ThinkStream

Rep. Culberson explains the issue and delves into the more ridiculous side of franking regulation. Some have called this a partisan power-play, but Culberson seems eager to address and fix the issue, saying he’ll approach Rep. Mike Capuano, Chairman of the House Franking Committee and say,

“Listen, Mike (Capuano), you have about as much chance of regulating the Internet as King Canute did at stopping the tide.”

Culberson, a frequent Twitter poster, tweeted earlier today that,

“Twitter is the Fifth Estate & far more powerful … because it is a true distributed network of We the People.”

Capuano was quoted in the Washington Post earlier this year with his wisdom on the Internet:

“I make no bones about it. I don’t know anything about this stuff,” Capuano said with a shrug. “To me, the Web is a necessary evil,” he admitted, “like cellphones.”

Andrew Feinberg’s interview with Culberson:

Great use of video here to describe T. Boone Pickens’ plan to supplant foreign oil as our primary source of energy. The use of good quality info-graphics, brief but poinient motion graphics, and actual footage of Pickens in front of a whiteboard really gives you the feeling that he believes what he says, and that the subject matter is understandable. I especially keyed in on the whiteboard footage, being a big fan of drawing out problems to find solutions and teach process to others. There is a genuine quality to this communication that is absent from most promotional communication, perhaps because Pickens doesn’t appear to be seeking office, though I’m sure he stands to profit nicely if his agenda becomes popular.

Praise from (not exactly Caesar) PageOneKentucky for the McConnell 2.0 website.

Patrick Ruffini makes some great points about the application of cognitive surplus on the Right having shaped the state of politics online so far. His key point is that what the Right really needs right now is infrastructure and distributed tools. There’s really no want for issue groups, and perhaps focusing all of our energy on an agenda, broad though it might be, isn’t as efficacious as developing the platform and tools to empower the movement in general.

I wonder if Mark Soohoo actually coordinated the message “John McCain is aware of the Internet” with the campaign’s communication staff, or just came up with it on his own…

From The Huffington Post:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYs8X0DZNI4&hl=en]

Activism is great, as long as you don’t expect the Federal Government to be the solution to everything.

Jonah Goldberg on Laziness, Inactivity, Progress, & Conservatism on National Review Online: “The ‘Just Don’t’ school holds that most problems solve themselves. If nobody else will solve your problems for you, you will be far more likely to fix your own problems. This is a naturalistic philosophy in that it embraces the natural order of things. No creature — except for man — takes responsibility for the ecosystem it lives in. Sharks eat as much as they can eat. Birds fly where they want to fly. Bears crap in the woods without so much as a ‘by your leave’ from park rangers. Everybody does what they do and the ecosystem achieves balance because of it.”

Robert Cook, a true hero and brother, laid down his life to save a complete stranger, embodying the core values of the fraternity to the last full measure.

Patrick illustrates a point that GOP campaigns consistently refuse to get, time and again: email is not direct mail, and familiarity is more effective than stirring prose. As Patrick points out, the average online reader takes in only 20% of the content of the average email, so if your content isn’t easily scanned, chances are your efforts are for naught. Especially when your 1,000 word missive hits my inbox at 5:30pm on a Friday.

Considering how easy it is supposed to be to integrate social bookmarking into your site, it took way too long to find this — a simple Javascript driven way to add a del.icio.us bookmark link to a regular old web page. Thanks to blifaloo.com.

The operative code here being:

document.write(‘linked text‘);

Luigi Montanez serves up some commentary at techPresident that takes Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus theory and applies it to the online political world.

Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody explains “Cognitive Surplus”.

Shirky posits, among other things, that Gin got humanity through the Industrial Revolution, and that today “Desperate Housewives” fills the same role.

Cognitive Surplus = Free Time

Of course it’s more involved than that, and the ramifications are very important from an online political perspective when you look at the explosion in citizen involvement in politics ala the Obama campaign.

Basically, Shirky is saying that society is growing into interactive social media, and that this change away from one-way push media is going to become the dominant paradigm. Montanez extrapolates that out into a view of short-sided Beltway insiders talking about Obama’s huge political supporter list only in terms of its ability to produce cash.

The real value, as Montanez cuts to, is the social network’s ability to take action:

Political activism is no longer the domain of a few die-hard (and kind of weird) party activists and political junkies. As the Obama campaign has proven, it’s something within the grasp of all Americans, because with the help of social technologies political activism can now be on our own terms.