Jill Resigns

Jill Miller Zimon resigned today from working for the Plain Dealer on the Wide Open site. I can't even imagine how difficult it was for her. This was her vision.

Jean and several other people at the PD and in the blogosphere know that for almost two solid years, I’ve asked and written about and pushed issues related to integrating traditional journalism, new media, bloggers and citizen journalism - all in the name of providing better and more content for readers who consult more and different types of sources for reading news and information. Someone confirmed to me this afternoon, when I said to him, “I know there must be some folks saying, about how my efforts to integrate these groups were in vain, ‘I told her so,’” that, yes, some people are saying, “I told her so.”

She's right to see this as the future, and shouldn't let the bad planning and implementation of others dissuade her. It was a gutsy move. Unfortunately it all ended just when I thought it was really hitting its stride.

The post I had been working on concerning Wide Open was called Harmonic Convergence. You can see how we disseminate information is becoming more plastic and less bound by any single media. Print media has the most to lose from all this... thus their klutzy overreactions. Unfortunately, they have yet to realize that they also have to most to gain.

This all makes me sad. It was nice seeing people trying new ways to rise above the static.

The old rules are dead. At this point it's all about the old referees fighting to keep their jobs.

An Obfuscated Dealer

For over a month now I've been wrestling with a post about the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Wide Open blog initiative, an experiment in hiring four partisan bloggers to create an online political dialog. Today's events made things moot when they fired the Ohio political blogger that I have more respect for than any other, Jeff Coryell, aka Yellow Dog Sammy. Their reason was simple: Congressman Steven LaTourette complained about Jeff because he'd been critical of LaTourette's campaign in the past.

I was curious to see how the paper would deal with the double edged nature of hiring two bloggers which have been lauded in right wing circles for leading the charge in trying to paint our current Governor as a champion of NAMBLA. Personally, I found it to be the most disgusting smear campaign I had ever seen. To turn a difficult non vote of conscience by a trained professional and try to twist it using the basest, most pretzel-like forms of twisted faux-logic was the kind of intellectual dishonesty reserved for the archest of partisan hacks. Back when I myself was a "partisan blogger" their actions in the matter caused me to pull links to their sites; an action that pained me given how BizzyBlog had stood up for me in the past. I must confess that it did give me a certain amount of ironic joy in knowing that their actions actually helped elect Governor Strickland and Senator Brown by promoting a Republican strategic campaign completely devoid of substance or integrity.

I was wondering how the PD would deal with things when their dark craft resurfaced the next time the GOP decided to anoint an obviously empty suit. Well... today's story has instead shifted things in an entirely unexpected direction.

The right thing to do for Jeff's fellow Wide Open bloggers is to resign. The actions by the Plain Dealer have proven the exercise to be a farce. Before last years Governor's race I had a lot of respect for NixGuy and BizzyBlog, and as I like to say, it's never to late to do the right thing.

You can read more about the situation at Buckeye State Blog as well as Jeff's post here.
Here's Jeff's release on the subject:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
30 October 2007

My name is Jeff Coryell, although I have also written on political blogs under the pseudonym Yellow Dog Sammy.

Today I was terminated from my engagement as a freelance blogger at the Cleveland.com blog "Wide Open" as a direct result of intervention of Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Bainbridge Township) of the 14th Ohio Congressional District, in retaliation for my previous blogging about his re-election campaign and my financial support for two of his election opponents.

In August, the Cleveland Plain Dealer hired four Ohio political bloggers to contribute to a daily political group blog called "Wide Open," located at http://blog.cleveland.com/wideopen . In order to assure balance, two bloggers with liberal leanings were chosen, and two with conservative leanings. The other participants are Jill Miller Zimon of Writes Like She Talks ( http://www.writeslikeshetalks.com), Tom Blumer of BizzyBlog (http://www.bizzyblog.com), and Dave of Nixguy ( http://www.nixguy.com).

My participation in the project soon came to the attention of Rep. LaTourette. I had written extensively about LaTourette's 2006 re-election contest and I explicitly supported his challenger, law professor Lew Katz (D-Pepper Pike). I also wrote about what I regard as the suspicious connection between large amounts of campaign cash LaTourette received from the Ratner family of Cleveland, of the Forest City real estate empire, and their receiving an enormous contract to develop 44 acres of the Southeast Federal Center in Washington DC. LaTourette was a member of the powerful Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and Chair of the Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management, which oversees the agency that awarded the contract (the General Services Administration). That writing is at http://ohio2006elections.blogspot.com/2006/10/cong-oh-14-latourette-r-awash-with_12.html , and was picked up at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=172&topic_id=19905&mesg_id=19905. My wife and I also contributed a modest amount to Katz campaign.

I have been told by Cleveland Online Editor Jean DuBail that Rep. LaTourette complained about my involvement in "Wide Open" to Cleveland Plain Dealer Editorial Page Editor Brent Larkin. I was also informed that LaTourette brought up the matter of my participation during an interview with Cleveland Plain Dealer political reporter Sabrina Eaton, when she talked to LaTourette about the retirement of Rep. Dave Hobson (R-Springfield). LaTourette mentioned that I had contributed the sum of $100 to the campaign of LaTourette's current opponent, Bill O'Neill (D-South Russell). Eaton suggested that LaTourette raise his concerns with more senior people at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. However, as a result of that conversation, Eaton reported my contribution in her story about third quarter campaign fund-raising by various Ohio Congressional candidates.

Cleveland Plain Dealer Online Editor Jean DuBail raised the matter of LaTourette's displeasure with my participation in "Wide Open"in discussion with the four bloggers on at least two occasions. We discussed the possibility of my making a disclosure of my support for LaTourette's opponents whenever I wrote anything about LaTourette on "Wide Open."

Today Dubail called me and asked if I would agree to never write about LaTourette on "Wide Open," as a condition of my continued participation. He said that the arrangement was sought by Susan Goldberg, Editor of the Plain Dealer. When I declined to agree, after further consultation with Goldberg by DuBail, I was terminated by DuBail.

"As a political blogger, I am a partisan. My political orientation as a progressive Democrat is an integral part of what I do and is completely transparent to my readers. This is a crucial component of being a political blogger/activist, and sets us apart from journalists in the classic sense. It was understood among the four participants in "Wide Open" that we are political partisans and that we would engage in political debate from our respective political points of view."

"I am extremely disappointed that the Cleveland Plain Dealer bowed to pressure from an elected official, to the extent of attempting to limit what a freelance political blogger could write on a hosted group blog and of terminating the services of the blogger to please the offical. To me, this sad episode strikes a heavy blow at freedom of expression and the purported journalistic independence of a once proud newspaper."

My political blog is Ohio Daily Blog, at http://www.ohiodailyblog.com. I previously blogged at Ohio2006 Blog, at http://www.ohio2006blog.com . I began my began my professional life as a successful private and government attorney, and subsequently earned a Masters in Fine Art degree and pursued a second career as an artist ( http://www.jeffcoryell.com) and art teacher. I live in Cleveland Heights, Ohio with my wife and two golden retrievers.

Beyond Corruption

Lawrence Lessig is one of my heros. I returned to computers after a ten year absence when I had finally figured out a good use for them: church hymns. I had taken on a job directing a small Lutheran church choir in Stockton, California. I was quickly frustrated trying to find easy music that we could sing that matched up with the weeks Bible readings. This would be a great job for a computer program I thought... a sort of database driven digital hymnal. I quickly got to work learning as much as I could about computer databases and the maddening world of copyright law. Time and time again Professor Lessig's name came up as the one positive counter to the forces trying to pervert copyright laws in favor of corporations over people.

I was thus with great interest that I read that he was switching his efforts from copyright reform to the greater issue of political corruption. One thing worries me though... he's arguing the negative.

To me it's not enough to just fight against "corruption." There are too many shades of gray in politics. It's my money... show me how it's spent. Today there is no easy way to do that. Everything is couched in the vaguest of terms and only then during the biannual feeding frenzy that is the election cycle.

I am a process man. It's not enough to just stick a label on your lapel and show how well you can recite your party's focus group tested talking points. Until it is easy for every American to hold their representatives accountable for the trust that we've given then, we can never really trust any of them. Anyone who's ever run a business knows that your employees will steal from you. If you don't monitor what they are doing with your money you are asking for them to steal from you.

It's not just about corruption... it's about accountability. If the bottom line you hold your employees to is that they aren't stealing from you you've got one fucked up company. Well my friends... welcome to the United States of America.

Lessig on "corruption"

(via Boing Boing)

On The Radar

• Open Congress > "Congress, I'm Watching" Widget
  Cute little blog widget that lets you show what bills you're monitoring. I like the direction it's going in.


• The Fix > Dems Seek Upper Hand With Atlas Project
  Boy, I'd love to get a gander at this baby!
  

The wonderful Open House project has a post up of a video presentation by open government pioneer Carl Malamud on his Washington Bridge project given at a Google Tech Talk on May 24, 2006.

There's also a web page for the talk that includes a business plan for the venture. The idea was to provide streaming archived video of Congressional committee hearings.

I haven't been able to find anything recent about the proposed plan, however since then he has sent an unsolicited report to the Speaker of the House on streaming committee data and on August 3rd provided an update that does look promising:

... The analysis of this short-term solution by the Advanced Business Solutions unit has concluded: “from a technical stand point we now know this is very easy and inexpensive to do.”

3. As a long-term strategy, the Office of the Speaker has conducted a large number of meetings, as has the Committee on House Administration, the Chief Administrative Officer, and several other groups. There is a concrete, funded set of initiatives to finish the wiring of the rooms so that all hearings have video coverage, and it is clear from a technical point of view that it is possible to achieve the goal of broadcast-quality video for download on the Internet by the end of the 110th congress. The recommendation to adopt that goal is currently awaiting action from the Office of the Speaker and the Chairman of the Committee on House Administration.

The thing that's really interesting about the video is how the Google people (25' in) latch onto the problem that fascinates me the most: annotating real time data streams. There aren't enough hours in the day for me to listen to my collection of old time radio shows let alone watch everything that is going on in Congress. How do I make it easy for the public to collectively annotate information in real time so that it can be easily processed and reused?

It's hard as hell to annotate video and unless video is annotated it's hard as hell to leverage it with automated tools. You need to be able to make a media clip start at a specific moment rather than playing the whole thing. You need to be able to easily sync up the video and transcripts using some sort of marker. I'd like to be able to drag it onto my blog editor, and have it automatically embed the clip at that point as well as add default folksonomy. Beyond that synchronized transcripts so that I can do quick quotes. As he points out the transcripts are out there but they take months to be made available to the public if they ever are. How do we synchronize video and audio to transcripts so that people can easily quote from it?

We need tags that work against a common ontology so that everyone is working off of the same page. When I say HR1515 am I talking about Representative Harris Fawell's amendment to the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, the 110th's Congress' bill to amend the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 or the Georgia General Assemblies bill honoring the life of Linton Webster Eberhardt, Jr ?

Ideally websites and tools should take care of those headaches for people. For instance... if I drag a bill in Thomas onto my blog editor, it knows that that is the one I am writing about, grabs the embedded meta-data from the page, and ads it as a folksonomy tag.

A True Congressional Record

I received an email last week from Derek Willis @ the Washington Post concerning a post I did last week. He works on their Congressional Votes database and has been kind enough to let me reprint his email. First off here's what he was responding to:

If print media wanted to cement their place in 21st century information streams they would work together to provide such semantic web reporting services. The Washington Post's US Congress Votes database is a start in this direction, even if it's crude and doesn't dive below the surface of what's really going on on Capitol Hill. Maybe I'm just super cynical, but I've always felt that the votes made in Congress are just misdirection in the 3 card monty game that is public governance.

And here's Derek's email:

Chris,

Saw your posting on media and the growth of the semantic web, and I'm interested in hearing your ideas about how to improve our votes database (although I don't agree that it is crude and barely scratches the surface, given my experience as a reporter for Congressional Quarterly). If you've got some specific suggestions on ways we could make it a better service, I'm all ears.

Derek
--
Derek Willis
Database Editor
washingtonpost.com

First off, I want to apologize for coming off so snarky in talking about work that I think is really cool and obviously took a lot of effort on their part. That was wrong of me and a sin common online. The Washington Post is clearly leading the way in an area that I think is an extremely significant step in 21st century democracy. However, leading the way doesn't mean that you've completed the journey. In hind sight I could have chosen a much better way to describe something that I think is really innovated both from technology as well as media perspectives.

For me the interesting aspect of blogging is the interaction between streams of thought. Much more so that just writing in a vacuum. As such I'll confess that one of my tactics as a writer/debater is to throw off quick confrontational asides in order to provoke reactions from people. This opens up a much more dynamic discussion of issues than what one would usually see in academic circles. And so, here's why it's crude and doesn't scratch below the surface ;-)

In examining the Washington Post site I'm going to use the two criteria that I think are most significant in terms of evaluating a semantic web application: depth and plasticity.

Depth. How deep is the data? How much does the reflect that's really going on?

For example: I'm playing a gig with my band.

OK... When? Where? What band? Who's in the band? What do they sound like? These would be the minimum data dimensions that I would think needed to be provided in order for people to be able to understand what's going on. Does the online listing for that gig reflect the true depth of what's going on?

Plasticity. How flexible and reusable is the data?

With the above example the basic thing would be the event having some kind of meta-data so that visitors can easily import it into their calendars. Adding hCalendar Microformat annotations to the listing on the page is one way to do this. Then if I had the Operator extension for Firefox I could import the event to my Google calender with the click of a button. Automated spiders looking for that kind of meta-data could also add it to their listings, making it easier for other people to find out about my band.

I could go even further by offering a FOAF file for the band, listing contact information and relationships that the group has with other bands. An hCalendar annotated blog that would make it much easier for people to keep up to date with our future gigs.

The easier it is for tools to export information into other tools, the more plastic it is. Plasticity is what the semantic web is all about.

So lets do the same thing with votes in Congress.

The Washington Post US Congress Votes Database focuses on specific votes. It provides an RSS feed for each member that one can subscribe to allowing you to find out about the votes as they come in. This is a great way to keep up with what your member of Congress is doing. It lists the name and number for the bill, which way the member voted, and provides links so that you can see more voting information about the bill and even go to the Library of Congress to view the text of the bill.

As much as I love the site and think that it's very innovative and an indicator of this to come, it isn't deep, and it isn't plastic.

How is it not deep? First off there's the actors. From the database's perspective there is only one type of actors= involved with the bills in Congress: Congressmen. But we know that by the time a bill goes to the floor a lot of fingers have been putting their thumbs into the legislative pie. Lobbyists, corporations, constituents, activists, and members of other government entities all play a part in the magical journey of a bill becoming a law. If we want our information to be deep we need to have those actors classified and provide a way for link them back to the legislation.

The other primary dimension to legislation besides actors is impact. Now it's difficult to classify such dimensions as the social impact of legislation, but when you get right down to it, there's only one dimension that really defines what everyone cares about: money. In order to go deep into the impact of legislation you need to be able to easily examine its financial impact. Earmarks... effects on national debt... benefits to corporations... what it is that the money is buying... etc... these things need to be spelled out if people want to really have a deep understanding of what legislation is all about.

Now this is no small undertaking, and I am not criticizing the Washington Post in any way shape of form. I am simply saying that if we want to have a real fundamental understanding of what the legislative process is all about we need to be able to examine these dimensions.

So how do we pinpoint who the primary actors are in the legislative process? Right now it's a dark science relegated to the back alleys of our nations capitol. Who benefits... how much does it really cost... how much is it really worth; finding the answers to these questions are difficult even when you ask the people creating the laws, let alone voting on them. More often than not, those who do know would rather that you didn't, seeing this information as a privilege coming from their exalted status. Information is power, and in our age power equals capitol.

Until the time comes when we can make truly open government the standard by which our representatives operate, there are several ways that we can look under the hood and deduce who's who and what's what. The biggest clue is what happens in the committees. What are the votes? Who is testifying? What is their roll? While all of this information is theoretically available it is difficult to find and never in one place.

How is it not plastic? To truly empower citizens with the information they need in order to keep track of what their representatives are doing all public governmental information needs to be classified in a standard way so that they can analyze the information, relationships and their impact. Beyond that, there needs to be a central, easily annotated record of what's said and done in Congress. We are paying for it, but you need a high prices staff to be able to figure out what we are really paying for.

One would think that that would be the Congressional Record, but sadly, that is not the case. This brings up one of my biggest complaints against Congress. Their actions are deliberately obfuscated online. You can't just easily link to it. Everything is walled away behind temporary links that you can only get to by filling out forms, and the only way to see what it the content really is is through a PDF reproduction of the printed version. Sure, they broadcast the floor debates and a few of the committee hearings, but live video streams are the polar opposite of something that can easily be annotated. Congress makes it as difficulty as possible for people to use their words online. (The REST style of architecture is designed as a good solution to these sorts of problems. - Chris)

In order for it to be plastic, it has to be textual. The modern age is a revolution of type. There would be no Reformation or American Revolution without movable type. Being able to easily copy textual ideas is a cornerstone of modern civilization. Yet, the only simple way to get a textual representation of what is said and done in Congress is to us a private service such as LexisNexis. This gives a huge advantage to big money interests over public citizens. Even then it is a crude version, without any sort of cross referencing or annotation.

A true Congressional Record would be one that included all committee activities and was organized in such a way so that it could be easily annotated. You should be able to directly link its sections, and it shouldn't take millions of dollars to figure out what impact the words really have. With this Congressional Record a true political revolution would take place that would go beyond the trivialities of Partisan gamesmanship to true democratic empowerment of every American citizen.

Imagine a Congressional Record that was as plastic as the entries in the Wikipedia. There I can see exactly who made changes to an entry. I can create tools to figure out who are the best editors. I can hold people accountable when they try to hide something. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to easily diff between versions of a bill and see who took what parts out?

What are some other data dimensions that we can add to our Utopian Congressional record? The most important thing has got to be to show me the money. What is being spent on a specific piece of legislation? Who benefits by it? If they do they should be identified so that we can track their relationship to the legislation. That will include information on industry, company health, and geographic locations. Most of this can be easily garnered from other places.

In order for a data feed to be useful, it needs to be defined. This is my biggest criticism of the current Washington Post database. It uses RSS, but it doesn't use RDF. If I want to parse automatically what's going on I've got to write my own scraper and munge the numbers. The semantic web is all about eliminating the need for that step and providing annotations so that you can more easily find matching patterns of data. With that than any other tool can easily lock onto the data and have fun with it.

That means we're going to need an RDF Schema for legislative data. If we had that, then we can turn the whole Internet into a collective tool for analyzing and shaping legislation. Show me which industries in a Congressman's district benefit from legislation? Add census data to the mix so that we can compare money spent in a district to its economic health.

I could see this as being a big part of the future of media. If entities got together to work out a standard for reporting on legislation, they could collectively use that to bring value to their products. Creating hooks into data is easy. Annotating what it means is harder. That's the real value in today's media. That's what big companies are paying a lot of money for.

I could see a large part of a 21st century reporters job being to connect the semantic dots of the legislative process. They could even add their readers and others online into the mix becoming a collective swarm analysis tool. Things like that already are happening online, but just like the Washington Post site, our work is crude and we are barely scratching the surface. Still, it is amazing.

Bonk

I came up with a name for the project I'm working on about a year ago. I thought it was such a kewl name that I didn't want to say it anywhere for fear that it would get hijacked. (Paranoia is strong in my gene pool.) The basic idea is an open-source embeddable distributed engine for building and binding Folksonomy and other meta-data annotated content applications. Rather than building yet another awesome framework for sharing information about your bottle cap collection with other enthusiasts, this would be something that does all of the back end stuff that these Web 2.0 frameworks do over and over again, plus add some cool extra stuff.

So I bought all the core domains but never used them. .COM, .NET and .ORG. Every now and then I'd google the word just to make sure that everything was quiet. For a year it was.

Then last week BONK, low and behold up come a few hits. But instead of coming from the programming space it was coming from the Danish folk music space. Makes sense. I could see why someone would name a band that.

Anyway I'm going to start officially calling it what I call it. I guess I'll have to TM it at the end just to be safe. That gives me six months to cross my eyes and dot my tees. Luckily I've already got someone who's willing to let me use their business as a guinea pig.

So without further ado here's my new favorite band Folk Engine that also has the same name as the business/project I'm working on called FolkEngine(tm). It's the main reason (besides the boy) that I won't be blogging much these days.

This is a big load of my mind. I can finally start using the tag FolkEngine instead of code terms. :-) Now all I have to do is get it done before I drive everyone I know mad.

Baselines

The first moment I looked at the RDF specification I had a problem with it: everything is URI based. If you want to annotate a thing, you have to refer to its URI.

What I'm working on completely seperates content from a specific location. A link to a text document, a thumbnail image linking to a text document, a summary of a text document, and the text document are all facets of the same thing, and I can place those things in many places.

For instance take a technical document with many sections. Now I can display those sections all on one web page for easy printing, or I can seperate them out into many pages for easier reading. Also, I can place the documument on many servers or offer a PDF version of the document. Which version is "the" document? Which URL do I point to? What if I make a new version of the document and I don't want to remove the old one?

In P2P frameworks content doesn't exist in any one place. It floats. I can grab it from many places. That makes the content extremely plastic. I want my content to have the same flexible characteristics.

The brings out what I consider to be the key weakness of what the W3C does. They create standards that define how the web works. The problem is that they do everything purely from the context of the web. Systems that store, display and annotate data don't just exist in a web context. I create a document on my computer that I want to place on the web. It has a local networked path and a system path. How do I annotate it with RDF if I haven't given it a home yet? What if after I place it in one place we decide to move it? Binding myself to URIs makes my data brittle when I want it flexible.

This also dovetails into another problem that is inherant in any framework: how do you identify people? I have many email addresses, that change every now and then. I move from place to place and use different variations of my name depending upon context. What defines me digitally? Right now nothing.

A Friend of a Friend (FOAF) could be said to be such a think, but it has information that changes over time. Also, my FOAF from work would be totally different from one that I exchange with my old drinking buddies.

I think conceptually I've got the solution: baselines.

A baseline is a collection of fields that define unchanging aspects of a thing.

This makes defining who I am digitally rather simple.

<baseline type="person">
<name>Robert Bob</name>
<mother>Momma Bob</mother>
<father>Billy Bo Bob</father>
<birthday>1-1</birthday>
<birthplace>The Moon</birthplace>
</baseline>

This creates a SHA-1 hash of f54634c2c982500c67d254d2afa44c618104bfee

Now I've got an identifier that defines me without containing any information that I'd consider private. I can do the same thing for any content by creating fields that define it. Description, creation date, created by etc...

With a baseline I have a key to an object that isn't bound by its specific content, context, or location.

The Blogosphere Revolution is a Semantic Web Revolution

I'm sure I'm not saying anything new but I wanted to get this down.

I've been separating out the concept of content syndication from the semantic web, but that is a mistake. Weblog content syndication, which is the technological force that has powered the current wave of online Progressive activism, is the original semantic web application. An RSS file is a collection of metadata that points to people's posts. That metadata is combined with tools allowing people to easily discover and distribute information.

While the "blogs" get all the credit for what's been going on, it wouldn't be anything without the semantic web as the conceptual distribution mechanism. Take away the semantic web and all you'd be left with is bulletin boards, which we've had for a long time.

The semantic web as a concept has taken a lot of hits for being unworkable. What's already been done online with political activism is proof positive that it isn't.

In the end the real difficulty is with making the RDF specification something that can easily interact with content in various formats. The solution by makers of blog software has been to not use RDF and create specs that focus entirely on the 1 dimensional streams that are blogs.

The future has got to be with breaking away from this 1-D prison.

Blogs and the Media

The Daily Bellwether has an interesting thread up reflecting on Jill Miller Zimon's post concerning relations between bloggers and the print media. This relates to rumors of the PD planning on hiring several bloggers including Jill.

It's going to be interesting watching how old media handles the growth of the semantic web. So far they've been mainly reactionary, which is always a dangerous sign. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have been adapting in interesting ways.

I'm thinking that eventually we'll see things adjust to a multi tier approach... blog feeds giving up to the minute information and old world print existing to provide overviews. The problem with adding more and more information into a system is that it gets harder and harder to process that information. Old media could do a much better job helping people with that. The problem is that they'd first have to understand what's actually going on, which means dropping a lot of their 20th century definitions for what news is.

One of my favorite examples of this is the Dayton Daily News' Get on the Bus blog that focuses on education. They haven't done a very good job of promoting it, but it does provide a lot of valuable up to the minute information.

One of the key steps of leveraging the semantic web in order to take on corruption in areas such as public education will be in creating standards for reporting public budgets at all levels of government. I can think of few things more important. Follow the money.

If print media wanted to cement their place in 21st century information streams they would work together to provide such semantic web reporting services. The Washington Post's US Congress Votes database is a start in this direction, even if it's crude and doesn't dive below the surface of what's really going on on Capitol Hill. Maybe I'm just super cynical, but I've always felt that the votes made in Congress are just misdirection in the 3 card monty game that is public governance.

On Tactical Coordination

Here's an essay that gets into what this is about.

Politics is war by other means. It is an abstract war, fought with ideas on an ever growing multi-dimensional landscape. As the newest addition to that landscape the blogosphere is a dimension whose potential we have barely began to discover.

The explosion of political blogging in the 21st century was born in large part from frustration over the Democratic Party's impotent response to Republican media tactics. Just as Goldwater's loss to LBJ fueled the conservative political revolution, two losing Democratic campaigns are to this day causing waves of change within the Democratic Party.

The first wave came from the 2004 Howard Dean campaign's use of the decentralized blogosphere in order to raise funds and promote activism. It was entirely focused on the race for the White House and used large portal sites to concentrate the message. The second wave came from the greatly enhanced decentralized swarm that was the 2005 Hackett campaign. This race added the dimensions of local targeted blogging and improved coordination between hundreds of small sites thanks to the power of automated content syndication. The ability of these sites to quickly disseminate information and raise money was a sea change that the political establishment has barely begun to grasp intellectually let alone take advantage of.

Large scale political change is usually the child of technological innovation. However, it is not enough to just possess technology, one also has to understand how it sings. In order to fully leverage the political blogosphere one needs to play to the blogosphere's strengths. As Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message" and the blogosphere is a decentralized, grass roots medium. This bodes well for Progressive causes since it is a naturally democratic medium.

While the blogs have been good at countering lies and distortions in traditional media there is still a large disconnect between what is talked about in the blogs and what is actually happening on Capitol Hill. How things work in the world's most powerful sausage factory is still largely the domain of beltway insiders. This creates patterns online that are largely superficial and reactionary. Form over function.

Breaking down the barriers that separate the day to day actions of Representatives and those they represent is the next wave of progressive political activism online. The key is for progressive legislators and progressive interest groups to use the twin technologies of web syndication and the semantic web to extend the legislative battlefield beyond Washington DC. (These are really the same thing. - Chris)

Here are several cases in point:

1) Caucusing the blogosphere

The farm bill is currently working its way through Congress. While this is a topic of much discussion amongst agribusiness around the world, you will hear almost nothing about it on the blogosphere. While progressive Senators are fighting to streamline farm subsidies rural members of Congress are pushing for legislation that addresses the interests of corporate farming.

By having Senate staffers simply document the struggle they make it much easier for bloggers local to the rural members of Congress to put political pressure on the representatives. Normally this information would only be available to lobbyists and connected insiders.

One of the big points in this is that it completely changes the natural of how legislators attempt to influence the blogosphere. The natural tactic of politicians is to initially try to court someone that they see as an influencer, and if that doesn't work chalk them down as another political enemy. The key dynamic is that they try to directly influence things. However, a decentralized force like the blogosphere is not something that you can just move. It is much easier to feed the stream than try to redirect its course.

Bloggers are starving for information. Their key weakness (as well as one of their key strengths) is that it isn't a job for them. They rarely have the time or the connections to talk with movers and shakers. This is why they are so reactionary. They are dependent on steams of information in order to blog. That means that while they are ranting and raving about what's written in their local paper, they are still dependent on it in order to have something to write about. What other's say through their various connections is the pallet in which they paint their picture. Add colors to their pallet, and they will automatically use them. Information is their oxygen.

What votes are happening in the House? How do they put mega farms over family farms? What legislation are we fighting for and why? What are the sticking points? These are all things that as a local blogger writing in a rural district would love to know about.

Rather than trying to hire bloggers, and sending them free copies of your book (although I did love getting a copy of Senator Obama's new book and don't want to discourage the practice), and inviting them to posh fundraising dinners, politicians and beltway activists need to be set up syndication feeds that provide legislative information that on the ground activists can easily use. Legislative aids needs to add to their resumes the job skill of blogger even though on the surface it would never seem like that is what they are doing. Rather than creating public personas they would be documenting their struggles on the Hill in order to be picked up by interested activists through automated tools.

Politicians that are beholden to large corporate interests need to feel the pinch every time they walk into a room full of small family farmers and have to explain votes that ignore their interests. The tactical coordination that I am talking about would do this on a shoe string budget.

2) Leveraging the Semantic Web

The semantic web is all about creating patterns for reuse. An address... an email... a date... a phone number... an event... a blog post. How can we make it easy for tools to automatically reuse that information? How can the event that I've written up in Outlook be made available to my friends through their Google calendar and also be sent to my public events feed so that anyone who's interested can show up? The semantic web makes this possible.

For the last few weeks Senator Brown has been storming around the state of Ohio promoting the Children's Health Insurance Program. I know this because I've read about it online. Every time a newspaper or a blog writes about an event that involves Sherrod Brown (or Jean Schmidt or a bunch of other politicians that I am interested it) I get a handy notice from Google. If I want to spend some extra money I can have LexisNexis tell me every time his name is mentioned in a business journal or TV transcript. But the problem is that I only know about these events after the fact. As a blogger I can't cover the event unless I go out of my way to find out what the Senator's schedule is. That means making contacts with his staff and hounding them for information. It ends up being a royal pain for everyone concerned.

It shouldn't be that way. Thanks to the people involved in the semantic web there are standards that make it easy for tools to import and export events. Every public person that wants to promote what they are doing should have their public calendar available online. Bloggers in the area can then be notified whenever any politician is holding an event within an X miles radius of their location. That way Sherrod Brown’s speech on the importance of health care won't just be condensed to a few sentences by a reporter. They can also be video taped and placed on YouTube . If he has a particularly good day it will quickly bounce around the blogosphere. This will in turn cause reporters to cover the events in more detail since they are now in direct competition with new media. The makes the semantic web a force maximizer as the Senator's voice carries beyond the confines of a specific place and time.

CAVEATS

The rub in all this is that one actually has to want people to know the "people's business." Part of the power that is being a member of Congress is that very few people know what you are actually doing. This makes it easy to promote legislation that helps your friends and campaign contributors.

The cool thing is that while the tools to leverage these technologies are currently very primitive, they are improving every day. As they improve it will be cheaper and cheaper for progressives to feed the semantic web with information that can be reused in ways that we cannot even imagine. Since we are empowering the people it is a force that naturally favors progressives. It is a technology that inherently promotes Progressive change.

CONCLUSION

The hardest thing about any battle is tactical coordination. The key to that coordination is information. An army that knows what is going on in other sections of the battlefield is able to naturally work in concert inflicting more damage at less cost. In my opinion this tactical coordination is the future of the political blogosphere. In reality it is simply a facet of the future of the web as described by its creator. This has been my focus for the last two years. The tools are being created even as we speak, and as we build them progressive change will come.