Steve Nelson of Clear Ink has produced a cool build in Second Life that displays information about Congress, pulling data into the metaverse using Sunlight Labs' API. The project is an entry in the Sunlight Foundation's "Mashup Congress and Win" contest that offers a $2,000 prize for "the best 'Web 2.0 Mashup' that displays information about Congress." (PdF's Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are tech advisors for the Sunlight Foundation). 

The PdF 2007 Conference hosted a spirited panel examining Andrew Keen's new book, The Cult of the Amateur, featuring Keen, Clay Shirky, Craig Newmark, and Robert Scoble, and hosted by PdF's Josh Levy. Larry Lessig has a response to Cult, and it's fair to say that he's not impressed.

The Web on the Candidates

Kate Phillips at the Caucus picks up on a "flooding the zone" meme that's made it's way from Chuck DeFeo to Joe Trippi to TechPresident contributor David All. Writes All, "the idea behind 'flooding the zone' is to virtually take organic search on YouTube out of the picture as effectively as possible. It’s practically a last-resort tactic which will hopefully never be needed. If the decision is made by your campaign that a YouTube video, like 'Macaca' is crippling the campaign, pull the trigger and 'flood the zone.'" Phillips points out that the previous day she posted about Trippi's reference to flooding the zone at the Business Development Institute's conference on "The Future of Political Communications" (and I heard him use the same phrase at the Politics Online conference earlier this year). Not everyone agrees with the the theory, however. Justin Hamilton, a staffer for Rep. George Miller, criticizes the approach in the comments below Phillips' post: "1) If it’s viral, it’s being passed peer to peer primarily. So the smaller number of people who take the time to find something by organic search on youtube won’t have an impact. 2) By going so far out of your way to keep people from seeing something, you’ve created a taboo effect that will both: make people want to see it more; and give the story a second day because the coverage will turn to the 'desperate cover up attempt' that might make more of an issue than the issue itself."

The Web on the Candidates

John Edwards advisor Joe Trippi is in the U.K., telling British politicians that "Internet activism is spelling the end for the age of spin." In an interview with the Guardian, Trippi talked about the always-on nature of online campaigning. "Before TV, what mattered was how your voice sounded. Then with TV it matters what your candidate looks like ... We are now moving to a medium where authenticity is king, from what things look like to what's real ... You have to be 'on' 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Trippi said. He describes the new world of politics in the "peer-to-peer social network world," in which the opinion of peers is worth more than a top-down campaign message. While no candidates in the U.S. - including Edwards -- are completely running this kind of campaign, David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party in the U.K., continues his engaged web presence with multiple videos a week and an active community blog.

The FEC has produced a very cool map showing most campaign contributions to presidential candidates (PAC money and contributions under $200 aren't represented). A bunch of bubbles are overlaid over a map of the U.S., and when you click on the name of a candidate (listed to the left) you'll see the areas that have donated to them; click on the bubbles and you'll get a close-up view of that region; click on them again and you'll see a list of individual donors and the amount they contributed. (hat tip: Hotline)

In her piece yesterday in the NY Times, Stephanie Strom reports on the increasingly willingness of national foundations, like Carnegie and Hewlett, to admit failures in their grantmaking. Hard to call it a trend with so few examples, but lets call it a trendlette.

What do William Gibson, George Orwell, Karl Rove, Chris Shays, Wikipedia and the rise of YouTube have to do with each other? Browsing today's news offerings, I find a connection.

Google the words “DailyKos” and you’ll get about 2.6 million results. Google the words “Democracy Alliance” and you’ll get about 44,000 hits, and from them you won’t find out much. That's why I'm writing to praise journalist Matt Bai's new book, The Argument.

John Wonderlich, writing at the Sunlight Foundation blog, picked up on a mashup of earmark data and Google Maps and made an awesome discovery: it’s ridiculously simple to mashup earmark data on Google Earth.

The Politico launches a young voter-themed sub-site; Debate Porridge calls the campaigns on a Saturday and finds that most of them aren't working; interesting numbers about the effectiveness of campaigns' web effectiveness from the Politico's Ryan Grim and Compete.com; a puff piece about Joe Trippi tracks his rise to de facto campaign manager of the Edwards campaign; and Stephen Colbert passes Bill Richardson in a poll and more than 500,000 are members of a pro-Colbert Facebook group.

A MySpace poll of their users claims that young people are perhaps more politically engaged than older generations; WaPo profiles John McCain, makes another tag cloud; the Slashdot community interviews Garrett Graff, chaos ensues; notes from the annals of e-democracy; results from the first National Presidential Caucus; the National Journal's Technology is closing up shop; a new Politico column from Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry looks at the Republicans and tech; and a new site from Bill Richardson might be the gloomiest thing ever.