The bar's been raised. Use of the backchannel--years ago it was IRC, today it's Twitter--lets the audience compare notes and pool their dissatisfaction if the program misfires. Here's what we did to avoid that at SXSW.

Snoop Dogg premieres trailer for Malice 'N Wonderland short film.

HBO recently premiered a new trailer for David Simon's upcoming series Treme and the consensus is pretty much universal that it looks amazing

Foursquare experiences massive growth surge following SXSWi, but can it sustain interest?

Tumblr announces the first version of the their new BlackBerry app.

The American Idol top 12 took the big stage last night. A great night for most of the ladies. Not so great for most of the guys!

Actress and Oscar winner Sandra Bullock is having a REALLY bad day.

The most undervalued and overlooked tool for online business success is choosing the right keywords your customers are searching for.

Talk about misplaced blame.

40,000 calls a day hit the Capitol phone system in anticipation of the big health care vote. Your call is very important to them.

• The EPA launches a cute drive to get folks to collaboratively produce a video that will, eventually, show people passing a sign reading "it's My Environment" across the screen, from left to right. If that makes no sense, just check out the video above.
• And Organizing for America is, in health care cram week, making use of simi liar trick. OFA allies are asked to download and fill out a sign reading "I'm Here for _______" that riffs off of the anecdote Obama has been repeating about Natoma Canfield, an Ohio woman recently diagnoses with cancer.
• It might be really weird to be Natoma Canfield right now. That is all.
• Democracy for America launched PrimariesMatter.com to orgnanize around potential Democratic primary challenges.
• Megan McArdle thinks that Progress Ohio's web video from a local tea party rally backfires.
• The David All Group expands with the addition of a former RNC deputy communications director.
• And somehow, I'm just learning of Google.com/UncleSam.

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Credit: Wordle

FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver recently had a neat post that made use of word clouds to visualize the differing tones of the Gallup survey responses of those Americans who are pro- and anti-health care reform. Around these parts, its raised the idea that the smart uses of word clouds are too few and far between. That, in turn, inspired the production of a word cloud of Connecting America, the national broadband plan released by the FCC yesterday. Frankly, this word cloud doesn't really seem to provide all that much insight into that document. But it did take quite a while to feed 360 pages of report text into the Wordle engine. So here you go.

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Credit: Phill Davison

This just happens to be Sunshine Week, the annual event dating back to 2002 that is led by the American Society of News Editors and is intended to have us all spend 7-days thinking hard about the wonder and potential of open government data. Barack Obama's a fan. But the folks at the Center for Public Integrity and the Sunlight Foundation want you to be more than just a fan of Sunshine Week.* They want you to actively participate in freeing government data. How? By pointing them in the direction of where government data remains locked in dusty cabinets or in some pending FOIA file somewhere in government:

Here’s what we’re looking for:

• Has the government denied your attempt to FOIA certain information?
• Are you aware of any government reports or data that are unnecessarily hidden from public view?
• Have you successfully obtained government data, only to find it difficult or impractical to use in today’s electronic environment?

Email all tips to: datamine@publicintegrity.org. We’ll be happy to credit you for your tip on the Center’s website, unless you prefer otherwise.

They're calling the effort The Data Mine, which does give it a nice touch of mystery, with an underlying flavor of hard work. But you don't have to put on a hard hat to participate. Just sending them an email will do.

*Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.

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A unanimous vote from the NBA's Board of Governors makes Michael Jordan the now sole owner of the Charlotte Bobcats franchise.

Credit: CouncilmanCabrera.com

In the west Bronx, city councilmember Fernando Cabrera has recently rolled out a new way for constituents to let his office know when a pot hole needs to be filled, a car towed, or heat turned on in a apartment building. Residents can click on a map to report a complaint, and the councilmember's office is instantly alerted where there are problem spots in District 14.

"We were just trying to figure out ways to bring the community into the process," Cabrera's legislative director-slash-press secretary Zellnor Myrie told me this morning. The program, running a platform called SeeClickFix developed by a group of advocates living and working in New Haven, has its advantages for their small office. (Cabrera was elected in 2009, in the wake of New York City's term limit fight.) As a pre-packaged platform based on Google Maps, there's little technical that Cabrera's shop has to do. And then there's the cost: nothing, for those in government who want to use it to connect with their constituents. "That's important, because we have no money," Myrie said with a laugh...

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As part of their on-going series of many-to-one sit downs with government leaders that casts Steve Grove as the avatar for thousands of Americans, YouTube sat down with the Federal Communications Commission chair Julius Genachowski yesterday, the same day that Genachowski's FCC released Connecting America, its long-awaited National Broadband Plan:

At 35 minutes and consisting of 17 questions that poured in from the public through Google Moderator, the chat is a condensed look at how this FCC is looking at the Internet as an essential component of American life. Genachowski tackled the big questions, from what the government plans to do about the coming wireless spectrum crunch to the near-total lack of competition on the backbones of American communications infrastructure that leaves many Americans either paying too much for broadband, or unable to get broadband at all -- and thus, unable to participate in things, like, say, a YouTube chat with the chairman of the FCC.

Grove, who is getting the hang of acting as the medium for the public's questions, introduced a fun feature called FCCaesar That's a play on both Genachowksi's first name, and, it seems, the fact that the chair is the executive branch's top dog on telecommunications. Genachowski played along, running through a series of strong questions by giving them a thumbs up/thumbs down, and sticking admirably to a sentence or two description of just why he felt the way he did on the topic at hand.

Also tackled: the traditional mediocrity (and we're being kind) of the Federal Communications Commission's online presence. It's a favorite obsession in these parts. Genachowski, it seems, shares that focus. "One of the things I'll tell you is that we inherited a website that won an award in the 1980s," he told Grove, "and that probably wasn't updated since." Ouch! He went on. "We have just a terrific new media team, kind of a SWAT team of really committed folks who are working on upgrading our operations. They've done an incredible job. If you go to Reboot.FCC.gov, it's actually a place where you can participate in our effort to re-craft a website that really works in an Internet era." Relatedly, the release of the National Broadband Plan yesterday was coupled with the rollout of a brand new Broadband.gov site, meant to act as a hub for what will hopefully be a continuing robust discussion about the role of the government in connecting America.

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So we've been doing some thinking. And some talking. Which can mean only one thing: trouble.

Our work is about technology and social change, coming through a variety of vehicles, from politics to products. But we started to run into a curious challenge: for many organizations, technology means tools, without a lot of thought about culture or organizational structure.

At the same time, the tools are getting cheaper and more accessible -- so much so that the tools your organization owns are to all intents and purposes meaningless. To paraphrase the immortal Walter Sobchak, The technology is not the issue here, Dude.

So, if it's not about the tools, what is it about? Michael Silberman and our friend and colleague Tim Walker of Biro Creative have drawn a line in the sand. They've articulated a manifesto for ways we need to be thinking -- beyond tools -- to realize the change that our era and its technology promises:

http://www.echoditto.com/insights/webthinking

The wealth of networks -- from the Internet to mobile phones -- challenges existing ways of doing things. People can connect directly to each other to self-organize and make things happen -- impacting everything from non-profit fundraising to recruiting to the very question of what it means to be a "leader" in the digital age.

How do we make change in the world? What role does technology -- especially the portable power of the network -- play in the pursuit of change? Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget is a provocative part of the growing examination of our hyper-networked, hyper-connected, hyper-technological world. Surely you have some thoughts, perspectives, ideas on the subject.

Join the conversation:
http://www.echoditto.com/insights/webthinking

And remember -- The Dude Abides.

• Spain | eHealth Week 2010 in Barcelona
   “eHealth for sustainable healthcare: global changes through local actions”: this is the motto of the High Level Ministerial Conference on eHealth, that is taking place in Barcelona in these days (until March 18th). The program is ambitious: in the conference the most innovative projects driven by the EU Spanish and European regions will be presented, creating a debate on the importance of ICT and participation in healthcare and the contribution of entrepreneurs working in the field.

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• Spain | eHealth Week 2010 in Barcelona
   “eHealth for sustainable healthcare: global changes through local actions”: this is the motto of the High Level Ministerial Conference on eHealth, that is taking place in Barcelona in these days (until March 18th). The program is ambitious: in the conference the most innovative projects driven by the EU Spanish and European regions will be presented, creating a debate on the importance of ICT and participation in healthcare and the contribution of entrepreneurs working in the field.

read more

• C-SPAN Video Library (Beta)
  CSPAN has put 20 years of their video archives online. The search interface is particularly impressive: allows searching by a wide range of semantic data, including integration with biographical information to pinpoint specific phases in the careers of public servants they've documented. First rate.