In Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall discusses reforming the way bills are passed in Congress without adequate review.

TPM readers suggested that blogs and their readers be harnessed to comb through future bills to uncover whatever foolish, nefarious or simply unconscionable provisions might be lurking inside them.

At first, as I said, though the intention seemed admirable, I wasn't particularly impressed by this idea. But over a few days, as I considered it further, it occurred to me that maybe I was the one who wasn't being realistic or rather was too stuck in conventional ways of thinking.....

Democrats are already pushing for a return to the observance of the rule which mandated that members of congress must be given at least three days to review legislation in its final form before it was called to a vote.

But why stop there? ...

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.

The Pentagon has long been one of the most net-savvy of all government departments, especially in its dealings with the media. (Take for example its posting of verbatim transcripts of reporters' interviews with top DOD officials, as a way for the public to judge whether reporters are being fair in their articles.) But this Washington Post article by Thomas Ricks suggests that while the military is trying to convince the public that the battle for Fallujah was a success (using a 59-page Powerpoint presentation called "Telling the Fallujah Story to the World"), a part-time blogger is matching them click-for-click with a far more critical take with a site called "Fallujah in Pictures: The War You Won't See on TV."

Ricks reports:

"As far as the blog site, this is information operations at its finest," said one Marine officer who has served in Iraq. "IO is about influence, and this piece tries to influence people by depicting the human cost of war."

Now the discussion turns to the ways that the Internet is enabling new forms of business (eBay, Amazon) and what lessons might be learned from that for politics.

Esther Dyson had the most interesting observations. In business you have the luxury of getting rid of customers you don't want (you can segment your market), but government has to serve all the people, which is why government is slower than business. In politics, she said, you can define a target market but you're hoping to enlarge it. Kerry and Dean, in her view, failed to succeed because they talked mostly to their core supporters rather than trying to enlarge their base. And their mistake was that they weren't listening enough, especially beyond their core supporters. She urged businesses and politicians alike to use the Internet to listen more and broadcast less. I agree.

eBay, she added, is itself a political phenomenon because it changes how people see themselves in relationship with others, and that empowering people in one sphere spills over into other spheres. She cited her experience in Russia, where friends of hers who work in software development are far more honest and happy than the average Russian, who feels irrelevant and depressed. That may be true, though I'm not sure how it proves the eBay experience itself is changing political expectations or behavior.

Quoting from Supreme Court to Look at File Sharing (washingtonpost.com):

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court said Friday it will consider whether Internet file-sharing services are responsible for their customers illegally swapping songs and movies, a multibillion-dollar case testing the limits of copyright law in the digital age.

Justices will hear a challenge to a lower court ruling in favor of Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc. that was a blow to recording companies and movie studios seeking to stop the online distribution of their copyrighted works.

In the realm of technological innovation, the usual political alliances and bedfellows don't necessarily apply. While the libertarianesque Silicon Valley capitalists haven't yet established a coherent political presence as a faction of either party, it will be interesting to see whether Web-facilitated political activism brings about some pressure towards open-source ideals and reconceptions of intellectual property. Even if so, the effect on the judiciary would take a generation or so to ripple through, so it's probably too soon to expect radical reevaluation of such matters from the Supreme Court.

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

For Inauguration week, Rich Harwood has invited several guests to his Redeeming Hope blog to talk about the Red/Blue division and "the next chapter of America’s story."

Rich has written and spoken extensively about the Red/Blue issue, including a June article in The Monitor.

Guests for the blog event include Meetup's Scott Heiferman and Peter Levine from CIRCLE, among others.

The widget on the PDF home page that shows which Senators and Congressfolks are being talked about the most in the blogosphere is driven by Technorati using an application developed for this site by Aaron Swartz. Micah Sifry, this site's editor, asked for help developing such a tool on the mailing list for deveIopers working with the API for Technorati (whose CEO, Dave Sifry, is Micah's brother - it's a small Sifrysphere, but I wouldn't want to paint it).

A week or so ago, Swartz was honored as a runner up in the Technorati Developers Contest:

Personaldemocracy.com: The URL speaks for itself. This website lets you stay on top of all things political. Specifically, it uses Technorati to show which politicians are rising and falling in the blogosphere-a phenomenon that has become increasingly relevant with politics and journalism.

Congratulations, Aaron!

Bloggers are playing a role in setting the stage of the Social Security showdown scheduled to be the Bush administration's first major domestic agenda item of its second term. At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has been functioning as something of a freelance whip, identifying wavering Democrats and shaming them back into line. Meanwhile, BlogPAC has launched a web site called There Is No Crisis in order to dispute the underlying premise of the Republican agenda: that without at least partial privatization Social Security is doomed. Naturally, the site has a blog and an RSS feed.

Your help is needed with a small but meaningful effort to get Members of Congress more aware of when the blogosphere is talking about them.

Whenever you mention a Member, can you try to link to their official web site? (The jumping off point to get their addresses from Thomas is here.)

At PDF, we've built a tool called "HotPols" that uses Technorati's tracking of the whole 6-million-plus-strong blogosphere to rank Members by who is being linked to most. Actually an 18-year-old freshman at Stanford named Aaron Swartz did the coding; he's scary smart).

If you go here you'll see two columns for the Senate. The right-hand one is the one I'm most interested in. That shows Senators ranked by links to their official home page. (It's not a perfect apples-to-apples list at the moment because a few Senators, like Obama, just switched on their official page and up til now their links were all to their campaign site.) But the number of links is low overall, because bloggers often don't bother to find the url. (Though many do link, for example, to Amazon's unique url for a book, which makes Technorati's book talk feature so interesting: )