We're pleased (or sorry) to report that the block of tickets on sale at extra discounted "early-early-bird" rates for Personal Democracy Forum 2010 has sold out -- in fact, demand was greater than expected!

Every year at the annual Personal Democracy Forum, we pick a theme to help give our ongoing conversation a focus. Two years ago, it was "Rebooting America." Last year, it was "We.gov." This year, we've decided to borrow a little inspiration from our friends at Edge.org and go with a big question: Can the Internet Fix Politics?

MoveOn.org, the five-million member e-organization of progressive activists, is doing something really interesting with its members tonight: thousands of them are going to be participating in a live online dial-test of President Obama's State of the Union speech. The organization sent out an email earlier this evening to its list, asking people if they want to rate the speech live.

Are you live-blogging the State of the Union? Join the crowd.

It's interesting to see how the Internet factors into the Supreme Court's earthshaking decision in the Citizens United case to overturn a century's worth of jurisprudence restricting corporate and union money in politics. I'm going to skip over all the details of the case, and the equally troubling question of judicial activism, as these are really topics beyond the purview of techPresident and are already being hotly debated elsewhere.

A very quick comment on the meaning of yesterday's special election in Massachusetts, in terms of the role of technology in changing politics:

First, I couldn't agree more with what Nancy wrote here yesterday:

Politics junkies in the U.S. are focusing rabidly on today's special election in the Massachusetts Senate race, but it's worth noting that Haiti is still garnering much more attention online. Here's the Trendistic chart comparing tweets using the words "Haiti," "#MASen" (the generic hashtag for the race), "Scott Brown" and "Martha Coakley":

And here's a similar comparison using Google Insight for Search:

We're pleased to announce that the eighth annual Personal Democracy Forum conference will be taking place this June 3-4 in New York City, and if you want to save money, you should take advantage of our "early-early-bird" registration. We're making a limited number of tickets available between now and February 15, after which prices will go up. So, if you know you're planning on coming--and you know who you are--why not book now and lock in our best price?

This year we're proud to be featuring these confirmed speakers, a most diverse and accomplished group...

Next Tuesday's special election in Massachusetts to fill the remaining three years of Ted Kennedy's term in the U.S. Senate is drawing a lot of attention, not only as the latest test of the national political winds, but also because if Republican Scott Brown defeats Democrat Martha Coakley, the Democrats will be down to 59 votes in the Senate (counting the two independents) and the health care bill may die on the vine. Both national parties are pouring money and troops into the state and the polls suggest it could be a close race. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to see what the online metrics might tell us about next Tuesday's vote. And on the face of it, Brown is surging.

Marta Evry is a 45-year-old film editor who works on television shows and movies in Hollywood. She took off six months in 2008 to volunteer full time on the Obama campaign, ultimately working as a Regional Field Organizer for CA-36. Along with her co-RFO, she ran many dozens of phone banks for Obama from August 2008 to election day, managing some 1,500 volunteers who made over 500,000 phone calls to swing states all over the country. Since then she has remained active as a community organizer, running the blog Venice for Change, and working on everything from health care reform, to marriage equality to California budget issues. She is also a delegate to the CA State Democratic party and a life-long Democrat. Until this summer, she was working with Organizing for America. No longer.

A few days ago, she read my Obama Disconnect essay and wrote me to say: "The thing I find completely heartbreaking about is to watch such an opportunity squandered right before our eyes. I literally watched it happen. When I look back to how eager our vol[unteer]s were this time last year, those sea of faces in both Denver in 2008 and the Inauguration in January and know that whatever movement there was is gone, gone, gone."

This afternoon, she read OFA deputy director Jeremy Bird's encomium to OFA's first year, which he posted on Huffington Post, and noticed that he had included a link to it on his Facebook page. Since she and he were friends on Facebook, she posted a comment, venting her frustration. It read, in part, "OFA as an organization has been a profound disappointment, but the volunteers are not, and the contacts and relationships that came out of the campaign have been amazing." Not long after, Bird unfriended her, disappearing her comment. [UPDATE: See below; Bird has refriended Evry.] (The full text is on her blog, which also inspired the title to this post.)

This is her story.