Digital

Abstract of a new working paper from Richard Freeman and M. Marit Rahavi:

This study examines two innovative efforts to provide union services to workers with the aid of low cost Internet communication: the AFL-CIO's Working America, a "community affiliate" that enrolled 2 million workers from 2004 to 2007 by canvassing them at their homes and over the Internet (www.workingamerica.org); and the UK'S Trade Union Congress's www.unionreps.org.uk, a discussion board for worker representatives to communicate about workplace issues. Working America demonstrates that workers without collective bargaining will join a union organization that communicates on-line and off-line and campaigns for worker interests in society. Unionreps.org shows that local worker representatives can form an on-line community that shares information to improve the services they give workers. Combining the two innovations could be a step toward a new "open source" union form that provides union services at low cost outside of collective bargaining.

Also worth checking out, this published piece from 2002 on the internet and employee organization.

Miro, an excellent new video player and internet TV app you can use to search and view videos on major video hosts like Google and You Tube, went 1.0 this month. Miro is an open-source, non-commericial project developed by the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation. A recent write-up in in Wired described their plans to overthrow traditional TV:

Most software entrepreneurs' ambition is to sell out for a huge wad of cash, or maybe go public for an even bigger pile. Not so Nicholas Reville: He wants to overthrow the television industry, and he doesn't care if he gets rich. In fact, as executive director and co-founder of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Reville is unlikely to make much money at all.

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But the PCF's ambitions go far beyond making and distributing a popular internet video platform. Ultimately, the foundation's goal is to promote and build an entirely new, open mass medium of online television.

"We see TV as moving online in a lot of ways," Reville explains. "There's a chance to make it really open, or there's a chance that companies are going to build proprietary systems and try to lock in users to creators. We think that video RSS is a really good way of making it a level playing field, so our goal is to push the video industry in the direction of openness -- towards using open standards."

Going the nonprofit route was an essential part of this goal. For one, Miro's fate isn't tied to finicky venture capitalists or stockholders. That's generally a good thing when you’re trying to form an organization around values other than maximizing shareholder profit.

If you watch a lot of internet video (or if you want to start), Miro is definitely worth a download.

Britian's Guardian newspaper lauched its Guardian America website today. Edited by former American Prospector Michael Tomasky, it will be a welcome antedote to the Murdochization of the American news media. As Tomasky explains in his welcome post:

... the paper was founded in 1821 "to promote the liberal interest" in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre. Now, I confess that I don't know what that was. But it sounds bad, and I've been around the block enough times to know that journals founded in response to events like massacres tend to be pretty reliable, from my point of view, more or less across the board.

So Guardian America will, yes, promote the liberal interest. Not with a sledgehammer; one of the most important liberal interests, after all, is in free inquiry, debate, scepticism, even about one's own positions. But I suspect that, among the Americans who like the Guardian, one of the things they like is that the paper expresses its view of the world a bit more openly than American newspapers do.

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In addition to high-quality content, the Guardian has one of the best designed sites in the newspaper business. Four columns but with lots of white space and nice graphics and video.

And, where else would you learn that it's National Curry Week?

A tip of the hat for Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) for engaging in a series of four nightly online policy discussions starting tomorrow night. The topic is our national broadband strategy.

During those four nights, I am looking for the best and brightest ideas on what Congress should do to promote and foster broadband.

I will begin each night's discussion with a conversation about some of the core principles I think are important, and then I'll ask for you to contribute your ideas that will help me craft legislation.

There are two reasons I'm asking for your help and participation. The first is because I think we need more public participation and transparency in the way Congress crafts significant legislation. This is an approach to legislation that has never been tried before. If it's successful—as I believe it will be—it may become the way lawmakers approach drafting bills on other issues like education, health care, and foreign policy.

The second reason I'm doing this is because broadband policy is one of the most important public policy issues today. Frankly, America does not have a national broadband strategy, and we are falling behind. That means our families don't have access to the best medical technologies, our students don't have access to the best educational opportunities, and our entrepreneurs are limited in the markets they can access.

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Congressman George Miller (D-CA) is doing some exciting things on the web. From Personal Democracy Forum's techPresident Daily Digest, here's a description of his Ask George project:

California Rep. George Miller is back with the second installment of his Ask George series, in which citizens can use video, blogs, SMS, or Twitter to ask Miller about the Iraq war. The submissions are aggregated at Community Counts, where participants can vote for the best questions. Miller then answers the most popular questions in his videos. In the new video, Miller responds to questions raised on a blog created by residents in his congressional district in California. Even though it's not produced by a presidential candidate, we continue to report on this project because it offers an example of how—with a little ingenuity and desire—politicians can use all corners of the web to engage voters.

A tip of the hat to the Kaiser Family Foundation for health08.org, their excellent new site. Here's their description:

health08.org is part of a broad effort by the Kaiser Family Foundation to provide a central hub for resources and information about health policy issues in the 2008 election. The site—operated by Kaiser staff—provides analysis of policy issues, regular public opinion surveys, daily news updates, video of speeches and debates from the campaign trail, original interviews and resources for journalists covering the election.

The New American Foundation hosted a great event last week on Christopher Howard's important new book, The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths About American Social Policy. Howard, a professor of government at the College of William and Mary, was joined by Mark Schmitt, a senior fellow at New America and Inclusion's own Margy Waller. You can now watch the video below, or download an MP3 from New America's website.

In a op-ed piece in last Sunday's NYT, Mark Helprin argued that copyright should last indefinitely. On the same day the op-ed was published, law professor Lawrence Lessig, one of the leading advocates against copyright über alles and a founder of Creative Commons, set up a wiki designed to facilitate a collectively written response. It's an interesting experiment—you can check it out (and contribute) here.

I'm in NYC today at the 4th annual Personal Democracy Forum conference. highlights so far have been the talks by academics Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler as well as one by marketing expert Seth Goldin. In addition to having great content, Lessig and Goldin had two of the best Keynote-delivered presentations I've ever seen.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and TPM Cafe is now doing some really impressive stuff with online video.

It's more sophisticated than the typical video blog, but still the kind of thing that most progressive policy shops should be able to do with a modest investment.

The World Bank has a new online atlas of the Milliennium Development Goals that's worth checking out, both for the data and its impressive use of Flash. Among other things, you can resize the maps based on country rankings.

In a Columbia Journalism Review article, Robert Kuttner comes up with a great name—crogs for Carefully-Researched Weblogs—for what I've referred to rather clunkily as the emerging policy blogosphere:

Ezra [Klein] ... particularly relies on expert sites that are not exactly blogs and not exactly journalism; rather they are a very important category often left out by old media critics who divide the world into amateur bloggers versus trained reporters. Many such sites are operated by academics or think-tank researchers who have developed a taste for a popular audience, mixing blog-style comment on breaking news with original analysis, and serious research.

This category of Web site doesn’t have a name, and it trivializes them to call them blogs. Let’s call them crogs, for Carefully-Researched Weblogs. For policy wonks like Ezra and me, some of the most interesting crogs are Dean Baker’s site on how the press covers economics; the crog on Middle East affairs by the University of Michigan professor Juan Cole; and a superb crog on health policy carried on Daily Kos and written by a physician and researcher calling himself Dr. Steve B (he has a sensitive position and won’t publish his real name). There are thousands of similarly high-quality crogs on just about every public issue, of great value to both journalists and ordinary readers. The sites are rich in hyperlinks, too, so a reader can move sideways into more detailed reports and primary sources.

The rest of the piece—about whether newspapers will survive in a digital era—is good too. Here's the conclusion:

As Generation Y grows up, and Generation Z finds the idea of getting news on paper even quainter, more people like Ezra (and his children) will become their own editor-aggregators. But if the dailies do their jobs, the next generation will still read newspapers—online.

My reporting suggests that many big dailies have turned the corner, though only barely and just in time, that newspapers have started down a financially and journalistically viable path of becoming hybrids, without losing the professional culture that makes them uniquely valuable.

Assuming that most dailies survive the transition, my guess is that in twenty-five years they will be mostly digital; that even people like me of the pre-Internet generation will be largely won over by ingenious devices like Times Reader, supplemented by news alerts, rss feeds, and God knows what else. But whether newspapers are print or Web matters far less than whether they maintain their historic calling.

If I could vote in the next UK election, I'd vote Labour, but I have to give conservative David Cameron credit for at least two things.

The first one, as I've mentioned before, is his willingness to bring Conservatives into the modern age when it comes to measuring poverty. Let's hope that sometime in the near future liberals in the United States follow his lead, so we can at least start having a debate on bringing the old-dated U.S. poverty measure into line with the poverty measure used by the rest of the well-off world.

The second is the great use of video on Cameron's website. In a recent blog on techPresident, MIcah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej discuss the Cameron site and what makes it unique:

Picture this: Every day, a major candidate for the highest office in the land spends a few minutes talking into a video camera held by an aide. Then the recordings are posted, with very minor editing, to the his Web site. On some days, they show him on the street, talking casually about the visit he's making to a local business or a day care center. On other days, he's sitting in his office, giving candid responses to the top five questions that have been posted to his blog, as chosen by visitors to his site.

The videos are all generally unscripted; the settings are unencumbered by props; and the camera work is about as good as any tourist's visiting the zoo.

If you think this is a fantasy, don't. This, in a nutshell, is how David Cameron, the youthful leader of Britain's opposition Conservative Party, has been taking advantage of online video since he launched his "Webcameron" site last fall. His casual and extended videos have not hurt his popularity; right now, Cameron's Conservatives are leading the ruling Labor Party by 13 percentage points in a recent poll.

For all the talk of this being the "YouTube Election," however, none of the current candidates for president of the United States is doing anything close to what Cameron is doing. Yes, they know they can use their Web sites to broadcast video to potential supporters. But so far, not one presidential campaign has demonstrated that it understands the difference between video online and video on TV. That's because they all apparently think video online is just television on a smaller screen.