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.

Kentucky bloggers are taking back their state's Democratic Party, one wiki entry at a time.  This week Ben Carter and Joe Sonka, proprietors of the progressive Kentucky blog BlueGrassRoots, announced the creation of BlueGrassWiki.  The project aims to organize information about Kentucky's 120 county parties in order to "infiltrate" local leadership in upcoming party precinct elections.

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.

The Wilmington, Delaware city council makes audio recordings of its meetings. This Tuesday, the council did something pretty lame: it voted down a measure to post those recordings online. The logic: it's better to keep these inaccessible, for no other reason than to keep people from getting them:

Due to the multiplication of breaking news related to online criminality in Italy (Facebook groups exalting famous mafia bosses, Google executives accused of defamation and violating privacy for “allowing” a video to be posted online showing an autistic youth being abused, growing concern about online piracy, etc..), the issue of Internet regulation has acquired a very important role on the Italian political scene.

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.