Last week I asked: “If this social network he is building can attract cash to a campaign, just imagine how effectively it can attract talent to an administration. You don’t imagine they will just throw that network away if elected, do you?” This week Marc Ambinder answers in The Atlantic:
What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog—also with comments—would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer.
Today Obama is like a brand, his campaign like a $250 million company, and the voters like customers; the persuasion flows one way. If he becomes president, then power, authority, and legitimacy will flow in both directions; voters who are now keen to support the idea of Obama may push against his initiatives in office, sometimes unpredictably.
Not quite. I think, actually, Obama has run a campaign that is remarkably two-way, especially for politics. Not only has he kept everyone in the drivers seat rhetorically (”this campaign” or “our campaign” he usually says instead of “my campaign”), but he has also accepted the impromptu assistance of his supporters by using their campaign offices and their videos. Granted, the goal is simply to get him elected, but I think he has begun to demonstrate that he is ready to engage the nation like no other recent president. Once governing the goal becomes much more complex and our continued engagement and commitment critical to success.
Haven’t these people ever heard of Perl or other programming languages that could easily process large reports? I guess it is good news that Obama and Clinton are swamping the FEC and media’s old technology with massive financial reports. We would not want fewer contributors, after all.
Of Mars, that is. Pheonix made a safe landing and the pictures started rolling in. I really love that NASA TV is now streamed on the web. Bravo to the team at the University of Arizona, and best of luck on the rest of the mission!
Lorcan has a useful post about the Powerhouse Museum experience with Flickr Commons to date. Seb Chan there writes that their 400 images have been viewed 39,685 times in the 71 days they have been up (actually, most have been up for considerably less than the full 71 days, since the museum is loading them 50 at a time). This works out to about 1.40 views per image per day. [Update: See Seb's correction in comments, actually about 3.5 views per image per day.]
Meanwhile I worked out last month that during our MDL Social Side of Reflections project the MDL Reflections database got about 0.18 views per image per day. Flickr is producing over 7 times the number of views that our Reflections system provides.
It is also interesting to note that Seb finds only 1% of the Flickr hits are due to search. 75% is from inside Flickr, the rest from direct references and web links. That 75% number is remarkable, and might be an indicator of the community that Flickr builds.
Also pertinent to the MDL discussion:
Tonnes of tags have been added and they have been of a quality that we’ve not experienced in our other tagging projects. I am firmly of the belief that the quality is a result of the Flickr environment (lets call it ‘culture’) and its userbase.
And:
Some notable interaction highlights include… user tagging of image content (the copious use of notes to identify features)… addition of extra information in the comments field… discussion of possible image locations like this long demolished pub in the Rocks. I like this one especially because the discussion takes place over at Yahoo Answers. This also happens within Flickr as in this example from Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains.
We need to mainstream our image content. It belongs on sites like Flickr.
OK, this is big. I’ve mentioned Processing a few times in the past weeks. It’s pretty cool, I just wish I had a reason to use it. Well, this week it seems that John Resig has given us all a birthday present: Processing.js, a version of Processing that runs in JavaScript. This has the potential to supplant Flash, we’ll see. I certainly find Processing itself pretty compelling.
Between this, the coming CSS web fonts, and newer/faster machines, web standards are on the cusp of a significant shift.
Mary just handed me Here Comes Everybody and I hope I get a chance to read it soon. Meanwhile, in this video Clay Shirky discusses where we all get the time to participate in a web 2.0 culture. His notion: we are giving up just a little of our addiction to TV sitcoms, the opiate of the masses, for a bit of participatory media. Not a bad thesis.
