Announced on the Twitter blog:

Summize is a popular service for searching Twitter and keeping up with emerging trends in real-time. Like Twitter, Summize offers an API so other products and services can filter the constant queue of updates in a variety of ways. The Summize service and API will be merged with our own and integrated under the Twitter brand.

There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. We will be adding search and its related features to the core offering of Twitter in the very near future. In the meantime, everyone is welcome to access search.twitter.com—there’s no need for a Twitter account.

It was a smart purchase and a good fit, something Twitter was absolutely lacking.

Still, the important question to me is, how is Twitter going to eventually make money? And will that decision completely ruin any chance of Twitter serving the public interest as a space for dialog and discourse?

To Whomever Was The Decision-Maker Behind The Cancellation Of The BPP,

You are an idiot.

Granted, that may not be the most productive way to start off this letter. But I’ve gotta tell you, you really are an idiot. Please allow me to explain why.

I’ll first go back to what I wrote when I discovered the Bryant Park Project, some seven short months ago, when I first started listening:

Others have written about the potential here, as old media (no offense, NPR radio people…) mixes with new. What’s most interesting to me is to see how it’s actually playing out, how both the folks at BPP and the fans are all trying to get a sense of this interesting community of real-time, 140-characters-or-less virtual beings in cyberspace. The somewhat inevitable cocktail party metaphor has been used, and as well the somewhat more intriguing “coffee at the local diner.”

…And it’s this acoustic space that’s created with Twitter, as conversations happen in real-time (perhaps the cocktail party metaphor is entirely appropriate?), that makes this particular space “oral,” just as much as it is written. And this orality, in turn, brings people together, and creates exactly the kind of community that BPP’s twitter-lutionary experiment is creating within their audience.

See, I’m not sure if anyone at NPR has picked up a newspaper or anything, but the Really Big Thing these days is building community around your brand. And, through the use of new media — Twitter in particular — you did just that.

You created a community of listeners; partners in the show, really. It even feels wrong to call them (us!) an “audience,” because it was something more. We got involved. We had a stake.

We felt connected.

Through our tweets, we got to interact with both the hosts and those behind the scenes. We got to follow what happened after the program ended. We got to know them; not fully, but enough to share a laugh in the morning and keep coming back for more.

What really makes you an idiot is this thing called The Long Tail. The idea is pretty simple. It’s that new media technologies — things like your web site and your twitter account — can create niche businesses that thrive online. And what can power those niches is something like the community of listeners you’ve developed all these months around the BPP.

Trust me — new media people would have killed for what you old media people had with Bryant Park.

So, look. Maybe I’ve offended you. Maybe “idiot” was harsh. Maybe you’re not an idiot.

Prove me wrong.

PS — You probably don’t know this, but those underlined words in my post are called “links” and you “click” on them with your “mouse.”

“When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future…”

- Marshall McLuhan

I discovered the wonder of IRC today. Okay, before you laugh, I’ll have you know I was using LambaMOO when you young whippersnappers were in diapers!

But, all these years, never used IRC.

McLuhan’s quote is apropos, because IRC takes me back to the early days, when I first discovered how complex and fascinating technology really was, when the Internet was still a young lad. When we connected over phone lines with modems. When we used Lynx.

What’s old is new…

[Note: My essay, published on techPresident today.]

In some ways, it’s too early to write this post. Usually reflection takes place at the end of an event, but, as part of the Get FISA Right movement, I’m not so sure where the end really is…in fact, it’s moved so fast, I’m not even sure where it started.

The story of the Get FISA Right group has already been covered heavily in the press. Here’s the 30 second version: A group protesting Barack Obama’s decision to support the current FISA legislation appeared on his campaign website, and as tens of thousands of individuals joined, it became not only the largest group on his site, but a movement strong enough to force Obama to take notice. His response to the Get FISA Right group was a moment of validation; this became something real.

Maybe a bit too real, as I found myself on Fourth of July weekend sitting alone in a room on a conference call with 10 or so people I had never met before in my life, logged into my email, editing a wiki, organizing a political movement at breakneck speed — all while my family ate barbecue without me.

It was at this point I began thinking about Clay Shirky.

I recently attended techPresident’s Personal Democracy Forum in New York City, and heard Shirky talk about his book, Here Comes Everybody. He started his speech off with this:

The thesis of the book is, in five words: Group Action just got easier…The idea is that the transaction costs, the difficulty of simply getting a group of people together to accomplish anything of value has historically been high, and what we have now with the internet and mobile phones are tools that lower those transaction costs. And there’s been this explosion of what people are doing with it.

Those words have been resonating with me over the last few days, because organizing and participating in the Get FISA Right movement has been “ridiculously” easy. We’re using free, social software tools to connect, to think through ideas, to collaborate, all with the aim of taking the passion and energy created on Barack Obama’s website and shape it into political action.

So we’re using email and a listserv. We have a wiki from Wetpaint. We’re using Google Groups and Google Docs to create initial drafts before posting them for public review. And we’re using social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to get the word out.

Group action really did just get easier.

Yet it’s not perfect, and mistakes have been made, and we’re questioning ourselves every step of the way. For example, once a (very) rough draft of our “response to the response” was created, we posted it on the wiki. But there was uncertainty — we knew there would be increased attention from the press after The New York Times published its recent piece on one of the group’s members, Mike Stark. Was it a good idea to put such a rough draft out in public, for reporters to potentially see?

We also had a long discussion about changing the email messaging function on the “My Barack Obama” site. The reasoning was that, once the group hit 18,000+ members, the flood of email the list produced was turning off a large number of people from the activist campaign. There were also questions about how “productive” a list that large could be. So it become “moderated,” meaning one of the group’s administrators would need to approve each and every message that went out. While there was some support for this change, many of the group members became upset, and disenchanted — there were charges of censorship.

Whether or not this was a mistake is still not known, but something had to be done. A happy medium was hopefully reached by applying an extremely “loose” form of moderation, essentially weeding out only obvious trolls. A Discussion Forum was also setup, and myBO group members were encouraged to move their conversations over to the new platform.

All part of a day’s work when running an open source political movement by the seat of our pants.

While the group has only been working together for a short time, there have already been some lessons learned:

Technology Must Be Boring

To borrow again from Clay Shirky, “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” By this, he means that it’s not until technologies become ubiquitous and commonplace and, indeed, boring, do they enable profound social changes. For the Get FISA Right group, this meant two things. First, the technologies themselves had to be free, readily available, and easy to use. Tools like Wetpaint and Google Groups “pages,” and sites like Facebook meant there were platforms around which we could collaborate. But beyond the tools themselves, for this group, collaborating online was “boring.” Many of the group members were already well-versed in blogs and wikis, and were able to quickly acclimate to the unique social norms and cohesiveness required to be productive online.

Transparency Over Perfection

As mentioned above, draft statements were posted out in the public domain well before they were ready. If we worked for a political campaign, this would never happen. But we decided transparency was something we valued, and conducting our business out in the open, we felt, only added to our credibility. That said, not everything was completely public. Certainly email discussions aren’t “public” in the sense of a wiki, nor are the pages in the Google Group; clearly, not everything can be done by committee. But every effort was made whenever possible to forgo perfection, get a draft of something together, and post it quickly.

Don’t Take It Personally

What is striking about the Get FISA Right group is the level of “professionalism” involved. By that, I mean every single member of the team is able to both give and receive constructive criticism extremely well. To an extent, the sense of urgency around the group’s mission — mobilizing the citizenry in the days before the July FISA vote in the Senate — forced an environment of quick decision making. But there was also a level of honesty that was palpable, as folks gave their opinions and hashed out decisions in real-time. For me, I think years of participating (pseudonymously) in the political blogosphere helped me become better at this sort of give-and-take — the blogs are no place for thin skins.

18 (Or Thereabout…) Is The Magic Number

The planning group was around 18-20 people, and this seems like just about the right size for this kind of effort. The group is large enough to bring varied backgrounds, expertise, and interests to the table, and also allows for work to get done across time zones. Whether it was two in the afternoon or two in the morning, others were available to work through whatever issues came up.

Hopefully these lessons can serve in some ways as a template for more efforts like ours. It genuinely feels like something new is being created here. I once heard PressThink’s Jay Rosen comment that citizen journalism is all about “extending the news space” into new territories. What we are doing with Get FISA Right is extending the political space in new directions.

But is this anything new? Haven’t blogs have been opening up politics to ordinary citizens for years now?

While that may be true, blogs, with the Dean campaign and, even more so, the first YearlyKos convention, have also become part of the political landscape. At this year’s Democratic Convention, bloggers will be reporting from The Big Tent. Politicians like Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, and John Kerry have posted frequently on Daily Kos. And blogs have become an important aspect of professional journalism too, as increasingly we see articles written primarily based on comments in the blogosphere.

But perhaps the most important distinction between blogs and the Get FISA Right movement is that bloggers have a home — a blog has roots. While the blogosphere hasn’t quite become arborescent, it’s 28 years later and we’re still tired of trees.

The Get FISA Right group has no home. We’re distributed; nomadic. We’re a Google group and a chat room and a wiki that is constantly changing. We’re a collection of email messages in the ether.

Perhaps that will change. Since our work started, we’ve created an Internet domain. We have a logo. Perhaps one day, there will be some roots.

But, for now, we’re rewriting the rules. We’re walking a tightrope.

We’re nomads. And it feels pretty darn good.

[Ed. note: This is my first attempt at writing a history of the relationship between Obama and the netroots." A couple notes: (1) It's a draft, still working on it, and would love comments re: what I'm missing; (2) There's a problem with the term "netroots," as there is no monolithic group -- they (we) don't all follow the great orange you-know-what. That said, until I figure out how to deal with that, I'm using netroots as a short-cut.]

The most significant event of this week was the culmination of what blogger Matt Stoller calls Obama’s “accountability moment“: his willingness to support the current FISA bill, and the blogosphere’s reaction to that statement.

The reaction in the press has been one of surprise — here is Barack Obama, the “online” candidate, facing backlash from the “netroots” (the left-leaning political blogosphere). The reason for this unexpected reaction is really the conflation of two aspects of the 2008 primary campaign: the continuing growth of the influence and power the netroots has within the Democratic Party, and the success of the Obama campaign using social networking tools effectively during the election. The two, though, are not the same, and a brief history of Senator Obama’s relationship with the political blogosphere can shed some light on the difference.

Perhaps the first exposure the netroots had of Barack Obama was back in 2004, when kos from the Daily Kos website called the soon-to-be Illinois Senator a “patron saint“:

There’s no doubt that Obama is a special candidate — a great orator, accomplished, great life story, and hails from a state where he can be as progressive as he wants to be. He has clearly captured the imaginations of Illinois voters, who gave him a resounding victory in a crowded Democratic primary field. He is African American, but his support cuts across ethnic lines.

A month later, kos remarked on the significance of Obama’s now famous 2004 convention speech, noting an ability to bring “the convention’s rhetorical theme of “unity” to life. And he did so not by seeking the center, but by defining what it means to be a Democrat better than any Democrat since … I don’t know.”

This goodwill, though, did not last long. In 2005, the netroots were incredibly active around the John Roberts hearings. Obama sent out a press release stating he would be voting to confirm Bush’s appointee, and included what many called a “scolding” to the liberal blogosphere, who were at the time heavily criticizing Sentator Leahy’s decision to also confirm. Obama said:

I was deeply disturbed by some statements that were made by largely Democratic advocacy groups when ranking member Senator Leahy announced that he would support Judge Roberts. Although the scales have tipped in a different direction for me, I am deeply admiring of the work and the thought that Senator Leahy has put into making his decision. The knee-jerk unbending and what I consider to be unfair attacks on Senator Leahy’s motives were unjustified. Unfortunately, both parties have fallen victim to this kind of pressure.

A debate began to rage on Daily Kos about his statement, enough to prompt Senator Obama to take the blog plunge. He signed on to DKos and posted for the first time, arguing Democrats need to be open to all points-of-view (introducing to the netroots his theme of inclusive politics; a theme, as we’ll see, he continues later on…):

But to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, “true” progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward. When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive “checklist,” then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems. We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted.

The post received 843 comments. While many were supportive, some of the most highly-rated comments were not:

blockbuster: With all due respect, and this is to Sen. Obama, welcome to politics in the early 21st century… Did you stand up, loudly and clearly, to defend Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry - did you ever express anger at the people who made these wild claims [i.e., political smears from the right wing]? If you, or other Democratic “leaders” ever did, the occasion was certainly not a memorable one. You come back and talk to us because we are the ones who provide you a forum to do so. But on the national level, Senator, the other side owns the microphone. What will you do for us to gain access to that microphone so that we no longer have to shout?

native son: With regard to Democrats’ reasons for supporting Roberts… How can we take seriously ANY Democrat who gives Bush the benefit of the doubt? At this stage of the game, after all this country has seen from this president, how in the world can ANY Democrat use this particular rationale to support Roberts?

adigal: Now, to say that one should not attack one of our good guys on the basis on one vote I agree with. But to say that we need a “kinder, gentler” tone, I think will encourage the republicans to continue to kick us in the teeth and the electorate to view us as wimps.

RenaRF: Senator Obama, I have the deepest respect for you and great hope as to the future of the Democratic party as a result of your being a part of it. However - our country can’t wait until that Democratic party matures and I fear I see the same reticense and determination to appear “statesmanlike” that caused our party to be trounced at election time.

The second significant interaction between Obama and the netroots came in June, 2006, when he made a speech at the Call to Renewal conference. In many ways, it was The Washington Post’s description of the speech that set things off:

Sen. Barack Obama chastised fellow Democrats on Wednesday for failing to “acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people,” and said the party must compete for the support of evangelicals and other churchgoing Americans.

This drew ire from the netroots (see here, here, and here), essentially for playing into and perpetuating the strawman “Democrats Hate Religion” meme.

In 2007, early in the President campaign, came the third clash between Obama and bloggers:

At Barack Obama’s gospel concert here last night, more than 2,000 black evangelicals were singing, waving their hands and cramming the aisles — most enthusiastically when Donnie McClurkin, the superstar black gospel singer, decried the criticism he has generated because of his views that homosexuality is a choice.

…His inclusion had drawn public criticism from gay activists who wanted Mr. Obama to cancel his appearance. Mr. Obama did not, but issued a statement a few days ago saying he strongly disagrees with Mr. McClurkin’s views and that he has tried to address what he called the homophobia among some black voters.

The event foregrounded the essential nature of the differences between the netroots and Barack Obama — political partisanship and principle versus the politics of inclusion. The point of view from the netroots was very clear:

So, in the end, Obama let his “best” and “favorite” artist slam gays to thousands of African-Americans, in his name, and neither he nor his hand-chosen white gay preacher said anything in response. Class act, that Obama campaign. For them, creating a “dialogue” means the gay-basher gets to spread his bigotry to thousands while the candidate and the token gay STFU.

The argument from the Obama team at the time was about inclusion:

Privately, Obama aides say they believe Obama is a candidate of real, transformational change, and that uproars like the McClurkin controversy are necessary speed bumps on the road to bringing people with opposing viewpoints together to air their differences.

This isn’t to say Obama had no support from the netroots; in fact, as the 2008 Presidential campaign drove on, and as it became clear the contest was between Obama and Hillary Clinton, the liberal blogosphere began to split along these lines. Obama supporters (despite whatever differences they had) began to coalesce around sites like Daily Kos and Open Left and TPM Cafe, while Clinton supporters drifted over to MyDD and Talk Left.

This split within the netroots came to a head when a member of Daily Kos went on “strike,” to protest what s/he perceived as an increasingly dismissive and belligerent stance against Clinton:

I’ve decided to go on “strike” and will refrain from posting here as long as the administrators allow the more disruptive members of our community to trash Hillary Clinton and distort her record without any fear of consequence or retribution. I will not be posting at DailyKos effective immediately. I will not help drive up traffic or page-hits as long as my candidate – a good and fine DEMOCRAT - is attacked in such a horrid and sexist manner not only by other diarists, but by several of those posting to the front page.

…Sadly, the majority of the administrators have allowed this hostile environment to develop in our online community for anyone who isn’t planted firmly in the Obama camp. They’ve routinely ignored personal attacks and allowed disruptive, spam-like posts to go unchecked whenever anyone expresses support for Hillary or challenges something their candidate has said or done…

As a result, our community has become little more than an echo chamber with an attitude that harkens back to the early days of Dubbya’s administration - yer either with us or yer a’gin us, heh!

The blog strike gained national prominence, including a write-up in The New York Times. And while not every blogger chose to take sides, the split was significant enough to set many of the netroots in their respective political camps for the remainder of the campaign season.

So, returning to the “Obama accountability movement,” if we look back at the history of Obama and the netroots, it is not surprising there would again be a rift between the two. And yet the Obama team’s success at running a campaign built largely on harness the power of new, online, social networking tools gave the appearance that the netroots had uncritically lined up behind the candidate. The Nation magazine noted how, beyond Obama’s success with tools like MySpace and Facebook, the site called my.barackobama.com helped created an online “wide net“:

Obama’s aides have not simply been riding a wave of hit websites; they also built their own social networking portal to connect and empower activists. Chris Hughes, a 24-year-old co-founder of Facebook, joined the Obama campaign to build MyBO, which invites users to network, blog and promote grassroots events. Unlike many campaigns that treat web politics as a separate silo, Obama’s field program is tightly integrated with MyBO. Iowa organizers were required to post all their events on the site and encouraged to write MyBO blog posts, vetted by the campaign, about local efforts. And the campaign trusts supporters to post whatever they want, from house parties to fundraising ideas to blog commentaries. More than 350,000 people have already created MyBO accounts, posting more than 10,000 grassroots events offline, including 1,000 gatherings where supporters simply wear Obama buttons and do community service in their neighborhoods. No other campaign has a decentralized program like it.

Obama’s success at using these types of tools branded him the “online” candidate, yet at the same time perpetuated the notion everyone online was behind him. When the FISA issue recently came to the foreground, the news media noted how this “irked” the netroots, how they felt “jilted.”

The political blogosphere, though, has never been uncritical of Obama; indeed, the history of the Obama and the blogosphere reveals a contentious relationship, one that demonstrates how bloggers today are continuing to do what they do best — put political pressure on elected officials.

This pressure continues today, as bloggers have organized to protest Obama’s intention to approve the latest FISA legislation. The protest, in fact, marks a significant turning point — while the 2008 campaign saw an unprecedented use of social media, it turns out, social media can work in reverse. Just as the Obama campaign provided the tools to allow supporters to organize and help him win the primary, his supporters have turned the tables and are using my.barackobama.com to attempt to push and shape his political positions.

As Mark Pesce writes, we’ve entered the age of hyperempowerment:

For the first time, we have a political campaign embracing hyperconnectivity. As is always the case with political campaigns, it is a means to an end. The Obama campaign has built a nationwide social network (using lovely, old-fashioned, human techniques), then activated it to compete in the primaries, dominate in the caucuses, and secure the Democratic nomination. That network is being activated again to win the general election.

Then what? Three months ago, I put this question directly to an Obama field organizer. He paused, as if he’d never given the question any thought, before answering, “I don’t know. I don’t believe anyone’s thought that far ahead.” There are now some statements from candidate Obama about what he’d like to see this network become. They are, of course, noble sentiments. They matter not at all. The mob, now mobilized, will do as it pleases. Obama can lead by example, can encourage or scold as occasion warrants, but he can not control.

Control, of course, is a prime directive of any political campaign — message control, most importantly. Today, we’ve entered uncharted territory: the “mob” (not the most flattering of terms…) can now do what it pleases.

The political blogosphere has always been a part of this mob, and, since the Dean campaign, has been a growing force in American politics. Today, the Get FISA Right movement, which includes many bloggers, is demonstrating that what started years ago in the blogosphere is maturing, and the tools and technology used to organize and activate people is growing beyond blogs to include wikis and Facebook and other social media.

The FISA protest is only the start.

[Update -- things to add]

- The Rev Wright controversy

Check out identi.ca, an open source CC twitter-like microblogger.

Supports openID, too.

I don’t really post about politics here; I focus more, instead, on my academic work, looking the culture of the blogosphere, etc. But I do follow politics (rabidly), and now have an outlet. It’s a new blog I am co-authoring, called “Obama Letdown Watch.”

To explain, it’s essentially a watchdog blog, and we’re hoping to make sure Senator Obama follows through on his promise of a “new kind of politics.”

Obama’s reaction to the FISA bill currently in Congress, and his willingness to vote for the bill when he previously said he would be against telco immunity, was really what prompted the creation of the blog. But what really solidified for me what I was doing with it, and why, was Obama’s reaction to the recent SCOTUS ruling on the death penalty. He agreed with the (conservative) minority of the court, stating:

I disagree with the decision; I have said repeatedly that I think the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstance for the most egregious of crimes…

The statement on FISA is a letdown — it’s definitely not taking a strong stand, definitely not a new kind of politics. The SCOTUS ruling, though, isn’t. Why?

Because Obama is not a liberal.

I know he’s being painted as one. The Republicans are calling him “the most liberal member of the Senate.” (Funny how whoever the Dems nominate to run for President turns out, coincidentally, to be the most liberal member of Congress…)

But Obama’s not a liberal. He’s a center-left politician. Which is fine — politics is all about compromise; there’s no room for expectations of purity.

But delivering on a new kind of politics isn’t a liberal thing or a centrist thing. It’s about being honest and transparent. And if Obama cannot deliver on that, well, it would certainly be a letdown…

OK, so that’s it for politics. Anything else, you can find on the Obama Letdown Watch blog. Hope you come visit.

I’m attending techPresident’s PDF2008, and what’s most interesting to me here is not really the content of the conference, although that’s the main reason I’m here. But it’s really the culture of the crowd in attendance that’s notable.

It’s the strange and unique mix of what I’d call TechnoPoliGeek culture. A mix of policy wonk, tech geek, and Web 2.0 venture capitalist crowds, all merging together to listen to 10 minute mini-lectures from some really smart people, like Clay Shirky, Lawrence Lessig, and Douglas Rushkoff.

What’s most apparent are the toys. I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a conference where it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that *everyone* is live-blogging and live-tweeting the event. Up in the rafters (where there are power outlets provided at many of the seats), there’s this undercurrent, a hum, a constant tap-tap-tap of the keyboards that’s playing like a white noise under all the speakers.

But it’s not only laptops; there are iPhone and vidcams everywhere.

There’s also an undercurrent of capitalist utopianism. Not so much by the folks who run this conference, but by many of the attendees and speakers. VC’s, you know who you are…It’s a strange thing — a push/pull between those who want to make a buck off our politics, and those who want to save our Republic. Not sure if the two are mutually exclusive…

Which was really the subtext of Johnathan Zittrain’s presentation earlier today — he pointed out the very tenuous nature of Web 2.0, stating that, for example, Wikipedia was always one hour away from complete meltdown (spambots, vandals, etc), and the only thing that keeps it floating is the hard work of dedicated individuals who feel they “own” Wikipedia. This hanging-by-a-thread-ness makes listening to the triumphilists an exercise in absurdity, as what’s need to make these technologies work is, in many cases, a “civic defense” team, like the wikipedians.

I’m not sure if technology can save our Republic. If it can create transparency, if it can enable civic defense technologies, if it can connect people, and inspire them to get involved, this crazy scheme just might work.

Strange Internet meme:

I am aware of all Internet traditions.

John McCain campaign, today:

John McCain is aware of the Internet.

Strikingly similar, no?

Apparently the MSM is eager to turn the 2008 election into another authenticity contest.

Well done, Time and AP.