New developments in the blogosphere

Recently, I’ve been receiving ‘blog releases’ from various groups. These are typically press releases that also go to people in the blogosphere. I would like to take a brief moment to highlight two of them.

Zephyr Teachout is working with Baobabs College Labs Project , a project of Mitch Kapor and Music for America.

"Democracy, like capitalism, needs innovation to survive," Teachout says, "and the best way to spur innovation is to give tools and real power to the end user. In the
long term, our democracy needs a lot more innovation if we're going to flourish into a new era."

The effort hopes to spread online beyond the initial schools using such web tools as Civic Space, formerly "Dean Space," Advokit, open source GOTV software, and Forwardtrack, open source petition software.

In her message with the press release, Zephyr writes, “I figured so long as I'm press-releasing, I might as well blog-release, too.” This is a perfect example of people going out and doing what has been talked about so much here at Greater Democracy.

Another interesting development with blogs and politics is Defender Bear. Andrew Korfhage, of Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund has created “a comic blog designed to promote discussion of conservation issues.“

This is similar to what has happened with people on LiveJournal commenting about the Doonesbury comic strip, which can be read on LiveJournal through an RSS feed. (Click here for an example).

It is great to see innovation and the evolution of online tools like the examples listed above.

Posted by Aldon Hynes at September 8, 2004 11:27 AM | TrackBack