Andrew Chadwick

Sunlight Foundation's Party Time!

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:48:21 +0100

Satirical but serious. The Sunlight Foundation is excellent for exposing mundane aspects of political elites’ behaviour.

New BBC iPhone app launched

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:04:03 +0100

About time too, though there are arcane regulatory hurdles to much of what the BBC does in this area.

This is one of the few news apps to have a well thought-through landscape mode.

Who Sent the "Yes We Can" Video Viral?

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 14:30:53 +0100

Who Sent the "Yes We Can" Video Viral?

ChronoSync

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:44:09 +0100

ChronoSync “is the complete data management utility that allows you to efficiently synchronize or backup files and folders from one disk location to another. There are hundreds of settings available within each Synchronizer document to customize your synchronizations. You can synchronize or backup files to almost any device. ChronoSync will even automatically mount other computers. Create as many documents as you need to handle all the synchronization and backup scenarios you have.”

I find it very useful for keeping multiple computers in sync, where the amount of data prohibits use of online services such as Dropbox.

(Part of the mini-series: a miscellany of tools and software for the Mac.)

JITP's special issue on YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States is out

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:02:32 +0100

Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Volume 7 Issue 2 & 3 2010

Kevin Wallsten’s article is free to non-subscribers. Here’s the lineup:

GUEST EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States — Michael Xenos

RESEARCH PAPERS

Congressional Candidates’ Use of YouTube in 2008: Its Frequency and Rationale — Girish J. “Jeff” Gulati and Christine B. Williams

The Sidetracked 2008 YouTube Senate Campaign — Robert J. Klotz

YouTube Politics: YouChoose and Leadership Rhetoric During the 2008 Election — Scott H. Church

Macaca Moments Reconsidered: Electoral Panopticon or Netroots Mobilization? — David Karpf

“Yes We Can”: How Online Viewership, Blog Discussion, Campaign Statements, and Mainstream Media Coverage Produced a Viral Video Phenomenon — Kevin Wallsten

Online Video “Friends” Social Networking: Overlapping Online Public Spheres in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election — Scott P. Robertson, Ravi K. Vatrapu, and Richard Medina

A New Opportunity for Democratic Engagement: The CNN-YouTube Presidential Candidate Debates — LaChrystal Ricke

REVIEW ESSAY

The Obamachine: Technopolitics 2.0 — Cheris A. Carpenter

WORKBENCH NOTE

Supporting Research Data Collection from YouTube with TubeKit — Chirag Shah

KEYNOTE LECTURE

Internet Research: The Question of Method: A Keynote Address from the YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States Conference — Richard Rogers

Caffeine

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 09:40:11 +0100

Caffeine. If you have a laptop and take it to meetings or use it to give conference presentations, this is an invaluable tool. You can keep your default screen saver and sleep settings for conserving battery while mobile, but override them when you don’t want to be interrupted.

“Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ⌘-click) the icon to show the menu.”

(Part of the mini-series: a miscellany of tools and software for the Mac.)

Right Zoom

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:36:54 +0100

Right Zoom changes the default behaviour of the green “zoom” button on the Mac so that it always maximizes the current window. It runs in the background and you can set a modifier key to activate it only when you want to.

An invaluable tool for new Windows to Mac switchers.

Part of the mini-series: a miscellany of tools and software for the Mac.

Name Mangler

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:39:34 +0100

Name Mangler: Batch renaming of files and folders with just about every logical possibility covered.

Part of the mini-series: a miscellany of tools and software for the Mac.

TrashMe

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:53:49 +0100

Part two of a mini-series of posts: a miscellany of tools and software for the Mac.

TrashMe: a new, free, intuitive application for simply and easily uninstalling applications, widgets, and preference panes.

GoMBox

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:54:16 +0100

Part one of a mini-series of posts: a weird miscellany of tools and software for the Mac.

The new Safari 5 added support for native extensions yesterday. Apple promise a directory later in the summer, but a few have already emerged.

I’m not too keen on extensions per se. My experience with Firefox was constantly ruined by crashing and out of control CPU and memory usage. Can Apple improve on this? The odds are good, though don’t expect a huge ecosystem of extensions to emerge as they did with Firefox. Maybe that’s a good thing.

GoMBox: “With this extension installed, clicking on Google Image Search results brings up a lightbox viewer rather than taking you to the page (and away from your search).”

Works well.

No to 55

Fri, 14 May 2010 19:28:20 +0100

[Not the usual sort of content for this blog, but British politics is moving through extraordinary times at the moment. This is a response to Philip Cowley’s blog post from earlier today.]

Phil’s post raises many interesting questions and there are all sorts of potential issues that will only be worked out when we see the detail.

I’m in favour of fixed term parliaments (of four years), but as I posted on Twitter yesterday, the biggest political problem with the proposal, and the reason why there is so much disquiet, is its jettisoning of the established convention that there is a link between a 51% vote of no confidence and the dissolution of Parliament.

Of course, as with all things in the British constitution, conventions are there to be broken, as they were in 1924 when Labour placed a no confidence amendment to the King’s Speech, leading Baldwin to stand down and MacDonald to take over with a minority government without the holding of a general election. That was slightly different from the normal no confidence scenario, though, because it was essentially about resolving the outcome of the December 1923 general election, held a few weeks earlier. But the overall point is that many, many generations of British politicians have had it in their bloodstream that a lost vote of confidence = dissolution = an election.

Though it’s open to abuse by the executive, there’s a certain democratic purity to the opposition being able to trigger an election on a simple majority basis in a no confidence vote, even in a fixed-term parliament system. These are all old arguments, I know, but they bear being restated.

Deciding who benefits most, the Conservatives or the Lib Dems, from this constitutional “lock-in” much depends on who you read. But it seems certain that there’s one group that will not benefit from the new rule at least in the medium term: the opposition. In this current context, the 55% proposal therefore has a whiff of naked self-interest about it.

Finally, as Phil says, this will be introduced by statute. In the absence of a written constitution with proper mechanisms for legitimising important constitutional changes like this, it sets the precedent that future hung parliaments will be able to legislate different thresholds depending on the specific balance of power between coalition partners at the time.

Better to establish constitutional rules as openly and as legitimately as possible, then let parties interact in the new environment, as has occurred in Scotland and Wales, where there were huge new constitutional settlements ratified by referendums. The 55% proposal gets it the wrong way round: it takes the current parties’ balance of power and establishes a new constitutional rule based upon this.

There’s an interesting post comparing the 55% proposal with the Scottish context here.

News Publishers Realizing: Paywalls Won’t Work

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 14:45:54 +0100

News Publishers Realizing: Paywalls Won’t Work:

“Readers will not pay to consume general news on the web” say the Daily Mail. Murdoch press looking increasingly isolated.

Participatory Politics and Social Media Workshop, Urbino, Italy

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:40:12 +0100

Participatory Politics and Social Media Workshop, Urbino, Italy:

Featuring my recently-graduated PhD student Yenn Lee.

Media, Electoral Insurgency, and Nick Clegg

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:00:00 +0100

Many overview studies of British politics—including all of the major textbooks—are weak on integrating the role of media in shaping political outcomes. But following Nick Clegg’s and the Liberal Democrats’ extraordinary surge in the opinion polls over the last few days, on the back of a winning performance in the first live television leaders’ debate on April 15, is this neglect justified?

Time will tell if the “yellow wave” endures, but it is unlikely that support will deflate all the way down to pre-campaign levels this side of polling day.

In America, the internet has helped “insurgent” candidates with little initial support, funding, and campaign infrastructure. Howard Dean, the anti-war candidate who came from nowhere to having a shot at the Democratic party nomination in 2004, led the first major American campaign to harness the power of online networks.

Then there is Barack Obama. It seems strange today, but in the early phases of the 2008 contest, Obama was regarded by the mainstream electorate as a relatively obscure junior Senator. And in Hillary Clinton, he faced a formidable opponent with instant brand recognition and the initial support of the Democratic party elite.

In this British election, things are different. As Charlie Beckett argues, it is television, not the internet, that has played the predominant role in the Liberal Democrats’ insurgency by raising public awareness of Clegg’s approach as leader and of the Lib Dems as a party.

And yet, the internet is playing a significant role. The Times reports that in the 24 hours following the debate, the Lib Dems received £120,000 in small donations. By American standards, this is a paltry, almost laughable, sum, but by Britain’s standards, for reasons explored elsewhere, it is dramatic. Precisely how much of this money was raised online is impossible to discern at this point. The fact, however, that the Lib Dems can name a figure with confidence so soon after the debate ended implies that the majority of it was online.

As Mark Pack has pointed out, the Lib Dems are now the only UK party to have a Facebook group—albeit an unofficial one—that has achieved a higher number of members than the subs-paying membership of the party itself. The group is called “We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the Lib Dems into office!” and as of 10.30am today (April 19) it had 95,000 members, putting it way ahead of all of the other party political Facebook groups and fan pages, official or otherwise. The group takes its name from the successful online charity campaign to prevent the winners of 2009’s X-Factor talent show from reaching the number one slot in the music charts.

The television debate acted as the catalyst, but the “we can get the Lib Dems into office” Facebook group keeps on growing. Mutual dependency between television and new media is what increasingly drives mediated electoral politics in the UK.

The yellow surge bears some of the hallmarks of recent American electoral insurgencies. Polling shows that the party is picking up significant new support from voters under 35. Clegg is presenting himself as a “fresh” alternative to the “old parties.” He is inviting the electorate to “think differently.” He presents an image of youth and vitality. During the television debate, this paid off, sparking hugely positive media commentary for the entirety of the crucial weekend news cycle.

For voters looking to punish MPs in the aftermath of the expenses scandal, the Lib Dems have an obvious advantage because they simply have fewer MPs and are arguably less likely to have been tainted than Labour and the Conservatives. The “we can get the Lib Dems into office” Facebook group could be evidence of this “outsider” appeal. Weakly aligned voters, especially the young to middle-aged, educated, middle-class citizens that dominate online politics, may be looking for something resembling a movement for reform. A hung parliament, leading to electoral reform as the price the Lib Dems will try to exact as a condition of supporting a minority administration, could be the key.

The internet is an insurgent’s medium. We may be about to see it become a more prominent, if uncontrollable, force in the election campaign. The ways in which it interacts with broadcast media and the press is what we now need to analyse. This is a prominent theme in the new book I am currently writing in the small spaces between periods spent following what is turning out to be a truly fascinating election campaign…

RT @TomChatfield: Living an augmented election http://bit.ly/98ca8g #leadersdebate (via...

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:57:21 +0100

RT @TomChatfield: Living an augmented election http://bit.ly/98ca8g #leadersdebate (via @jamescrabtree) <- Excellent piece

RT @philipjcowley: BFI have just launched an online collection of PEBs, with incisive accompanying...

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 18:12:55 +0100

RT @philipjcowley: BFI have just launched an online collection of PEBs, with incisive accompanying text — http://tiny.cc/1uvvz

In case you missed it yesterday, @simoncollister’s NCPU blog guest post on the Digital Economy...

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 18:12:55 +0100

In case you missed it yesterday, @simoncollister’s NCPU blog guest post on the Digital Economy Act #DEBill http://bit.ly/c7ekbC

Facebook page down, ITV website half-down, but Twitter handling the strain #leadersdebate now top of...

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:36:54 +0100

Facebook page down, ITV website half-down, but Twitter handling the strain #leadersdebate now top of Twitter global trend list

Debate not dull. What it reveals is the real poverty of debate we get from prime minister’s...

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:36:54 +0100

Debate not dull. What it reveals is the real poverty of debate we get from prime minister’s questions in the Commons #leadersdebate

RT @BBCLauraK: http://ow.ly/1yVPa - take a look backstage at the debate in Manchester

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:36:54 +0100

RT @BBCLauraK: http://ow.ly/1yVPa - take a look backstage at the debate in Manchester