One out of four American adults have rated a product, service or person using online reputation systems, according to this new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And that's not counting the under 18-year-olds!

Jon Stahl reflects on the victory of "a decentralized network of citizens and media activists [that] took on the 'old media' network of Sinclair Broadcasting" and draws some interesting lessons:

Advokit is an open-source grassroots-network voter-file campaign-management tool developed by veterans of the Dean primary campaign and available either as a hosted (ASP) service or as a stand-alone install.

The collection of essays now known as Extreme Democracy should appear in book form early next year, but it is coming out in serialized PDF (portadble document format) at the moment at the project's blog.

At the liberal Daily Kos and conservative Red State community weblogs, reports of questionable behavior at polls or in GOTV (get out the vote) efforts are flooding in today. Here's a brief survey gathered over the course of the last hour:

1. Federal Judge Finds Intimidation of Native Americans in South Dakota
2. Challenging the challengers
3. Boilerplate talking points in line
4. Republicans challenging every voter in two locations in Racine, WI
5. Ohio journalists sneaking into polls despite ban
6. Emily's List misdirecting voters to polls in SC
7. MoveOn volunteers encroaching on polling places
8. False Schwarzkopf call spliced onto McPeak robocall?
9. DNC denies it

The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) began from "a proposal to develop a pilot project in one county in California" and has spawned the voter verifiable, open-source
Electronic Voting Machine project:

Just in case your boss doesn't believe you when you say that a static website won't suffice anymore for whatever kind of political work you do, check out this new study from ACNeilsen: 87 percent of all Americans say they are a part of an online community, and while shared personal interests, hobbies and health-related communities rank very high, 49 percent of Americans also say they participate in public issue sites.

If you can get the Real Audio link to work, you can hear an interview I just did with public radio's "Future Tense" program on my Nation article on open-source politics. Mary Hodder says she heard me on KALW in San Francisco today, so the piece is out there.

One of the things I said, which I hope didn't end up on the cutting room floor, is that I'm hoping to participate in an open-source style discussion of just what open-source politics might look like.

On MSNBC's Countdown, Keith Olbermann has been one of the few television newshosts tracking down the issues related to counting and recounting votes and addressing potential voting irregularities (such as voter fraud and suppression), particularly in the closest states.

Without appearing in any way to contest the election, the Kerry campaign lawyers do seem to be pressing for a careful validation of the results in Ohio. A rush transcript I just received via email quotes Joe Trippi giving credit to the rumor mills of the blogosphere for keeping the recount / potential voting irregularities stories alive long enough to encourage the Kerry people to "get back into the game":

In The Wall Street Journal (free registration reguired), Joe Trippi says that Kerry would have lost even bigger without the grassroots and that the Democrats need to return to their 'roots, literally, to stay competitive:

The staggering defeat of the Democratic Party and its ever-accelerating death spiral weren't obvious from the election results. Two factors masked the extent of the party's trouble. Without the innovation of Internet-driven small-donor fund-raising and a corresponding surge in support from the youngest voters, John Kerry would have suffered a dramatically larger defeat. And the true magnitude of the Democrats' abject failure at the polls in 2004 would have been more clearly revealed.