How much should lower-level political candidates try to adopt the multi-faceted internet strategies of the presidential campaigns?

It’s hard for me to watch the coverage of the fires burning in Southern California right now because it brings back memories of my own personal experience with out of control wildfires.

Big Think aims for highbrow web intellectualism and networked conversation -- is it working?

I'm taking off tomorrow morning for London, England, where I'll be speaking along with techPresident blogger Michael Turk at "Politics Web 2.0," a two-day international conference hosted by the University of London, Royal Halloway. The conference features 120 papers organised into 41 panels, with more than 180 participants drawn from over 30 countries, and is probably a bit more academic than most of the events I tend to go to these days. My talk is titled, "The Revolution Will Be Networked: How Open Source Politics is Emerging in America." What do you think I should cover?

I'm in a breakout session at the New Democratic Network's daylong conference on "New Tools, New Audiences," listening to Vijay Ravindran, the CTO of Catalist, talk about web 2.0 and its development of an "Enhanced Voter File." As usual, these are my rushed notes, and at best a good paraphrase of what was said, not direct quotation.

When a big earthquake hit Abruzzo, Italy, earlier this week, the debate there over whether blogs and social media could be sources of real news got a jolt of reality. Surprisingly, it took one hour and a half for the news to be reported by national television and more than three hours before the main newspapers did the same in their online edition. People awakened by the quake used Twitter to spread the news even before news agencies. For a couple of hours Twitter was the only source available to Italian people to share news and information and, most of all, try to contact friends and relatives living in Abruzzo.

Big news! Personal Democracy Forum Europe, our first conference overseas, is happening November 20-21 in Barcelona, at the Torre Agbar (pictured below). To get on the mailing list for more details, go to www.personaldemocracy.eu and sign up!

Yesterday, the Department of Defense launched a new site, defense.gov. It appears to be targeted at the general public, whereas its standard site, defenselink.mil, has always felt like it was serving those in the defense community.

It's great that the department recognized a communication gap with private citizens. For a democracy to stay strong, it's important that its members stay engaged with their government. But right now, defense.gov seems like little more than a portal full of outbound links to pre-existing sites, all of which house various forms of press releases: the obligatory Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube links on the left, along with links to each branch of the armed services; news features in the main body about DoD "going green", a recent awards ceremony, etc.; and Iraq and Afghanistan news on the right. It is just a compilation of stuff that's already out there. Nothing new.

Government agencies considering a revamped Web presence should keep this tenant in mind: the point of a site like this it not to exploit each and every new method of broadcasting your message. The point is to listen.

Can participatory culture shape public opinion?

The 2008 presidential campaign in the United States was full of examples of parody used to spread a message of change and mobilize voters. But average citizens are also now more aware of the possibility to modify and circulate images and related messages also when it comes to protest against politicians.

An online fire is burning in Europe. It was set by what appears to be a designed campaign to transform the European intellectual property regime, towards a more restrictive set of rules directly affecting the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and information. We're seeing its implementation in Sweden, France, Italy, UK or at the EU level in Brussels.