitoring before the recent upheaval in Iran brought the topic to international attention.Read more...

It took me the whole long weekend to recover from the rush of friends, tweets, and innovative civic playtoys at last week's Personal Democracy Forum. As our research fellow Nina Keim noted, Twitter was definitely the belle of the ball. But there were a number of other standout tools that demonstrate the potential for what PDF organizers are calling "we.gov".Read more...

Last week I attended a two-day New Media Training conference with the New Organizing Institute (NOI). The Institute aims:

* To train and support a new generation of technology-enabled campaigners.

* To consolidate and disseminate knowledge gained in the field of political technology and online organizing.Read more...

At this year’s Personal Democracy Forum more than 1,000 opinion makers, political practitioners, technologists and journalists gathered together for the sixth time to discuss how technology is changing politics. Having witnessed how Barack Obama found innovative ways to leverage modern media tools to advance the campaign, the PDF is now focused on identifying how much the Internet and technology tools are changing the environment.Read more...

Firefox has just announced its release candidate of Firefox 3.5 for testing. Its new video features are impressive. With technology evolving at such a rapid speed, filmmaking continues to become more and more accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a flip camera. By the way, we just bought our very own HD flip camera yesterday for $200 but when we did a bit of pricing research we found ones for as cheap as $129. Read more...