opolitics

18 Doughty Street is a new web based internet TV channel. They won’t hide its rightwing agenda. I wonder if it will be Fox News for the UK. Discussing politics is always good for democracy in an age where civil liberties are compromised for the Anti Terror crusade. I am looking forward for the 10th of October to watch the channel. I tend to the left and currently live overseas. Good luck to the 18 Doughty Street team.

David Cameron, Conservative party leader, has launched his own vlog (video weblog) to try to get his message across to young people. Blogging is the latest PR and marketing weapon for political parties, trying to look fresh. David Cameron shows his domestic charm in the kitchen, dining room, the car and in the office. The question is will Web 2.0 help Cameron win the next elections.

Ryan King has announced that he will continue S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System. I have used S5 a few times in the last couple of years, and really enjoyed it. The web never looks good on a presentation because of the size and the detail it presents. PowerPoint on the other hand, isn’t web friendly for the same reasons the other Microsoft office products are not web-friendly using not standardized HTML and bloating converted files. S5 gives me the liberty of enjoying both world’s standardized HTML files as well as hyper-linking to other sources.

I see the future where Blogging software WordPress and S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System will be mashed up to form a tool where presentation will have comments and trackbacks and really create a discussion.

Israel. The war against the Hezbollah in Lebanon and bloodshed are having their toll on the population. The majority of the Israeli general public support the war and numbers haven’t declined since it started, 3 weeks ago.

The other day Gili challenged me and asked me if I could help her with an online petition. I said that I don’t write code, but I could help her and find a solution.

Orit and Gili have been petitioning the government for a ceasefire and needed way to collect signatures in an easy way.

The WordPress Blogging software is very easy to skin. You can create and design your own theme very easily if you have basic knowledge of HTML and CSS (PHP is also usefull).

How to create a petitioning software with Wordpress?

1. I used the default WordPress theme Kubrick and changed the commenting system and internal instruction to a form for adding names, emails and addresses. I shortened the comment field and labeled it as the place for entering the address.
2. I added a Page template that creates a list of all the signatures collected.

Basically this is it. The first version was in Hebrew I started working on English one adding a printer friendly version and thinking of other features.

Shortly, I will post the Wordpress Petition theme \ code on the internet and share with others.

Here is the English test site and the Hebrew working version of the petition, calling the Israeli government for a cease-fire and the opening of negotiations with Lebanon.

Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities.
Broadly conceived, this term could encompass older media such as mailing lists and Usenet, but some would restrict its meaning to more recent software genres such as blogs and wikis. Others suggest that the term social software is best used not to refer to a single type of software, but rather to the use of two or more modes of computer-mediated communication to engage in community formation.[1] In this view, people form online communities by combining one-to-one (e.g., email and instant messaging), one-to-many (Web pages and blogs), and many-to-many (wikis) communication modes.[2] In many online communities, real life meetings become part of the communication repertoire. The more specific term collaborative software applies to cooperative work systems.

Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_software

References

1. Stowe Boyd, “Are You Ready for Social Software?”
2. Christopher Allen, Tracing the Evolution of Social Software
3. Adrian Chan, “Research, Notes, Investigations into Social Software issues”.
4. Clay Shirky, “A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy”.
5. Matt Webb, “On Social Software”.
6. Joseph M. Reagle Jr., Social Protocols: An Introduction

UK’s Hansard Society research examines the potential of political blogging
Key findings from Political Blogs - Craze or Convention? are:

• Blogging has the potential to significantly impact on political engagement and political processes as they provide an opportunity for alternative informal voices to enter into the political debate without a great deal of cost or effort.
• Blogging breaks down the barriers between public and privates spaces and allows elected representatives to put across their individuality and personality.
• The availability of low-cost, low maintenance authoring software means blogs are far easier to construct and update than conventional websites.
• The most appealing blogs are those which provide genuine debate between bloggers and visitors to the blog. Blogs that do not offer this facility give visitors little reason to return.
• At the moment, political blogging is still regarded as the pursuit of internet connoisseurs rather than ordinary members of the public. While our jury found blogs easy to navigate, they found the tone of content unappealing.
• Blogging has the potential to be of enormous benefit to MPs and other elected representatives who use it as a listening post rather than another tool to broadcast their ideas, achievements or party dogma.

See also

• Effective Political Blogging - Doc Searls, Cameron Barrett, Mitch Ratcliffe and Halley Suitt [recorded live by IT Conversations at the O’Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In] Ross Mayfield’s Notes
• Evolution of Political Blogging - Samuel Rose
• Election 2004 - Ed Cone, Session Leader - Bloggercon III - IT Conversations. (blogged by Renee Blodgett and others)

an audio (podcast) update on Open Politics in Israel

Read my open politics implementation.

CNET News.com

Congress catching on to the value of blogs

When someone calling himself “John Kerry” posted a diary on the popular liberal community blog dailyKos last week, its members reacted with both suspicion and amazement.

Congressional bloggers

Eleven members of Congress have jumped into the blogosphere so far. Some have gone the whole nine yards and allow readers to publish responses to their musings. Other aren’t there yet.

See also:

BBC: Bloggers take on politicians