June 11, 2010
US Political Parties Losing Ground to the Web?
With midterm election primary season in full swing in the US, this year's batch of long-shot, internet-insurgent candidates from both sides of the aisle are zooming to the top of election results across the country.
So far this year, candidates challenging incumbents in Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Arkansas have cruised to victory backed not by party bosses, but fueled instead by impressive online followings and a grassroots base of support.
With the candidacies of Howard Dean, Ron Paul, and Barack Obama as case studies, web-based grassroots support is nothing new in American politics, but to many experts, the recent success of challengers on the web as a new phenomenon, one that threatens to destabilize traditional party politics.
Washington Times has more:
Internet politics came of age in the 2004 presidential campaign, when former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean attracted followers and raised money online, shaking up the Democratic presidential primary.
Barack Obama, at the time running for a Senate seat in Illinois, took those lessons to new heights four years later, using a multimillion-strong network of online supporters to upset Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination and then defeat Sen. John McCain in the general election. On the Republican side, meanwhile, Rep. Ron Paul's "moneybomb" fundraisers brought in millions of dollars and made the Texan a factor to be reckoned with throughout the 2008 primary season.
[Republican strategist Michael McKenna] said parties have proved powerless to stop the insurgents, in part because the parties are built around the sort of closed process that the Internet is designed to undermine.
To read the whole article, check out the Washington Times.
Posted by Buzz Webster at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 04, 2010
BP spill, if it was your home.
CNET has a look at a unique use of Google Maps to visualize the growing BP oil spill if it was at your doorstep.
Ifitwasmyhome.com uses a Google Maps application to overlay the outline of the BP oil spill over your current location.
From CNET-
Using freely available government data, a new Web site helps people quantify the BP oil spill in local terms.
IfItWasMyHome.com uses a combo of Google Maps and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite tracking data to place the parameters of the BP oil spill--the result of the April 20 explosion of an oil rig--over any area in the world.
The spill can be moved to center on any location of one's choosing by simply entering location data (such as a city or postal code) as one would usually do for Google Maps.
Playing with the tool is devastating.
Many in the media initially compared the spill to the size of Rhode Island or Delaware, America's smallest states. But playing with this tool that follows NOAA data daily, one sees that if centered on Boston, the spill now would cover almost all of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, more than half of Connecticut, and parts of New Hampshire and Maine combined. That's more than half of New England.
Posted by Buzz Webster at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
