Interface The Future

I think that the Seattle Weekly got it right. Interface is “a Manchurian Candidate for the Computer Age.”  In fact, the whole time I read the book I kept thinking that the plot had kind of been covered in that movie a number of years ago.  This isn’t to say that I don’t adore Stephenson. When [...]

We Just Saw “The First Campaign”

Not going to lie, it was a little weird to read The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House just a few short days after Barack Obama made history.  I wanted to like Garrett Graff’s book, but as with so many books about globalization and technology’s potential I found that [...]

Blended Networking! Eureka!

Eureka!  I just finished reading another IPDI report, Person-to-Person-to-Person (like takes you to the free PDF), and am so glad I finally found the phrase I’ve been looking for: Blended Networking. I could’ve smacked myself on the forehead– all those posts I wrote about how everyone is describing the importance of online communications connecting with [...]

“Netroots Rising” Slowly…

Just finished Feld and Wilcox’s Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics and, I have to say, I think I enjoyed it a lot more than Blog Wars (which I read and blogged about last week).  Unlike last week’s book, I was glad to read the account [...]

A Minor Skirmish with “Blog Wars”

David Perlmutter’s Blog Wars manages to be an excellent introduction to the world of blogging without being overly simplistic (i.e. there was precious little “this is the Internet.  It is amazing“).  At times I think Perlmutter falls into a “bloggers will change the world attitude” (despite his frequent asides and contrary claims)– there is a [...]

Relationship Management, for Politicos…

I just finished another IPDI report, “Constituent Relationship Management: The New Little Black Book of Politics” (available as a free PDF from their website).  Like the Mobilizing Generation 2.0 book I read and blogged about a month ago, I found that the essential take away from the IPDI report is that, newsflash, people still matter.  [...]

The Way I Love My Country

This week I tore through MoveOn.org’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country.  When I first started to read this book I felt like it was all of 40 pages of content stretched into 140.  It was a busy week, I wanted to (no pun intended) move on to some other assignments.  However, after about the [...]

Talk to Me Like a Person not a Vote

I finished Mobilizing Generation 2.0 while at the Planned Parenthood conference I blogged about a few days ago.  In many ways this was the perfect context in which to read this book– although I may be biased (after all I am a huge supporter of Planned Parenthood’s mission),  I think that Planned Parenthood is really [...]

Sticking It to “The Tipping Point”

I’d like to believe that I’m not one of those snobbish academics who is biased against best-sellers.  There are lots of great best-sellers.  For example, I really dug The Da Vinci Code and Into Thin Air among others.  It is entirely likely that I was biased against Malcomlm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things [...]