Who Will Be America's First TechPresident? A Challenge to the Candidates

By Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry

As we prepare to pick the next President, we’d like to challenge all the candidates running to tell America: How should this public resource be used to make our country more competitive, more democratic, healthier, better educated, more secure and financially sound?

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Seriously, how do I know you?

By Greg Bloom

Facebook grapples with Boyd’s Law of Social Networking, but it might be missing the point.

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A Change.org is Gonna Come (to Your Non-Profit Org)

By Micah L. Sifry and Joshua Levy

Change.org — the social network that seeks to connect people around social issues — recently announced a major new addition to its platform. Calling itself the “Ning for nonprofits,” the site now lets nonprofit organizations create “branded networks” that can tap into Change.org’s community of users but retain their own look and feel.

Ben Rattray, Change.org’s founder, has spent the past year building up the community on the site, and the announcement represents a second phase of the sites’ development as well as a response to the needs of many nonprofits and also for Change.org to tap into a larger user base.

Recently, we had a chance to catch up with Rattray by phone, and here’s what we learned.

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Voting Machines = Headaches

By Allison Fine

After seven years of reforms, millions of dollars in new machinery, there are so many problems with voting technology in San Francisco county that it cannot certify this election until a hand recount of ballots is completed.

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Campaign Web Sites, The Morning After

By Chris Casey

If campaign web sites had feelings, then on the morning after Election Day many would feel like a bride or groom left at the altar. Months of planning, buildup and being the center of attention ends abruptly in a frozen lonely stare.

After all of that work for their candidate, recruiting volunteers, raising money, building a community of supporters, and spreading campaign news, a very large number of campaign web sites freeze on Election Day. And that is a big mistake, for the winners and losers alike.

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Raise Money on Facebook: Four Fundraising Applications You Need to Know About

By Peter Deitz

In June 2007, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the release of FBML, a scripting language that assists developers in creating custom “applications” for the popular social network and its 40 million active users. Within days of the announcement, developers at Change.org, ChipIn, and Firstgiving chartered their courses for Facebook. Their common goal: to create applications that would add unprecedented fundraising capabilities to the most ‘sticky’ web site in history.

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Read the Writing on the Wall

By Greg Bloom

When Howard Dean “friended” Micah Sifry on Facebook, Micah announced his skepticism about the meaning of this relationship: “What kind of “meeting” is taking place here, between a famous person’s Facebook profile and college students?”

With all due respect, I think Micah’s question falls into the linguistic trap of whether social network “friends” really are your friends. If we set aside our notions of authenticity (that’s often a useful thing to do, anyways) we’ll see that what’s happening here is the establishment of a new channel of communication between a citizen and a political leader - nothing more or less. And that’s quite a lot.

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Sen. Durbin Tries Legislation 2.0

By Micah L. Sifry

Senator Richard Durbin is doing something interesting over at OpenLeft.com this week: he's asking for comments and suggestions to help him draft legislation "that will make the United States more competitive in terms of broadband access." And he's going to post the draft language online for viewing and comment, prior to introducing it in the Senate.

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The New, New Philanthropy

By Allison Fine

We appear to be reaching a tipping point of interest and activity around “new philanthropy” that is worth some examination. In particular, the efforts of the MacArthur Foundation to dip their toe into Second Life and the Case Foundation to fund individuals working to shift power locally between citizens and government are causing stirs.

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Fictional Profiles, Real Friends

By Adam Conner

One of the things that caught my eye in all of the fallout and discussion from the Obama MySpace controversy was this line from Micah's original TechPresident article:

"And indeed, for MySpace this probably will never be a problem again"

And for future and current politicians, it probably won't be. But MySpace has built an entire lucrative industry around marketing its social network to feature and promote profiles of upcoming movies, popular television shows, and various fake profiles of fictional characters.

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