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Mitt Romney didn’t just get a running mate in Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — he inherited a robust, engaged social media apparatus that will be critical to volunteerism and conservative voter turnout.
Rep Ryan is an anomaly in the House. He’s a star politician who had more Twitter followers before the announcement than Republican House Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), and almost any other congressional figure save current House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). The tea party groups who are crucial to the GOP’s chances may be some of the most active, savvy online denizens in American politics. Romney’s social media profile is broad but not deep, meaning he has a lot of followers — almost 4 million on Facebook and more than 800,000 on Twitter — but the enthusiasm and engagement expected from such a large audience was muted.
Paul Ryan VP pick adds social media muscle
Websites that are subject to frequent copyright removal notices will soon begin to appear lower in Google search rankings — a new effort to crack down on piracy that has Hollywood happy but consumer groups fearful of potential abuse.
Announcing the new policy on its blog, Google said that sites with “high numbers” of “valid” removal notices would be affected as the search company tries instead to “help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily — whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.” To movie studios and recording artists, that’s good news. The new Google policy could limit access to movies, songs, books and other digital documents often peddled illegally online. But public-interest advocates like Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation say the search company’s new plan is ambiguous. They say those “valid” takedown requests aren’t often valid, and they fear some legal sites could be caught in the fray.
Google search to be anti-piracy enforcer Google's New Search Penalty Could Lead to Unintended Consequences (Public Knowledge) Google’s Copyright Filtering Causes Concern (Talking Points Memo) Google cagey with details of piracy penalty (The Hill)
It's an increasingly common navigational experience in the age of connected and app-enabled phones: you can see yourself as a little dot on the map, moving on your screen as you move in the physical space of the world. You see your map, your map sees you. And if your map is a Google Map and your screen powered by the Android operating system, you can see your map seeing you and many of the people around you.
This collection and sharing of locational information is the basis behind the traffic-tracking layer on Google Maps. By combining all those devices' location points and detecting the speeds at which they're moving, Google is able to infer how quickly traffic is moving on major streets and highways. Originally launched in 2008, it can be a really useful layer of urban information, representing real-time conditions. And as the company recently announced, it's growing. More than 130 cities and small towns all over the world have been added to the project, including places like Kalamazoo, Michigan, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Latin American cities like Bogota, Colombia, and San Jose, Costa Rica. With more than 400 million Android users throughout the world, Google is finding that it has enough of a data mass in many more cities to provide this information. This map shows all the locations throughout the world where Google is mapping traffic conditions using phone data.
Google's Growing Web of Street Traffic Surveillance
Nothing drives an elected official to indignity faster than the promise of something for nothing. When Google announced that it would build a fiber-optic broadband network capable of delivering one gigabit-per-second internet—roughly 150 times the average American internet speed—to residential users in an American city, mayors lined up to debase themselves. Duluth’s jumped into a frozen lake, Sarasota’s into a shark tank. The mayor of Topeka changed his city’s name (for a day) to Google. Ultimately Google decided on Kansas City, and next month it will start providing its blazing-speed internet for $70 a month. But that service will not be available to all Kansas Citians. Instead, Google has divided Kansas City into 204 districts (which it annoyingly insists on calling “fibrehoods”), has invited consumers who want the one-gigabit service to register in advance, and will deliver service to the 46 areas with the highest concentration of interested consumers. Only one American city offers one-gigabit Internet connections to every resident, and it is not tech-savvy San Francisco or university-laden Boston, but Chattanooga, Tennessee’s fourth-largest city, nestled in the Appalachian foothills.
The need for speed - What superfast internet connections can do for a city
Alabama was the first state in the nation to create a public television network in the early 1950s, but now, the network may be the nation’s most vulnerable, thanks to an attempted coup from its conservative overseers.
A judge in the state heard testimony this week in a lawsuit on the alleged wrongful termination of the network’s former executive director and CFO, who were apparently fired after refusing to air overtly religious content. The network’s license is up for renewal this year and donations have dropped off, raising the stakes of the conflict between the network’s politically appointed commissioners and its professional staff. Though the controversy has been largely missed by the national media thus far, it gets at the heart of key questions about religion in public life and government spending that have gripped the nation in the Obama era. “We feel like we’re victims of a hostile takeover,” an Alabama Public Television employee who helped blow the whistle on the commissioners’ plan told Salon. The employee asked to remain anonymous because the chairman of the Alabama Educational Television Commission, the board of political appointees who oversee the network, has issued a gag order with an implicit threat of retaliation against employees who speak to the media. “This is going to set a national precedent. Everyone is gunning for public television; this is how they’re going to do it,” the source said. At the center of the controversy is the work of David Barton, whom NPR called yesterday in an unrelated story, “The most influential evangelist you’ve never heard of.”
Tea Party takes over Alabama public TV
Faced with a need to upgrade the department’s aging, stovepiped tactical communications networks while reducing costs, the Homeland Security Department is considering a “game changing approach” by using emerging commercial and public safety networks on a subscription basis.
“Use of a subscription model reduces the ownership and operating costs by sharing the network ownership costs across a wider user base,” DHS said in announcing a program for developing prototype networks. The DHS Science and Technology Directorate is soliciting proposals from government, private sector and academic research and development facilities for prototype public safety networks. It expects to award up to $8 million to fund developing and testing. The Next Generation Tactical Wireless Broadband program envisions a seamless national network of interoperable commercial and public systems that can be leveraged by federal, state and local public safety agencies across the country, including DHS.
DHS wants to 'change the game' on public safety network
A Federal Communications Commission plan to make television stations disclose how many political ads they have sold is creating administrative headaches for network affiliates in battleground states that deal with a dozen or more campaigns or political groups in a single market.
An online database the FCC launched last week is designed to eliminate the need for people to obtain hard-copy files of advertising agreements from individual stations. Instead, the stations must scan the agreements into computers, convert them into PDF files and upload them to the database. “There isn’t any question that it’s using up station resources in terms of time spent for some people who normally had full-time jobs doing something else,” said Lou Schottelkotte, director of sales at ABC affiliate WEWS in Cleveland. In battlegrounds such as northeast Ohio, Schottelkotte said, there can be 10 to 12 political entities jockeying for air time simultaneously. One native of the Buckeye State, T.J. Basalla, a marketing specialist for a technology company, recently tweeted, “You can honestly go through an entire local newscast in Cleveland and see nothing but political ads.”
FCC Database Creates Headaches for TV Stations in Battlegrounds
The initial reaction was stunned outrage. After Nextgov first broke the news on June 11 that the State Department was mulling a $16.5 million contract with tech giant Amazon to purchase 2,500 Kindle Touch e-readers for overseas programs, one particular calculation started making its way around the Internet: $6,600—the amount the department reportedly was planning to pay per Kindle. Considering the e-readers normally retail for $189, this set off many alarm bells on Facebook, Twitter and beyond as yet another needless government contractor markup. “The State Department is buying Amazon Kindle e-readers for nearly 3,500 percent of their list price,” the Heritage Foundation tweeted.
But it wasn’t true.
Once the obliquely worded contract was properly explained, it turned out that State has a plan in mind that is somehow both more reasonably priced and much more expansive than what was first reported. The five-year contract could include as many as 35,000 devices, and while State plans to buy the individual Kindles for 10 percent below retail price, the deal also includes 3G Internet access, language translation software and tons of preprogrammed content, along with the potential to download more directly from the department in the future.
State Department’s Kindle Plan Offers a lesson in Diplomacy
Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr. and Michael D. McCurry, co-chairmen of the non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), announced the moderators for the 2012 general election presidential and vice presidential debates:
First presidential debate:
Jim Lehrer, Executive Editor of the PBS NewsHour
Wednesday, October 3, University of Denver, Denver, CO
Vice presidential debate:
Martha Raddatz, Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent, ABC News
Thursday, October 11, Centre College, Danville, KY
Second presidential debate (town meeting):
Candy Crowley, Chief Political Correspondent, CNN and Anchor, CNN's State of the Union
Tuesday, October 16, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY
Third presidential debate:
Bob Schieffer, Chief Washington Correspondent, CBS News and Moderator, Face the Nation
Monday, October 22, Lynn University, Boca Raton, FL
Commission on Presidential Debates Announces 2012 Moderators
This study explores the problems that journalists face in employing the doctrine of fair use under copyright in their work.
Journalists are key actors in the public sphere, because they create and circulate information for public knowledge and deliberation on public affairs, and shape knowledge and therefore expectations about the wider culture. To the extent that journalists inhibit their own performance because of copyright concerns, they limit their ability to perform that public sphere function. The study results from longform, open-ended interviews with 80 journalists in a variety of subject areas and on a range of media platforms. It finds significant evidence of delays, decisions to limit coverage and failure to disseminate on the basis of insecurity and misinformation about fair use. Journalists made aware of this problem took action to shape a set of principles interpreting their fair use rights.
Copyright, Free Speech, and the Public's Right to Know: How Journalists Think About Fair Use