The details of the deal aren't clear, but it looks like the path may still be open for the city of Philadelphia to offer cheap or free broadband access to its residents, to the consternation of Verizon, Comcast and other private companies. But, as the Washington Post's Cynthia Webb reports, the telecom lobby may have given up a little in this battle, but it's winning the war.

Unfortunately, Harvard restricts access to its students during class hours, so attendees at the "Votes, Bits and Bytes" conference won't have wifi until Saturday's sessions. But, if you ask the conference organizers nicely, they'll give you a pass. So here I am, sitting in the august Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School, listening to Hossein Derakhshan (Hoder, a leading Iranian blogger) give a fascinating talk about the role of blogs in his home country (he lives in Toronto).

Blogs in Iran, he says, function as a) windows into and outside a closed culture; b) bridges, between men and women, older and younger generations, and voters and politicians; and c) as cafes, where people can talk to each other outside of the government controlled media.

Before him, Pippa Norris of Harvard University gave a talk about the limited impact of e-voting in England (details on her blog). And Tom Sander reported on his research into Meetup attendees.

Scott Heiferman, the CEO of Meetup (and a member of PDF's advisory board, I should add), just gave a terrific keynote address on the future of connected politics. Here's his vision: We're going from flash mobs and bricks-and-mortar organizations to flash, emergent, people-powered, long-lasting, open, influential, agile, chapter-based, institutions/organizations/unions that have card-carrying members and meet regularly face-to-face to act on common concerns. He called this the "Napsterization of organization." (I told Mary Hodder, sitting to my right, that she should ask for a fee--she grinned and said she'd take a nickel.)

We need a "Constitution-wizard," he said, in other words tools that help people create such new kinds of powerful federations. One step in that direction is going to come from Meetup, which starting next week, Heiferman announced, will allow all the members of a Meetup category group (Pug owners, Townhall.com fans, knitters, or the fastest growing Meetup category of stay-at-home-mom's) to talk to members of the same group, worldwide.

I may not be able to blog as much today as I did yesterday, and unfortunately there are four concurrent workshops underway every 90 minutes. But here are my notes on Richard Freeman and Robert Fox's reports on "Open Source Unionism."

The idea, Freeman said, is to take people where they are and find a way to involve the millions of Americans who sympathize with the union movement but don't work in an unionized setting the opportunity to join in and gain some of the benefits of collective action. Thus the AFL-CIO launched WorkingAmerica.org in the summer of 2004, with the idea of signing up people, charging them little ($5 dues are voluntary), delivering info to them over the net about their rights as workers, organize them where possible by firms and by regions. Members vote on its priorities. It started in 10 cities in 5 states with 400 paid door-knockers and very quickly signed up 500,000 people. The list is now at 750,000, and there's a fair amount of excitement about the potential for future growth.

Blogs for Christmas is a CivicSpace site that enables you to send an email subscription to one or more blogs to the recipient of your choice. Blog evangelism and/or spam!

Who are the PPF and RR? "We're a bunch of programmers, designers, and organizers who're working to change the way politics and media work. There are some amazing things happening at the intersection point between politics and technology, and we're all over it." They "see Blogs for Xmas as strategic evangelism for an already successful phenomenon. Blogs are more engaging than mass media and better for keeping people connected to the world around them, so the more people get their media this way, the better. We want our parents to read blogs. And we'd like to see eveybody's parents reading blogs. On most of our projects, we're forging ahead and making new tools to enable new kinds of interaction (like Blogtorrent). But there's also a huge need to take the great stuff that's already happening and expose it to a wider circle of people."

Quoting from Editor: Myself - Hoder, No more blogging and net-socializing:

Friends in Iran, journalists and technicians, are saying that judiciary officials have ordered all major ISP to filter all blogging services including PersianBlog, BlogSpot, Blogger, BlogSky, and even BlogRolling. They have also ordered to filter Orkut, Yahoo Personal and some other popular dating and social networking websites.

Joi Ito posted this question about Six Apart's two hosted blog services:

Anyone know if TypePad or LiveJournal are being blocked? Is Google doing anything about this?

...and then this update from the #joiito irc channel on freenode:

[Catspaw] Joi: Livejournal and Typepad both accessible form the major Iranian ISPs

Kerry voters were two-and-a-half times as likely to participate in online discussions or chat groups about the election than Bush voters, almost twice as likely to register their opinions in online surveys, and four-and-a-half times as likely to contribute money online to a candidate, according to the just-released Pew Internet study. Remember the "gender gap"? Now it looks like there's an "Internet gap."

Patrick Ruffini, Bush-Cheney '04's webmaster, has helpfully placed the relevant chart on his blog, and he argues that, contrary to appearances, there's mixed news for the left in this finding. Democrats, he suggests, "tend to excel at the web-only kind" of e-activism, "while the Republicans focus on building powerful synergies between the online and the offline." He continues:

And the web-only kind of activism has a mixed track record at best. At first, MoveOn's "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest seemed like a trailblazing concept. Until you saw the God-awful ad that won, and realized that, like most MoveOn initiatives before or since, all that energy was simply being dumped into a rat hole. Just how credible and useful are online polls when your guy wins with 90% of the vote? And using a chat room or posting a comment on a blog is not in itself a productive political act; for one thing, you could be out talking to undecideds instead of preaching to the online choir, and secondly, in the blogosphere, quality matters more than quantity. A thousand blogs echoing the WaPo/NYT line will never be as effective as fifty blogs providing an interesting and original alternative voice, probing for weaknesses in the MSM Death Star.

My two cents: Like most debates about the relative merits of different political strategies, this one is colored indelibly by the fact that the Republicans won. GOP e-activists are also doing a good job of presenting themselves as the most net-savvy, most concerned with pushing power to the edges of their network, etc.

Dave Pollard says the blogging popularity curve's long tail shows that it is "just" a logarithmic curve and not a "power law" curve after all. In Bloggers, Your Audience Awaits and its followup, The Long Tail: A-Listers Maybe Not So Powerful After All, Dave Pollard, the author of How to Save the World and one of the sharpest minds watching the blogosphere questions just how dominant and influential the supposed A list of popular / prominent webloggers actually is.

There is an inverse relationship among A-listers between number of page views and average time spent per page view....

What this suggests is that online advertisers looking for a bargain might be better off investing in a bundle of B-list bloggers, those 2,000 bloggers who each get 1/4 the reader attention of the average A-lister, an average of 60 hours/day of attentive eyeballs.

JD Lasica, Marc Canter, and a large team of contributors have announced the alpha release of Our Media, a site that provides a self-publishing front-end for media content to be hosted at the seemingly bottomless Archive.org and encourages Creative Commons sharing of content.

As bandwidth and storage costs get more manageable, economic and technical barrier to publishing should fall and its efforts like this one that are actually bringing about the democratization of media.

Diversity. Democracy. Racism. Progressive.

Four words no longer recommended for polite online and on-land conversation.

Diversity

This is what I've concluded navigating the various predominantly white environs and institutions in which I've lived, studied and work for most of my life. And in retrospect, I see that I have all but avoided such exchanges in the blogogsphere since actively blogging while black -- until recently, that is.
In the heat of renewed, more mainstream discussions about diversity in -- and for -- the blogosphere, I am reminded of three other words I've increasingly sought to avoid using casually in light of my realization that most people either 1) choose not to think substantively about the range of meaning the word "diversity" itself holds for different groups or 2) simply refuse to define it for fear of revelations that might challenge their rhetoric.