August 24, 2005
Micah Sifry Invites You to Participate in Supporting Andrew Rasiej
Updated: the call is now at 12:30 pm EST instead of 1pm EST.
...with this conference call for bloggers about Andrew Rasiej, who is running for Public Advocate in NYC:
From: info@rasiej.com
Subject: Barlow, Dyson, Hodder, Michalski, Newmark, Searls, Sifry, Trippi, Vos and Weinberger invite you to meet Andrew Rasiej
Date: August 24, 2005 2:37:37 PM EDT
Dear friend:
When someone who understands the democratizing forces of technologies like social networking, blogging, and p2p decides to enter the world of politics to shake things up, we should take heed and add our voices.
That's why we're writing you about Andrew Rasiej, candidate for New York City Public Advocate, and inviting you to join a national bloggers conference call next Tuesday August 30 from noon to 1:00pm EST to meet him and find out more.
At first glance, you're probably thinking, "Why should I pay attention to this race? It's not even the most powerful office in New York."
But Andrew is running to prove that the power of networked politics is real and can fundamentally alter not just campaigns, but also how citizens and elected officials engage in civic life and the results they achieve. It just so happens that the office of Public Advocate, which is the number-two elected position in the city, is perfect for this.
The Public Advocate has the power to introduce legislation, conduct investigations, and chairs an important--though neglected--commission on open public information. But the office is really only limited by its holder's imagination and ability to organize people and focus attention where it needs to be focused.
Andrew is also a candidate of new ideas, and here are his three most important proposals:
1. To make America's largest city a Wi-Fi hotzone, and to help close the digital divide by creating a low-cost, high-speed wireless mesh network for everyone in the city.
2. To use the ideas behind open-source and peer-to-peer networks to reinvent the Public Advocate's office, and turn it from being one person's modest soapbox into a sounding board, connecting hub and amplifying megaphone for all the people in the city.
3. To use technology to make city government more open, transparent and accountable.
Andrew's getting attention for his innovative and common-sense approach, as these articles by Thomas Friedman,
David Kirkpatrick,
and Stowe Boyd show. Joe Trippi says, "Andrew worked with me on the Dean campaign and I can honestly say that this is a brilliant man who can have a positive, real effect on New York City."
Moreover, Andrew's not just a idea guy; he has a track record of getting things done. From starting the rock club Irving Plaza to founding MOUSE.org, an education nonprofit that has trained thousands of NYC students to be their schools' own technologists, to advising top Democrats like Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean, to starting the Personal Democracy Forum—he is a doer, not just a talker.
You may not agree with everything he has to say, but we urge you to give him a listen—and we're sure he'll give you a listen, too. The conventional wisdom says he's a long-shot, but political change has to start somewhere.
To take part in the conference call, please RSVP to info@rasiej.com (hit reply) and you will be sent the call-in information. Feel free to share this invite widely.
Sincerely,
John Perry Barlow
Esther Dyson
Mary Hodder
Jerry Michalski
Craig Newmark
Doc Searls
Dave Sifry
Joe Trippi
Esme Vos
David Weinberger
p.s. While Andrew is running in the Democratic primary, what he represents ought to inspire Republicans, independents and creative thinkers of all stripes. As Phil Windley, the former CIO of the state of Utah and a Republican, recently wrote, "If we are not willing to support (vote and donate) to people who understand technology and what powers innovation, then we'll get the nation we deserve."
Important Questions About What Matters as we make an Ad Hoc Community Algorithm to Describe Blog Communities and Weight Bloggers In Them...
J. LeRoy on Convergence and Procreation talking about ad hoc groups in the blogosphere:
- To tie this into my recent posts about rankings and tracking of expertise on the net, I want to note the transience of thought on the individual, the right to multiple associations, and the healthy aspects of not being an expert.
Right on! Dynamically generated communities will be key to this process, because day-to-day, these communities shift, and yet, it is also important to see conversation over time. The blogosphere is often self correcting, and bad actors get modded down over time, with useful work modded up. So we must achieve a balance in this dichotomy.
- These groups and communities on the net are well formed. And, yes, the conversation is well formed and on-going, but we should be wary of rankings that build up expert or superblogger status on given individuals.
- Inherently:
- 1 Ad Hoc Groups are created to solve problems
- 2 Blogs' subject matter is transient
- 3 Community is fluid
- This leads me to wonder how we would establish relevance of blog posters by community indicators when the communities themselves are in flux by design. Communities defined by a given area of interest will tend to highlight those who are perhaps overly focused on those areas of interest. It may yield a search of those who are tunnel visioned and not those who are innovative.
So what are the metrics that help balance tunnel vision with newness and interestingness in a community and the weighting of blogs, to discover innovation? Or do we use the metrics we have now, but tune them to balance these concerns?
Julie Leung in Now serving: Blogher Bouillabaisse:
- Why do metrics matter? From dialogue I've read, it seems metrics matter because they matter to the media. The Top Whatever blogs are the ones that will be referenced and used to represent blogging to the majority of people in the world who don't blog. They in a sense become who we are. Yet as Staci Kramer pointed out in the discussion, not all journalists care about the Top lists either.
- Why should metrics matter to a blogger like me? I've been taking a bit of my own Blogging 101 advice these past couple weeks and considering what it is I am trying to do here. Why am I blogging? Sure, I use Technorati. In fact on the Blogher survey before the conference, I checked that I do care about traffic. I've even cried over my Technorati ranking. But that was mostly because I wanted to be involved in conversations. I wanted to know that others were reading and responding. And I also had mistaken ideas about what my Technorati rating should be, after seeing my husband's statistics. I've now realized I'll never have the links and traffic he does. We are blogging for different - but overlapping - communities and in separate niches.
- All I want to do is write well and have good conversations. As far as finding good blogs, rankings only reveal what lots of people who link like to link. They are not necessarily indicators of good writing or good blogging or even blogs I want to read. I use Technorati, Feedster and PubSub to know who is linking and talking to me. But as for my ranking, I don't need to know it in order to blog or to sense I am blogging successfully.
Asking ourselves why we blog is very important in this discussion. It can lead us to uncover some implicit motivations and activities we engage in, that might help us with this effort. On reason I blog is to create a knowledge management system for myself. Another is to point to things I'm interested in, sharing that with others. And I like having an opinion exposed now and then. Digging deeper will help expose the answer to the broader issue at hand: finding out who does what, and what is done by whom, and what and who matter.
Mathemagenic in Link love: lists, clouds and action points asks from 'what to how?" and wonders.. where to get the data:
- But it starts with the data. And the data is not public.
- I can not speak for others, but I can talk about problems we have with the data needed for our research (which addresses some of the "link love" aspects). What we need to develop algorithms and tools are pretty simple: blog content in "full-text RSS quality" via APIs...
- We tried many of the current blog indexing tools: no luck (those that are pretty close to what we need, BlogPulse, Technorati and Bloglines are either consider the data they collect commercial or do not have APIs to access it). As a results Anjo is working on weblog spider instead of community discovery algorithm.
Data is an issue. However, we will ask companies collecting data to help us. Three have firmly committed to running a community algorithm against their data, along with a startup in stealth mode, that also has a complete database. We'd love to have as many blog search companies as possible on board for this ad hoc community experiment. I've seen this experiment as something of a partnership between companies who create blog search for readers, bloggers, PR people, advertisers, and marketers, and the blogging community that is talking about this effort. If others see problems with this, please tell us.
