The Society for Human Resource Management is displeased with a public blog post by Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Stewart Baker lambasting the organization’s legislative push to replace the E-verify system, an online program that allows employers to check the legal immigration status of potential employees. At issue is the July 11th post to the Department of Homeland Security’s public blog in which Assistant Secretary Baker takes a sarcastic tone and argues that SHRM wants to kill E-verify so that corporate employers can safely hire illegal immigrants.

SHRM is unhappy not simply with the tone, but also because this was the first contact they received from the Department of Homeland Security after repeated attempts to discuss the issue. SHRM and the bill’s congressional supporters can decide whether Baker’s post was uncouth or his positions are unacceptable or incorrect. Looking from outside of this debate, there are clear positives to the use of a public forum, like a blog, for these kinds of differences of opinions. SHRM now knows the position of those in power at DHS and the level of committment to that position, as evidenced by the tone of the blog post.

Perhaps, SHRM is also somewhat shocked at the use of a new media platform - and a transparent one at that - as a way for the government to express policy views and make known personal and policy differences. The public nature of this response is likely a positive for the group’s efforts in that they can readily point to the attitude that they are fighting against. They can also likely parlay the publicity into an actual meeting, at which they will already know the positions of those they will be in discussions with. (Baker has already stated that he is willing to meet now.)

Accusations of bad faith and improper tone aside, this is a welcome development for the government’s use of transparent new media. The public greatly benefits from the open flow of information coming from the government in its discussions with outside actors, such as SHRM, and inside actors, such as Congress. It liberates policy disputes from behind the closed doors where they occur and let all know where all actors stand.

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Update: Roll Call is reporting that this was an issue with the Internet company hired by dozens of congressmen to run their Web sites:

"Smith’s site started blocking blogspot domains three months ago after GovTrends re-designed it and blocked readers routed from certain sites that could pose security risks, using a “blacklist” generated by Web security company gotroot.com. The blocking snafu seems to have been put to rest, at least temporarily. GovTrends unblocked blogspot from linking to Congressional clients on Tuesday, according to the company’s vice president, Ab Emam. But Emam says they’ll be closely monitoring traffic and if spam increases or there is harm to the sites, they could start blocking again without warning."

The antithesis of this rule would be to block links from other sites on the Web. That’s what Rep. Adrian Smith is doing. Smith is currently blocking all incoming links to his Web site from the .blogspot domain. This is apparently because an anti-Smith blog, Smith Watch, has been heavily criticizing him and attacking his record in Congress. The blogger at Smith Watch was having trouble linking to Smith’s site and asked the tech folks at Blogger to weigh in; this is part of their response:

The problem isn’t with your link. It’s with THEIR server. It’s rejecting (giving a 404) when the link comes from blogspot. … He’s blocking requests when it comes from bloggers.

Ok, to explain. Whenever you click on a link, the browser sends off a request to the server…yadda yadda…included in that is the referrer of the page you came from. His Official Government Website, that WE pay for (well I’m guessing on that part), is throwing up a 404 when the referrer heading comes from blogspot.com. I tested from one of my test blogs and it doesn’t work either, also uploaded a test page to googlepages (a different domain) and it works. So it really is blogspot they are blocking via the referrer.

… Congressman Adrian Smith is afraid of Bloggers!

I think the key here is that, yes, we do pay for these official government Web sites and Rep. Adrian Smith thinks that he can decide who can link to and discuss his role as an elected representative of the people of the third district of Nebraska. This is a truly terrible example of a congressman miserably failing in his use of the Web and appears to be an attempt to silence an online voice by nullifying their ability to link. As anybody who’s read anything about the Web (David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous springs to mind) will tell you, links are the glue that hold the Web together and allow communication across platforms and channels. Without links there is no Web. I’ll leave it to the reader to determine what this says about Congressman Smith.

Hat tip: Eric Nebraska at Daily Kos.

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I’m excited to be in New York today to attend Jeff Jarvis’ Networked Journalism Conference, and I found it fascinating to read the background statements of many of the participants. When we were asked to pick who we most wanted to meet, I simply refused to pick.

But I am interested in having some talk time with Danny Glover from the National Journal and Air Congress. Included in the site are video clips and podcasts from members of Congress themselves, as well as original content that he mostly produces. The site also posts audio and video about what’s going on in Washington from bloggers, MSM journalists, trade associations, watchdog groups and even the executive branch. Sounds like a natural partner for Sunlight.

Glover has a good nose — for pork and for hypocrisy. And he’s one busy fellow, having covered Washington for the last 15 years with the National Journal and Congressional Quarterly. Danny runs the Journal’s "Beltway Blogroll," where in a recent post, he writes about how MySpace paid for six bloggers to attend the interactive debate with John Edwards the social network hosted with MTV on September 27th. He also edits the Journal’s "Technology Daily." In January 2006, Danny wrote "The Rise of Blogs" which was a great look at the growing influence of blogs on the political discourse of the day.

And he’s one of the many terrific people who will be at the Summit.

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The IBM Business for Government report on blogging is a very useful introduction to Web 2.0 and blogs for wary lawmakers, as Ellen notes below. I’m not sure when they made this report - I know I first read it a month or two ago - but if they were to update their list of members of Congress blogging they would see that congressional blogs are not only more widespread than they report, but are also growing quickly. I’ve been collecting information related to member Web sites and the type of content they post for some time now. Below the fold you’ll find a full-ish list of congressional blogs. It’s a lot longer than IBM and others have reported.

These blogs vary in quality from rarely updated and only press releases to a real online communications hub.

1. Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.)
2. Rep. J. Gresham Barrett (R-S.C.)
3. Rep. Marion Berry (D-Ark.)
4. Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio)
5. Rep. John Boozman (R-Ark.)
6. Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.)
7. Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah)
8. Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.)
9. Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.)
10. Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.)
11. Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Tex.)
12. Rep. Bud Cramer (D-Ala.)
13. Rep. John Culberson (R-Tex.)
14. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.)
15. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.)
16. Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.)
    
17. Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.)
18. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.)
19. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)
20. Rep. Phil Gingery (R-Ga.)
21. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)
22. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.)
23. Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.)
24. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.)
25. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.)
26. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.)
27. Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R-Mich.)
28. Rep. John Linder (R-Ga.)
29. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)
30. Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Penn.)
31. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.)
    
32. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
33. Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.)
34. Rep. John Peterson (R-Penn.)
35. Rep. George Radanovich (R-Calif.)
36. Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.)
37. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Ala.)
38. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.)
39. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.)
40. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio)
41. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Wash.)
42. Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.)
43. Rep. Jerry Weller (R-Ill.)

There are also some blogs from congressional party organizations and caucuses:

1. Congressional Black Caucus (Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick)
2. Democratic Senate Caucus
3. Republican Conference
4. Republican Senate Group
5. Republican Study Group (Rep. Jeb Hensarling)

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Here’s an interesting new report — The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0. Think of it as a kind of "Blogging for Dummies" without the humor. (No disrespect to the author or to the "…for Dummies" series.)

This report could be very helpful to any Member of Congress, mayor, state legislator, bureaucrat, corporate CEO who is looking to get an understanding of blogging and Web 2.0. In a straightforward and non-threatening manner, the report explains the Web; its history, its now, and its future. It also attempts to encourage decision makers to engage this brave new world. In common language, the author explains everything from how to start a blog, to social networking, to why blog in the first place. And he makes the case that Web 2.0 tools can increase civic engagement and strengthen our democracy.

The author includes many examples of government sponsored blogs such as Sen. Inhofe, Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Miller and even the LAPD. He includs a list of corporate CEOs who blog, such as Dallas Mavareck’s owner Mark Cuban and Sun Microsystem’s Jonathan Schwartz. He lists all the Members of Congress who blog as of April of this year:

Rep. John Boozman (R-Ark.)

Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas)

Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.)

Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.)

Rep. Jack Kingman (R-Ga.)

Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.)

Rep. John Linder (R-Ga.)

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.)

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.)

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)

Rep. Mike Pense (R-Ind.)

Rep. George Radanovich (R-Calif.)

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.)

Blogs are the fastest growing part of Web 2.0, the report says, and are becoming more respected. The benefits to government of blogging are pretty obvious. In addition to allowing government officials to communicate directly with the community, bypassing both internal and news based editorial control and encouraging openness, accountability and transparency, the study notes that Blog readers tend to be better educated, more diverse, more engaged in public decision making than the public at large.

We couldn’t have written the recommendations better ourselves.

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This week, the General Services Administration introduced a new section to their Web site USA.gov highlighting blogs run by government agencies. Only a few government agencies are getting into the blogging spirit but you can now find them all in one spot. Thinking about joining the Peace Corps.? Now you read the Peace Corp. blog, an aggregator of Peace Corp. Volunteers' own blogs on their experiences. Want to follow the National Endowment for Arts initiative to make reading a central part of American life? Check out The Big Read Blog and follow NEA Literature Director David Kipen as he travels the country. There are a number of other blogs across the government including the Library of Congress blog, the Pandemic Flu Leadership blog, and the GLOBE Program blog. I can't think of a better way to communicate what these agencies are doing than to talk to the public through the blogging platform. Maybe Congress will decide to change the way they communicate some day too.

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Yesterday the Sunlight Foundation and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society hosted the Sunlight-Berkman Conference on Political Information. Our new intern Andrew MacRae attended the Conference in Boston and wrote up this review of the day:

On January 15^th, 2007, the Sunlight Foundation in cooperation with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society held an all day workgroup entitled “Local Political Information in an Internet Era”. The session brought together bloggers and organizations, in an attempt to share data, goals and thoughts. For addition coverage see what other participants had to say, Ethan Zuckerman, Jake Shapiro, John Palfrey, Dan Gillmor, David Weinberger and more.

If you measure success in terms of question answered or problems solved, this weekend’s conference held at the Berkman center was nothing short of astounding. The impact of bloggers and citizen journalists has not only increased in the last election cycle but with all of the new tools and data sets that are increasingly available it is impossible to imagine their influence waning any time soon. While there will always be room for improvement, the progress in making public information/data transparent has been enormous in such a short period of time. Web 2.0 empowered citizens are increasingly able to stand up and answer the question, “Who are my elected officials?”, “How are they getting elected?” and “How are they governing?”

Another measure of success is in terms of new questions generated. As we went around the room at the end of the day, it was obvious that many questions involving the sharing of data within this community are being answered. Equally difficult however, are the questions: “How do we continue to fund these endeavors?” “How do we bring this information to a more demographically and ideologically diverse audience?” and “How do we provoke these citizens to not only inquire about it, but also to act upon in?

In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood.” The Sunlight-Berkman conference entitled, “Local Political Information in an Internet Era", couldn’t have been on a more appropriate day.

A special thanks to the Berkman Institute for all of their collaborative efforts in making this conference a success.

 

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John Podhoretz draws a distinction, in his New York Post column, between those who get their information from the awkwardly-named “Mainstream Media” (I prefer traditional media) and those who follow (or follow, in addition to newspaper and television) political blogs and Web sites, and hypothesizes that the latter are getting a much different election picture than the former. Those on “Blog Time,” Podhoretz argues, are more attuned to subtle or even significant shifts of voter zeitgeist: Rep. Harold Ford had a bad week; Republicans have put the worst of the ongoing Foley mess behind them; this district’s latest poll looks good for the incumbent, and so on so forth. Those on “Mainstream Media Time,” by contrast, are getting fed a steady diet of one way stories suggesting that Republicans are in trouble, according to Podhoretz.

For what it’s worth, my impression of the tenor of stories in papers and television versus what blogs are saying squares pretty well with Podhoretz, but I think the difference is better explained by the audience each is trying to reach–people who follow politics more closely will be far more interested in the ups and downs week-to-week than people who (apologies for putting it this way) have better things to do with their time. So while I might suddenly find it fascinating that new polls show challenger Eric Dickerson has pulled ahead of Rep. Julia Carson (and further, that that poll may well be inaccurate due to limitations in polling techniques for House races), I wouldn’t expect, say, someone who’s not obsessed with politics or who doesn’t live in Indiana’s seventh district to find this all that fascinating.

One thing I’d fault traditional media for is the extent to which, once again, its coverage is poll driven rather than substantive, and it seems like a lot of the blogs are following suit. Polls are interesting as far as they go, but the only poll that matters, of course, is the one on election day; to win that one, the campaigns and parties are raising and spending obscene amounts of campaign cash. I’m far more interested in who’s giving that money than anything in the latest poll results.

I’m also getting more and more interested in how campaigns are spending that money (and what they’re spending it on). Is there a channel of communication we’re missing, a microtargeting effort that lets a campaign (or rather, its volunteers) speak directly to voters, making pre-determined pitches on the basis of voter preferences to get people to the polls on Nov. 7? To me, that’s a much more interesting question than whether people who closely follow political blogs are much more up to speed on nuances in political races than those who don’t.

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On the heels of today’s Jeff Birnbaum article, “Support for Electronic Filing of Senate Candidates’ Campaign-Finance Records Gains Momentum,” the blogosphere, left and right, has united to push Senators to file their campaign-finance records electronically. Bloggers from Daily Kos, Red State, HuffPo, Captain’s Quarters, Think Progress, and Wonkette are pushing for the passage of S. 1508, which would mandate electronic filing. S. 1508 is one of many transparency measures that have been languishing in Senate or House committees waiting for the kind of public pressure that bloggers brought to Coburn-Obama and will now hopefully bring to electronic filing. The following is a list of transparency bills that could use a helping hand:

H.R. 4967 (Sunlight Act of 2006) Sponsored by Steve King  
Where it is: House Administration Committee and the House Rules Committee
In the bill:
1) Requires all FEC reports be filed electronically and placed on the internet in a searchable database.
2) Requires all private travel reports be put on the internet in a searchable database.
3) Requires all personal financial disclosure reports to list the actual dollar amount rather than using a range. Also, require all personal financial disclosure forms be put on the internet in a searchable database.
4) Requires all bills and conference reports be placed on the internet at least 48 hours before a vote, all amendments made in order by a rule within one hour after the rule is filed, and all amendments made under open rule immediately as it is being offered.
5) Requires the House to project onto a wall the topic of debate on the floor for the viewing of members and the gallery.

H.Res. 797 Sponsored by Melissa Bean
Where it is: Referred to House Administration Committee
In the bill:
1) Instructs the Clerk of the House to create a record organized by member name of all recorded votes including the roll, date, issue, question, result, and title or description of the vote, and any cost estimate of the Congressional Budget Office related to the vote.
2) Requires all members to have a link to their voting record in this database on their official webpage.

H. Res. 728 Sponsored by Jeff Flake
Where it is: Referred to the House Rules Committee
In the bill:
1) Establishes new rules for pre-approval of privately funded congressional travel.
2) Requires the Clerk of the House to post all private travel reports and advance authorizations on the internet, not later than 10 days after receipt, in a searchable database.

S. 2179 CLEAN UP Act Sponsored by Barack Obama
Where it is: Senate Rules Committee and Senate Administration Committee
In the bill:
1) Requires all conference committees to hold regular, public/televised meetings; require conference committees to give conferees adequate notice of the time and place of such meetings; require that all conferees be afforded the opportunity to participate in full and complete debates on the matters before the committee.
2) Requires actual voting in conference committees and require the majority to allow the minority an opportunity to submit dissenting or minority views.
3) Requires all legislation (bill, resolution, amendment, and conference report) to be placed on the internet for at least 72 hours prior to its consideration.
4) Requires that no appropriation bill will be considered unless a list of all earmarks in the bill and accompanying reports are made available to all Members and placed on the internet for at 72 hours prior to its consideration.

H. Res. 688 Sponsored by Brian Baird
Where it is: Referred to House Rules Committee
In the bill:
1) Requiring all bills, amendments, and conference reports to available to members and the public, by putting it online, for at least 72 hours before such legislation is considered.

H. Res. 81 Sponsored by Mark Green
Where it is: Referred to House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution
In the bill:
1) Requires the Clerk of the House to create an online database of lobbying reports modeled on the database on the Senate homepage.

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Bill posted earlier about the exciting new journalism project that Jay Rosen, associate prof at the journalism school of my alma mater NYU, is undertaking. There are many perspectives out there in the blogs and in the traditional media about Rosen’s efforts to bridge the gap between citizen journalism and professional journalism and about the role of blogs versus the traditional newspaper. Daniel Schorr recently told a USA Today reporter that he finds bloggers “scary” because “there is no publisher, no editor, no anything. It’s just you and a little machine and you can make history.” To some that may be scary, for others it’s the future.

ZDNet’s Donna Bogatin blogs about Rosen’s project, asking Rosen’s funder, Craig Newmark about the significance of NewAssignment and “the convergence of professional journalism and citizen journalism and ‘equal partnership’”:

Mostly, this is my way of participating in the evolution of sustainable journalism. I figure there’ll be a number of experiments, a few will work, but we don’t know which ones.
…
The convergence, which is already happening, just provides the opportunity for the more effective and trustworthy reporting to be visible to more people. I think we’ll see such a profound merging of both forms of journalism that they’re really won’t be "sides."

Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine writes:

This is an answer — not the answer — to the frequently asked question in the shrinking news business these days: How will we support journalism and investigation? NewAssignment will not replace the work of professional news organizations. It will complement them, attacking the stories that are not being covered.

At Joho the Blog D. Weinberger approaches NewAssignment in a similar manner as Jarvis. It is not “the answer” to the “money question” of how network journalism will operate. Instead NewAssignment “responds to the question, "How can journalists and citizens work together, in public?" NewAssignment may validate that hybrid, networked journalism gets the job done. But as a charity, it is not — and Jay is clear about this elsewhere in his post — the business model for the future of journalism.”

Malcolm Gladwell broaches the fears of Daniel Schorr, and takes on Chris Anderson (whose book The Long Tail got the Slate treatment today), by arguing that blogs will not overtake the traditional media, newspapers in particular.

Any form that consists, chiefly, of commentary and criticism is derivative. We need derivative media sources to help us make sense of what we learn from primary sources. But you can’t have one without the other, and although it maybe possible for some bloggers to think of their thoughts as rising, fully formed, from the blogosphere, it just ain’t so. Even people who do not think of themselves as being influenced by the agenda of traditional media actually are: they are simply influenced by someone who is influenced by someone who is influenced by old media—or something like that.

Today also brought a story produced by the old media about the new media supplanting another old media. The Washington Post ran an article on YouTube’s broadcasting of the Israel-Hezbollah War being fought in Lebanon. The article’s premise is essentially: Is YouTube the new CNN? (The major difference being that you actually see what the bomb did rather than watching some infrared videogame.) “In a matter of weeks, YouTube has become a video Dumpster for a global audience to share first-hand reports, military strategies, propaganda videos and personal commentary about a violent conflict as it unfolds.”

The 2006 Knight-Badden Awards, mentioned previously by Bill, produced a website that allows citizens to cover events throughout the world much like YouTube can through video. The site GlobalVoicesOnline provides an extensive number of links to blogs throughout the world. In one place you can go and read a food blog from Turkey and then switch over to a blog from Beirut about the current conflict. There is more news here than any news organization (save for maybe the BBC) could produce or would be able to fit into their programming or paper.

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