Dr. DigiPol

A mobile phone video taped Saddam Hussein’s execution (oh no! I think it is this one). Now we can all see it online. Not the official video. Some witness’s phone, video. Magic. Or is it?

Congress is giving itself blogs for the New year. They plan to restrict the rules of what they can say on them to what is allowed under the franking rules. Let’s eee how they use them. Are they going to allow constituent comments? Comments from anyone? Comments from no one?
Will […]

As many of you may know, my firm, the Internet Advocacy Center, runs the Internet Advocacy Roundtable every third Thursday of the month. We met yesterday and Hatef Yamini, of Care2.com, who hosts the Roundtable, posted a great summary of the discussion on Frogloop.

How has the internet changed since 2001? According to a listing of the Top 10 sites in 2001 compared to 2006, it looks like the last five years saw the rise in dominance of social networking websites over search engine sites.

But this impression may be a bit too shallow.
While on its […]

You did it. You’re the man. You are the woman. You are the world. You are the people. I can’t thank you enough. You are the sunshine of my life. You rock. You, you, you, you, you.
You never know the impact you make on other […]

Even as many of us gear up for campaigns to create a buzz about our issues and candidates on MySpace and other social networks, the FTC yesterday issued a staff opinion that buzz makers that are being paid to promote products must disclose their relationship to the companies paying them. This will clearly affect […]

For all the hype about YouTube, it is not the ideal place to distribute political and advocacy video. Sure, it reaches millions of viewers, and that is a good thing. But YouTube is not a destination site for people interested in politics and policy issues. When a political video pops on YouTube it is a phenomenon to be reckoned with, but that pop is never guaranteed.

Raul Fernandez’s “Uploading American Politics” washingtonpost.com provides a quick snapshot on how the Internet has swept through the political landscape in only 12 years.
And while he captures the essence of the phenomenon, perhaps he is overstating some of it. Fernandez talks about how lots of political content was distributed over blogs, YouTube, and instant […]