Back in September I wanted to know how to find out “where the money comes from to fund US politicians”:https://blog.org/archives/001231.html and was surprised at how hard it seemed to be to get at the info. Fortunately (if a little late) the great guys at “SearchEngineWatch”:http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/041028-604a just provided an excellent overview of a number of search facilities. Interestingly, “Google employees seem to lean overwhelmingly towards supporting Kerry”:http://insidegoogle.blogspot.com/2004/10/google-says-to-vote-google-employees.html (I knew they hired smart people…). Oddly though my own political contribution doesn’t seem to appear.

P.S. “Open Secrets”:http://www.opensecrets.org/ (‘your guide to the money in US elections’) which seemed not to respond when I looked in September is now back online.

P.P.S. I just came across a post over at the Berkman Centre about Cameron Marlow who has found a number of other “political hacks”:http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/home?wid=10&func=viewSubmission&sid=605 (in the sense of interesting uses of technology in the service of politics not to be confused with politicians’ spin doctors!) including a “text analysis of the presidential debates”:http://overstated.net/04/10/01-presidential-debate-analysis.

The most popular weblog, “boingboing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/10/26/boingboing_endorses_.html and (more tellingly) the second most popular conservative weblogger, “Andrew Sullivan”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=qFFINfAm4eR7PMnY1tkQ2m%3D%3D have endorsed Kerry (though “Instapundit”:http://instapundit.com/archives/018671.php – the most popular right wing blog – does not look likely to do so). Keep an eye on “the official Kerry endorsements page”:http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/press_endorsements.html to see who in the US mass media endorses Kerry and see “here”:https://blog.org/archives/001247.html for more on what the rest of the world thinks of the election.

Update: Even the Economist has “endorsed Kerry”:http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?Story_ID=3329802 (albeit reluctantly).

After three necessarily tumultuous and transformative years, this is a time for consolidation, for discipline and for repairing America’s moral and practical authority. Furthermore, as Mr Bush has often said, there is a need in life for accountability. He has refused to impose it himself, and so voters should, in our view, impose it on him.

On a lighter note here is a mildly entertaining, well-executed Chomsky-ite propaganda cartoon video clip that just came to my attention – Pirates & Emperors. And I just learned if you haven’t yet seen Fahrenheit 9/11 it is being made available unofficially in several formats to download “by this guy”:http://marc.perkel.com/archives/000468.html among others (apparently Michael Moore would “like people to pirate the film”:http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/56254.html though of course since he almost certainly doesn’t own the rights this doesn’t make it legal). There’s a BitTorrent of it “here”:http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2848/Fahrenheit.911-avi.torrent (this is the most efficient way of downloading it though it needs “special software”:http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/).

Don’t forget if you are overseas there is (probably) still time to cast your overseas ballot (see “here”:http://www.aokerry.com/aok/2004/10/4_important_ann.html for more information about how from Americans Overseas for Kerry though of course the same instructions work whichever way you want to vote).

I always assumed that the large amount of news I receive about battles with the US Congress about various communications policy issues (copyright, privacy, digital divide issues) was simply due to my own interest in these subjects influencing my choice of online media sources. But it seems according to a report by Syracuse University’s “Convergence Center”:http://www.digital-convergence.org/,

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, communications and information policy (CIP) replaced the environment as the policy domain of greatest congressional activity, as measured by number of hearings. From 1997 to 2001, the annual number of congressional hearings devoted to CIP surged to approximately 100 per year.

We Are What We Do is a book with accompanying website that offers 50 suggestions for small things you could do to help others and/or the planet in your daily life.

Something a little odder but in the same vein is “Join Me”:http://www.join-me.co.uk/ – an international movement started by a British comedian, Danny Wallace, who simply asks its members to do RAoKs (random acts of kindness) on Fridays (hence Good Fridays). You can buy his book and listen to a radio interview made with Danny in Wisconsin (of all places!) “here”:http://wpr.org/book/040328a.html. What I find truly heartening is that thanks to something Danny started as a joke over 100,000 good deeds have been inspired. I must get around to posting him a photo and signing up…

For those who are interested – the mystery person in charge of the “Atrios”:http://www.atrios.blogspot.com/ weblog (a leading left wing political weblog in the US) has been revealed as Duncan Black who works at “Media Matters”:http://mediamatters.org/, the new David Brock media watchdog group.

See here for the ‘outing’ and here for more discussion about this in the blogosphere.

Turns out I’m probably not many degrees of separation from him as according to his profile, “he has held teaching and research positions at the London School of Economics”.

It seems odd that people on the right like “Instapundit”:http://instapundit.com/archives/016837.php are trying to make something about the fact he gets paid to do the same work that he does on his blog as his day job. It’s not as if Atrios claims to be non-partisan…

Update I learned about this at AoIR and assumed it was fresh news as it was news to me, but it seems the news has been around since late July. Shows how easy it is to miss even ‘big news’ in the blogosphere, even though your RSS reader has “126 feeds”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/derb/ if those feeds are not covering that topic. Shades of “Cass Sunstein”:http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR26.3/sunstein.html…

The world’s second largest ISP, Savvis (who?) has at length agreed to kick 148 of the worst spammers off its network. It was initially reluctant to do so (one source claimed it earned $2m a month from hosting them) but a whistleblower went to the “Spamhaus”:http://www.spamhaus.org/ anti-spam organization who threatened to block access to all email from Savvis for everyone using their spam blocking software. Frankly I find this kind of quasi-blackmail morally dubious at best, but it does seem to have worked.

The BBC report ends, ‘as they are thrown off one service provider, there is always another one ready to take them on for the lucrative business they bring,’ but I am more sanguine. If spammers could be thrown off all the large, reputable ISPs and driven onto fringe players, they would be easier to find and their cost base would rise.

P.S. Interestingly (to me, anyway) Savvis inherited many of these offenders from its purchase of Cable and Wireless, a UK company I used to work for (on the digital TV not the ISP side).

It always seemed a shame to me that the commercial nature of documentaries like “Fahrenheit 9/11”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361596/ and “Outfoxed”:http://www.outfoxed.org/ meant that they would not also be available free – at least not officially – but Robert Greenwald who made Outfoxed found a clever way around this.

Rather than releasing his whole film he has simply released the raw interview material from it, allowing independent filmmakers or the curious to make their own use of it. An excellent use of “Lessig”:http://www.lessig.org/’s “Creative Commons”:http://creativecommons.org/ license – I hope more journalists and their organizations start to adopt this practice.

Robert Greenwald’s comments and the interviews in a variety of formats are available on “archive.org”:http://www.archive.org/movies/movies-details-db.php?collection=election_2004&collectionid=outfoxed_interviews&from=thisJustIn

Thanks to “BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/09/15/outfoxed_interviews_.html who led me to Lawrence Lessig who led me to “Torrentocracy”:http://www.torrentocracy.com/blog/archives/2004/09/outfoxed_torren.shtml and “Demand Media”:http://demandmedia.net//?op=displaystory;sid=2004/9/15/1612/10512

The International Herald Tribune writes up “the poll results”:http://www.iht.com/articles/537982.html and I agree entirely with the comment of Ghost in the Machine – “Undecided voters out there, you know how you can “Ask the Audience” on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire when you’re stumped? Consider it like that.”

Not only is Kansas one of the few US states to “try to teach creationism alongside evolution”:http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/state/9342070.htm in science classes, now it is being taken to court because a gay teenager is in prison for 17 years for an offense which would have earned a heterosexual 15 months jail time.

Wired News reports, ‘A small California newspaper has undertaken a first-of-its-kind experiment in participatory journalism in which nearly all the content published in a regularly updated online edition and a weekly print edition is submitted by community members. It’s all free.’

“The Northwest Voice”:http://www.northwestvoice.com/default.asp’s experiment seems like a good idea on the face of it (and the creators give a good account of their reasons at “Open Source Journalism”:http://www.opensourcejournalism.org/) but I fear newspaper groups could be tempted to fire all or almost all their journalists and rely on citizen contributors for a lot of small papers. The trouble with this approach is that ‘ordinary citizens’ may not have an interest in doing any investigation into complex issues or underlying causes of problems (or if they do they may only do so because they have a particular axe to grind). Let’s hope instead that this kind of citizen journalism frees up staff journalists to do a better job on that kind of reporting (and let’s face it there isn’t enough of that going on at the moment).