The news out of the 2008 biennial news consumption survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press is not the fact that the drop off of consumers of traditional news sources (especially print newspapers) continues to decline and the percentage of those accessing news online is soaring. These trends have existed for the past five or six surveys Pew has conducted over the past ten or 12 years. This year’s incarnation found a sizable minority of us are at “the intersection of these two long-standing trends,” Pew reports, where “today it is not a choice between traditional sources and the Internet for the core elements of today’s news audiences.” In other words, a new grouping of news consumers has developed whose news gathering habits integrate traditional media sources with the Internet.

Through the survey’s data, Pew has identified four segments in nation’s news audience: The above-mentioned group, who Pew terms “Integrators,” who use both traditional news sources along with the Internet. They make up 23 percent of those surveyed. The younger set, which Pew terms “Net-Newsers,” relies primarily on the Web and are the vanguards leading the social networking revolution. They are much less likely to watch television or read print newspapers. This tech-oriented group makes up 13 percent of those surveyed. The older crowd, dubbed the “Traditionalists” by Pew, is the largest grouping at 46 percent. This group cites television as their primary news source. The fourth group, the “Disengaged,” has little interest in news, according to Pew, and make up 14 percent of the public.

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C-SPAN announced today that it will host a large amount of convention coverage on its web site and on other platforms, including credentialed blogger posts, special Twitter hash tags, and embeddable video from both the Democratic and Republican convention. C-SPAN’s efforts will include:

— Real-time tracking of credentialed state and national political bloggers, aggregated on the websites, to enable users to follow the latest online convention news and analysis;

— Video clips from the network’s convention coverage, embeddable, to facilitate use by political bloggers and other convention watchers;

— Linkable access to the complete C-SPAN Video Library, allowing interested users to fully search all C-SPAN video content;

— Live coverage of C-SPAN television and radio networks;

— Blogger Tips and Online Convention Video Finder tools;

— Real-time feeds from Twitter users using the hash-tags #RNC08 and #DNC08

This is a huge turnaround from two years ago, when C-SPAN ordered the removal of all of their clips from YouTube, claiming copyright infringement. The copyright purge began after viewers posted the Washington Correspondents Dinner notorious routine by comedian Stephen Colbert. The clips were viewed nearly a million times before C-SPAN claimed copyright. Soon after they ordered all videos removed from other content providers, including Metavid.

It wasn’t until Nancy Pelosi became Speaker and started posting YouTube videos of congressional hearings (which use C-SPAN cameras) to her blog that the controversy truly erupted. Pelosi and group of technology, right wing, and left blog activists all pressured C-SPAN to liberalize their policy. On March 7, 2007, they acquiesced, allowing for all non-commercial sharing, posting, and copying of C-SPAN videos past, present and future.

The convention announcement marks a new moment for C-SPAN as a modern Internet information provider. Once a small cable channel with a dream; now with embeddable web video, Twitter hashtags, and aggregated blog posts.

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Yesterday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released another of their very informative reports, this one titled Internet and the 2008 Election.  The report found a dramatic increase in the number of Americans who used the Internet, email or cell phone text messaging to follow and engage the 2008 presidential campaign.

So far in this year’s campaign, 46 percent of Americans have used information technology to get more information or get involved in something political, up from 33 percent at this point in the 2004 race.  Pew also found that 35 percent of Americans had watched political videos online during this campaign, which marks a tripling of the number who did so in the 2004 cycle. Of those Internet users under the age of 30, one out of two are using social networking sites to get or share information on the campaign. And in another sign that citizens are getting increasingly comfortable online, 6 percent of Americans made campaign contributions online, a 300 percent increase of the number who did so four years ago.

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Yesterday, the Congressional Management Foundation released the report, Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement, in which they reported on a survey of over 10,000 citizens about their interactions and communications with member of congress.

Of the report’s findings, what caught my interest is CMF’s statement that the Internet is now the primary source citizens use to follow and communicate with Congress. Their research found that 92 percent of Internet users who had contacted Congress had visited a member of Congress’ Web site.  And a plurality (43 percent) of citizens contacting Congress did so using online methods, which is twice the percentage that used snail mail or telephones. Obviously, this was bound to happen…not surprisingly it seems like we reached this milestone pretty fast.

CMF also found that almost half of adult Americans (44 percent) contacted Congress in the last five years to support, oppose or learn more about issues of interest to them. This is a much higher contact rate than a report in 2004 which found that 18 percent of Americans had contacted Congress.

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It sounds silly, but it is, in fact, true. In this month of May, fifteen years ago, Ted Kennedy became the first Senator to communicate with constituents over the Internet. Back in 1993, this was no small feat. At the time there were no congressional offices connected to the Internet. (The House launched a pilot program on June 2, 1993, hooking up seven members to an Internet network.) One dedicated staffer and the technology hubs of MIT and other top-level educational institutions made Kennedy into the first digital Senator. Here’s the story (which you can read about in more detail Chris Casey’s book, The Hill on the Net):

One day while working as a systems administrator in the office of Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, Chris Casey dialed online to read the bulletin boards at Massachusetts universities. While finding answers to computer questions and downloading software to help in the office, Casey found himself reading threads about a variety of topics, including politics. The discovery of this online constituency led Casey to suggest that Kennedy reach out by creating his own online community and posting his press releases for public comment. Casey worked with Jonathan Gourd of North Shore Mac to set Kennedy up with a “conference” to connect with online constituents. Casey then went to sell the Senator’s office on the idea, eventually winning approval from Senator Kennedy himself, who, understanding the importance of constituent relations, told Casey, “If you can find a way for me to reach constituents using computer networks, do it.”

While Kennedy’s office initially set ground rules to not respond to written questions and comments, that barrier quickly fell aside as Casey cautiously entered the fray to give information on bills the Senator sponsored or votes the Senator took. Kennedy’s office also used the bulletin board to post the text of legislation for review, most notably the release of health care legislation prepared by Kennedy’s committee on the eve of President Bill Clinton’s big health care speech to Congress. Casey later worked with MIT to get the Kennedy bulletin board groups posted into usenet groups (ne.politics and talk.politics.misc). A year later to the month, Kennedy launched the first official Web site for a Senate office.

So, as many in the news and on the blogs pay their dues to Senator Kennedy for all of the bills that he had a hand in crafting, remember that every time you send an e-mail to your Senator, or talk to your congressman online, Ted Kennedy did it first.

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The following video is a TED talk by Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase, whose blog I read regularly. He discusses mobile phone research and design in a broader context of international culture. While he doesn’t explicitly discuss politics, the ideas he introduces about the rapid evolution in the ways in which we experience technology have big implications for the ways in which we’ll experience information and government.

I tend to focus on what government needs to do in order for data to be accessible or compelling for citizens and lawmakers, trying to answer the question, "what does government need to do to allow legislative data to flourish, and how will that affect government?" Chipchase focuses on the manner in which people interface with technology, answering the question, "what does technology need to do to allow people to flourish, and how will that affect how we experience the world?"

He reminds us that there will soon be 3 million people using cell phones worldwide, and that this interconnectedness will have strong implications for how we go the business of being human, especially in third world countries. He points out that mobile phones are enabling people in third world countries to engage in banking through "air-time transactions". I’m also reminded that while we focus on freeing political data to a broader internet-using public, others are working to take that technology and integrate it into the rest of our lives, to the part that isn’t connected to computer monitors.

As cell phones in third world countries create unintended consequences like giving everyone addresses (Chipchase shows his pictures of cell phone numbers written over doorways on otherwise unindexed addresses, and remarks that our geographical system is already outdated) or enabling the illiterate to manage their contact information, democracy and government are bound to continue to be affected as well.

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The man who really introduced me to the power of Internet (long story, see his explanation here) — Gavin Clabaugh — reminds us what shining a light into hidden corners of Washington, and mixing the data with a bit of technology and a handful of the Internet (with a little Miller and co-conspirator pixy dust thrown in) can do. He says that the combination may result in nothing short of the power to save democracy from itself. I promise you, Gavin was not sitting at the table when we hatched the idea for Sunlight (though his wife was my communications director when I headed the Center for Responsive Politics, so maybe there’s something in the bloodline).

It was a long-time reporter of Washington’s hidden secrets who said to us "Many members of Congress do what they do, because they can get away with it." We responded, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." And sunlight in the age of the Internet means something far more powerful than it’s ever meant before.

The mere act of opening the kimono changes behavior and changes the balance of power. …So too, the inherent "connectedness" of the Internet is also changing the relationship of money to power as well. Big money is still there (by the bucket-full in this particular election season), but it is being somewhat counterbalanced by so-called Internet campaigns, campaigns that are using the ‘net’s ability to aggregate lots of small things, in this case small contributions.

Nevertheless, today’s innovative (dare I say social) uses of technology have had a liberating effect. Instead of robbing us of rights, they have increased our participation, restoring power to the formerly powerless. It has strengthened our democracy, not undermined it. To paraphrase Al Gore in his (absolutely terrific) book, The Assault on Reason, "a connected citizenry" is our greatest hope. The new internet is all about connections and the open secret effect…

Gavin give us several other examples of how transparency, in the networked age, is changing the power dynamics - in the relationship between funder and grant seeker, passenger to airline (please say it’s so!), and the news media.

Read his whole post.

Transparency can make a difference.

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Our presidential nomination process (as well as our election process) creates a situation where states with early primaries become more important than the rest. This can leave people that don’t live in these ‘early’ states to feel a little disenfranchised.

That was before the Internet! Today’s Washington Post has an article about a town called Columbus, KY, a small town of about 229 people. Using the site Eventful.com’s demand feature, which allows groups of people to demand someone to come to their town, 1,870 people asked Presidential candidate John Edwards visit Columbus, KY and he did! This is a pretty incredible event. It is rare for a top tier presidential candidate to visit a small town that is not in any of the early primary states.

This is the perfect example of the power of the Internet. When people have a medium to organize they can accumulate enough numbers that give them an influential voice. Eventful.com is a great organizing tool. It is being used extensively by presidential candidates, artists, musicians, and other speakers. This tool can be expanded to ask members of Congress as well. Right now, there doesn’t seem to be much demand for members of Congress. In the past, the best way to ask a member a question was to write a letter, email, call them on the phone, and go to an event they schedule. With Eventful, it is now possible to demand your member of Congress to come to you and that is pretty powerful.

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A CBC Report on “Internet” from 1993, the year I first went online:

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What happens when the entire Internet crashes? The Onion News Network reports:

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