PTP Blog

Seems like the MySpace folks are working to build a case against the idea that MySpace users are politically disengaged.  A recent survey

. . .revealed a few key facts: that MySpace’s young user base is more politically engaged and active than the U.S. population at large, that they tend to be politically independent, and that they plan to vote in the 2008 election.

Read the rest - it is quite interesting at MySpace touts early success with political polling initiative

Web Worker Daily  has a “Look Inside Virtual Company MoveOn.org” it isn’t much of a look that you don’t already know if you know about MoveOn, but vaguely interesting - the virtual retreat sounds torturous, but I suppose if you’ve got a good headset, then it might be okay.

More interesting would have been a review of the headsets, phone systems, and other hardware and software they use.  I mean, they can’t really run everything on Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, and other online technologies - certainly not with their membership databases and other member related information, right?

Twitter’s had quite a bit of buzz lately. If you haven’t heard of it, maybe its because you’ve got better things to do with your time than subscribe to a service that enables you and other twitter users you know to update each other on the minutiae of your lives via the web, cell phone text message, or rss.

But wait, maybe, just maybe there’s something else here. Stay with me for a moment here:

Take twitter, not as potentially annoying social phenomena likened to the latest form of cat blogging, but instead as a communications platform that does a few things really well and really easily:

1. enables short text posting through a web form, from your cell phone, or through an instant messenger account
2. publishes that short message on the web
3. pushes that short message out to your network of subscribers via: web site, rss or cell phone text message

Do you see it yet? How about some scenarios:

• GOTV work? GOTV staff posts a “remember to vote” message on twitter 1 week, 3 days, 1 day, on the day, and then every hour for the last 5 hours of election day. Could this get annoying? Maybe, maybe not depending on constituency. Include a link or phone number to find out where to vote/get a ride/or for election protection info for extra points.
• do you do lobby days? spend a chunk of your state’s legislative session at the capitol? Twitter just became your best bet for super fast updates to supporters and to your website.

Those are just two examples. There are many many more, and I hope that you’re thinking about and planning to use some of them. Twitter’s not perfect - far from it. Currently, the site can be painfully slow as the number of users outweighs the resources of the server twitter.com is sitting on, but I’d be surprised if that didn’t change soon.

What is really cool about twitter is that it is totally permission based - you can’t just collect someone’s cell phone and and spam them with sms text messages - they have to register at twitter and ask to receive your updates. It may add a layer of complexity, but it means that folks that do subscribe to your updates probably really want to hear from you.

From an organizing perspective, it would be very cool if twitter supported groups, but given how many people are clamoring for this functionality, I hope to see it soon.

What are your thoughts about where and how twitter could be used in community organizing?

the latest version of Skype includes an option Firefox extension that automatically transforms phone numbers in webpage into buttons that you can click to initiate a Skype call.

Here’s an example of what it looks like in action:
(Click for a larger image)

This example is taken from PTP’s database - Salesforce - but would work the same with any other online database out there.

As you can see, the possibilities are pretty intriguing - imagine setting up a phone list with entry fields - a caller could sit at a computer, clicking and calling their way down the list, entering in response directly on the page and therefore directly into the database. This could be pretty darn cool.

We all know that spam’s a problem. But a recent post on gigaom.com had a stat that caught my eye: quoting a NY times article that said spam “accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages.”

I knew that it was bad, but since we’ve set up with Mailfoundry, the number of spam messages that actually make it to my inbox have dropped to fewer than 10 a week - yes, a week.

I’m not suggesting that Mailfoundry is the answer to spam filtering - running mail through Gmail, using SpamAssassin, and any of the many other tools out there are probably equally good.

What I do think is that as the number of spam increase relative to actual mail, we’re going to see three things happen:

1. spam filtering that happens away from your inbox is going to increase in popularity due to its greater efficiency for the end user (you).
2. spam filtering that aggregates the spam reporting of its userbase is going to become ever more effective - think about something like Gmail or Mailfoundry, where many users are marking messages as spam thereby training the filters for everyone. It just makes sense that this sort of approach is going to always be more effective than what you or I can do invididually by training our own anti-spam system.
3. some form of verified sender and “pay to send” email is going to arise out of the competing proposals. Making spam unprofitable is the only realistic way I can see to shift this trend. The concept has problems, but spammers are spamming to make money. A serious reduction in the profits would go a long way towards reducing the allure of spamming.

The trick is going to be coming up with a solution that retains the utility of email while signifcantly reducing the spam problem in a manner that doesn’t restrict control of who can send email.

I read about OpenDNS a few weeks back and decided to give it a try.

OpenDNS is a company that provides free DNS lookup service for your computer. Since you all have DNS service already - you get it when you buy an internet connection, you might wonder why you’d want to look at OpenDNS.

I wondered the same thing, but after reviewing what they offer, and actually using it, I think they’ve got two really great features that make them worth a look.

The first, and probably most useful is their spelling correction - have you ever typed in a URL incorrectly? www.progressivetech.og for example? OpenDNS will correct that to www.progressivetech.org for you - super useful since we all sometimes forget that we’re not perfect typists, but also nice because at least on small laptop screens, the address bar in my browser isn’t always quite as clear as it could be (I probably do need to get another eye exam too, but that’s besides the point). I haven’t used the service for all that long, so I don’t know how extensively the spell correcting works - for example, typing www.progresivetech.org doesn’t trigger auto-correction, but instead takes you a google-esq search page. Still, most of the URL mistakes I make are in the extension - .co or .cm instead of .com.

The second feature that makes OpenDNS interesting is their anti-phishing protection. From what I can tell, they maintain a database of phishing sites, and block your computer for reaching those sites. If you try to access a site in their anti-phishing database, you get a page that tells you that the site was blocked because of phishing, and gives you the option of submitting a form to contest the phishing block. Again, I don’t know how extensive their database is, partially because I haven’t used the service that long, but also because I don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure of accidentally hitting a phishing site. Still, even a little protection from phishing is nice.

If you’ve ever thought about finding a different set of DNS servers, I think OpenDNS is worth a look.

about a month ago, I was having a conversation with a colleague where we puzzling over what it would take for YouTube or similar services to be a tool for community organizers.

One of my thoughts was that YouTube needed some organizing related content before it would be of much interest to organizers or members of community organizing groups.

Well, the folks over at Kentuckians for the Commonwealth may have started the ball rolling by posting this video called “Why We Vote” check it out and forward it on:

gee, I think I break almost all of these rules for good blog writing.  Of course I’ve never actually claimed to be a good blog writer.  Training curriculum on the other hand. . .

Still, its a good list.  Check it out.

Amanda’s got a question about interesting use of Google Maps by community organizing groups.

I started to respond over there, but think elevating the conversation out of a comment thread is probably worthwhile since I think there are some folks reading here that aren’t reading over there, and I’d really like them (if you’re not sure if you’re included in that them, you are) to weigh in on this.

So this is what little I know on the subject: mapping mashups just haven’t reached into the organizations we know doing anything with GIS.

I think there are a few reasons for that.

1. online mapping tools have only very recently reached a point where you can do interesting things with them.
2. Organizations that do mapping a lot already have a great deal invested in their present toolset and workflow.
3. The advantages of online mapping “mashups” are unclear versus more traditional GIS mapping software.

I’ll expand a bit on each of these points: continue reading…

just when you hoped it was going to be a quiet election season for the internet:

When Republican Sen. Conrad Burns briefly struggled to keep his eyes open at a Montana farm bill hearing last Thursday, a state Democratic party operative was right there taping it. Within hours, the video of Burns was on YouTube and available to viewers around the world.

Not at all surprising that campaigns are using YouTube and similar services for this kind of thing.  At a recent PTP training, I gained some insight into how groups are using MySpace in similar ways. 

I’d love to hear about community organizing groups that are doing any work with video along these lines - we generally see groups invest in putting their video content on their website.  What I’m curious about is the thought process behind releasing video on something like YouTube, where the audience is potentially larger, but the message, and importantly, the context, more dilute.  Maybe.  As I’ve said before, I don’t entirely grok this “new media” thing and how it intersects with the work that we do at PTP.