Technology
Entries related to technology.
State Legislative Websites
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/15/2007 - 15:47ReadtheBill.org is an organization advocating that “bills should be posted online for 72 hours for anyone to read before Congress debates them”. I think this is a great idea, and I’ve often brought this up to friends. People who are interested in the legislative process typically ask about the role of the Library of Congress’ Thomas system for tracking legislation. Thomas would be a great vehicle for posting legislation online for people to review. The problem is that bills are not currently required to be posted on Thomas for 72 hours before they can be debated.
Others suggest that this requirement should apply to state legislation as well. I think that is a great idea, and I’ve been thinking about and exploring State Legislative Websites a bit recently.
At the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) annual meeting last week, I attended various sessions about blogging and legislative websites. I decided to review some of the websites and present my thoughts on where we are.
It seems as if the biggest hurdle that State Legislative Websites face is that of getting people to use them. When Kim ran for State Representative, I was struck by the number of people who didn’t know who their State Reps where. People told me that 85% of the people in the United States don’t know. If that is the case, one wonders how many people would ever look at State Legislative Websites.
During the sessions at NCSL, legislators and their staff expressed the belief that the community of bloggers is actually pretty small, and they are the same people that you always see on election night or at any political event. They wondered how to get more people involved.
A good starting point would be to improve the State Legislative Websites. Many have basic search mechanisms to help people find bills, but often those mechanisms are based on the assumption that the searcher already knows about the bill, its bill number, and how it is working its way through the legislative process. Numerous sites used abbreviations that would flummox people not closely following the legislative process, and modern tools like RSS feeds and the ability to subscribe to a bill’s status via email was notably lacking.
Interactive Technologies
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/05/2007 - 15:51The National Association of Legislative Information Technology, NALIT, had a great session entitled Interactive Technologies. It was attended by around 40 people, many of which appeared to be legislative staff.
Panelists included House Majority Leader Steve Harrelson from the Arkansas House of Representatives. He spoke about his site, Under the Dome. Senator John Valentine, President of the Utah State Senate spoke about his site, The Senate Site which is the “Unofficial Voice of the Utah Senate Majority”.
They spoke about these sites being unofficial sites, financed either individually, as is Rep. Harrelson’s case, or by a PAC in Sen. Valentine’s case. In Sen. Valentine’s case, they have a staffer who works part time for the State Senate and part time for the Senate Republican PAC. The staffer clocks in and out of each job according to the task he is working on. The PAC has bought its own computer and pays $25/month for electricity, internet access and desktop space in the Utah Senate office.
One advantage of having these sites be independent is that it avoids some of the issues around freedom of speech and who can moderate what on the site. There was a lot of discussion about maintaining a level of discourse that encourages intelligent discussion and not the brow bashing so common on many blogs. Sen. Valentine noted the difference between having an opinion and being well informed.
One person, talking about the importance of strong moderation asked the question, “How many of you legislators would allow town meetings where people speak with brown bags over their heads?” It was suggested that technology rarely changes human behavior and many people suggested the people you see on the blogs are the same gadflies you see all the time. The question was posed about how to reach a broader audience.
Jeffrey Griffith, former Associate Director and Chief Legislative Information Officer for the Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service spoke about his recent research into efforts to bring legislative information systems to various organizations in Europe. He noted independent research done on one British Member of Parliaments constituent emails which resulted in 25% of the respondents claiming they had had their opinions changed and had voted for the MP as a result of his email outreach. This study indicates that at least in some cases, internet outreach is changing opinions and reaching new audiences.
Sen. Valentine observed that his traditional mail hasn’t decreased as his email increased. Instead, older constituents continued to use traditional mail and younger constituents used email.
I asked if any one was doing anything to reach beyond the current online groups, using Facebook, MySpace or similar sites. Rep. Harrelson spoke about his Facebook and MySpace presence as well as mentioning the Democratic Party’s PartyBuilder.
I asked about people doing anything to widgetize or deportalize their websites. Rep. Harrelson spoke about his blog’s RSS feed being picked up by Arkansas based aggregators and Sen. Valentine spoke about having a large number of people subscribing to his site via email. Sen. Valentine also spoke of the importance of media crossover when information from the blog would be talked about in the newspapers or during drive time radio.
It was good to hear about various state legislative bodies here in the States, as well as people in Europe making strides to build communities that engage in intelligent discussion about the issues. We need more of that.
NCSL: Wireless Broadband: Answering the Call
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/05/2007 - 13:24Around 100 people are attending a luncheon. The focus is on the advantages of broadband, areas with broadband see housing values increase and improved healthcare delivery. Concerns are presented about tax issues, consistency of policy from state to state and private sector access. The speakers thank people who helped make the luncheon possible, AT&T, Cisco, Comcast, Dell, Ebay, Time Warner, Verizon and others.
The keynote speaker is Steve Largent, former NFL Football player, Republican Congressman from Oklahoma, and now head of CTIA, the Wireless Association. The board of directors of CTIA includes people from Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and so on.
During the keynote, Steve shows a video, “Wireless There’s Magic in The Air.” It traces the history of wireless in the United States, leading up to a futuristic view set in 2015.
He points out a survey by MyWireless.org. Like their website, he doesn’t mention that MyWireless.org is an offshoot of CTIA. (See this article from Common Cause about MyWireless.org).
He focuses on tax policy and regulatory policy. He encourages legislators to ask regulators if their policies “will reduce or increase the costs of companies providing wireless services.” It seems like the question is not if it will reduce or increase costs to companies, but will it increase or reduce costs and options for individuals.
One person asks what State Legislatures should do where there are rural districts that national carriers aren’t building out in. “I can tell you that we’re coming,” he answers. The 700 mhz auction will help greatly. “It is just a matter of time.”
There are subsequent questions about identity theft and the number of lives saved by e911 services, number portability, safe driving and issues about placing of cell towers,.
It is interesting that in the crowd, I am the only person with a laptop, even though there is WiFi available throughout the conference. The industry association is out in force. I speak with a representative from T-Mobile at the end of the keynote. Yet there is very little representation from those fighting for more open telecommunication policies.
How do you surf?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/03/2007 - 09:58SEO experts spend a lot of time talking about getting incoming links to your website and boosting your Google Page Rank, your Technorati authority and similar measures of links. Searching my logs, the largest single source of referrers is Google searches, and this is clearly important. However, as I noted from Quantcast, half of my traffic is from ‘regulars’, people that come back again and again.
Since my focus is more on community and relationships, I’m more interested in these regular readers than the casual browsers. It got me thinking about how to get casual browsers to become regular readers and how to get regular readers to become even more frequent readers.
Some people push their RSS or Atom feeds as a way to get people to read more regularly. I’ve taken to usually putting my whole entry on the front page, and in my RSS feed so that people can more easily read the whole entry. Yet, I would really prefer people to come to my site and get the whole experience as opposed to seeing the post in the context of whichever feedreader they are using. I want people to see the widgets. I want them to see what else I’m interested in, what is going on in my broader community.
That is part of what I like about MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, and the other community widgets. They encourage you visit each blog.
All of this leads me back to my discussion about social network aggregating. I would like a good aggregator to pull together my posts on various different sites. Usually, for larger posts I do that manually by posting at remote sites and cross posting at Orient Lodge. For Microblogging, I have Twitter subscribed to Facebook as well as Orient Lodge, and I have Jaiku subscribed to many of my feeds.
For bookmarks, I would really like some sort of tool to aggregate, sort, sift and rate the different sites I’m interested in. For aggregation, I would like to pull in all my communities from MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and BumpZee. I would like to pull in sites that I’ve tagged with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. I would like to pull in the feeds I’ve subscribed to with BlogLines and Google Reader.
For each source, I would like to see the sites I’ve subscribed to, tagged, or joined. For each site, I would like to see the where I’ve bookmarked them from, what tags or categories I’ve used, and how I rate them. Ideally, I would like to be able to increase or decrease the rating with a single click. I would like to be able to navigate from one site to the next easily. Right now, it takes two clicks to get from one MyBlogLog site or BumpZee site to the next. It takes three clicks on BlogCatalog.
I would like to add Geotagging into this so I could select sites based on their location, and I would like to add the RSS components so I could visit only sites that have been updated recently. Of course there would also need to be an option to make the lists public or private, or if ‘friends’ capability were added, to make the lists available only to friends.
Using Ruby on Rails, I whipped up a fairly quick prototype. Version 0.1 doesn’t include any RSS or OPML parsing to load data from other systems. As far as I know the MyBlogLog API isn’t available yet, so it doesn’t load from there. However, it was very quick and easy to pull together.
I’ve deliberated about whether or not to share this as a blog post, or to try to find someway to monetize the idea, after all, I do need to find some real cashflow soon. However, as I noted, the coding is pretty simple, and I suspect that there are plenty of people having similar ideas. So, instead of trying to be all NDA and everything, I’m posting the idea here. Perhaps others are interested in the idea and we can refine it further. If you’re interested, let me know your ideas.
Housekeeping
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 08/02/2007 - 11:55Yesterday, I rearranged the blocks on the right side of my site. I’ve added a block for ‘Cambodian Bloggers’. Beth Kanter is trying to raise money to attend the Cambodia Bloggers Summit. It will take place August 30-31. She has been invited to provide a keynote, train the trainers and help bring a stronger connection between Cambodia bloggers and those of us here in the United States and around the world.
I’ve known Beth for quite a while from the non-profit blogging circles and have great respect for the work she does. If a bunch of us all chip in, it would be great; money well spent.
I also moved the Lijit Widget from my general group of social network widgets up near the top. They provide a neat interface to Google so you can search on all your sites, both directly and within your social network. They provide nice little icons pointing to the different social networks your in, and a cloud for searches that have been done.
Lijit is still very early stage. There have been a few bugs setting it up, but their customer support has been great and I hope to see a lot of neat features coming in the future. Like RapLeaf, which does provides reputation related information, I believe their social network aggregation is one of the really important emerging trends, and I’ll be writing more about this soon.
In other website related stuff, quantcast has now gathered enough information to start giving me additional details about my audience. The graph shows the ups and downs of the week. They are currently saying that I get around 2000 unique monthly visits, or which around 1400 are from within the United States. Of that, around three quarters are people passing by, yet the regulars make up about half of the actual page views.
A lot of the traffic I’ve been getting has been Trackback Spam. I worry about the amount of strain the filtering of the spam places on the server, so I’ve ended up completely shutting down trackback on the site. The blog posts that have been getting the most traffic recently have been my posts about Falcon Ridge. I posted a comment about it in Livejournal and Facebook. I expected that Facebook would drive more traffic, but interestingly enough, much more of the traffic has come from Livejournal.
My post about The Motherhood got a fair amount of traffic, some from The Motherhood itself, others from Salon, where my wife wrote about it and on Been There, a blog by Emily and Cooper from The Motherhood. It terms of the interconnectivity, that sites like Lijit and Rapleaf are starting to explore, I found it interesting that Emily and Cooper were also both early contributors to Beth’s fundraising appeal to go to Cambodia.
Yet the post that has been getting the most traffic over the past few days has been my post about Zachary Cohn. I do hope that people reading the post stop and think a little bit about pool safety, the importance of product liability lawsuits, and getting more politically involved. Even more so, I hope that readers stop and read a few of my other blog posts. Yet the whole thing feels a little bit uncomfortable. It feels a little bit like people rubbernecking at a celebrity car crash. I sure hope that isn’t a major reason for the traffic.
Beyond the website housekeeping, the legal issues around the selling of our house continue to escalate. I do believe there is a place for litigation, but it should be avoided wherever possible. Kim, however, sees the actions as impacting Fiona’s education and is starting to talk about wanting not only fairness, but vengeance. I am hoping we will find a peaceful resolution soon enough. Until then, since we are looking at litigation, I’m going to remain mostly quite on this.
Some of Kim’s anger is perhaps fueled by the flareup of her lyme disease; yet another stressor. The final stressor I want to talk about is my mother’s surgery. On Tuesday, she had knee surgery. I spoke with her yesterday. She was groggy from the painkillers and from the lack of sleep. She wants to get home as soon as possible, but it does sound like the surgery went well and she is mostly getting the care she needs.
Any of you with a religious bent, are encouraged to lift up prayers for my mother, for Kim and, I guess, for all of us right about now.
