K Street Cafe

Report: Facebook and the New Age of Privacy
(Fast Company)
A look into the evolution of Facebook privacy, from the F8 Conference in April to the present.

FourSquare and Seven Months From Now: Would Lincoln Be on LinkedIn? (The Huffington Post)
More politicians look toward the web for campaigning tools as midterm elections approach.

Ten Fallacies About Web Privacy (Wall Street Journal)
Dispelling some common misconceptions about privacy online.

Israelis, Palestinians Expand Mideast Debate to Wikipedia (Tech President)
How Israel and Palestine are expanding their advocacy efforts through social media.

Open for Questions: The End of the Combat Mission in Iraq (YouTube)
Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes addresses questions regarding Iraq from the online community via YouTube.

Originally published on PMPU.org.

The Congressional Management Foundation and its Partnership for a More Perfect Union present “Inside the Hill”, a web series that allows you to hear directly from Members and staff on how technology is changing the way Congress works. It is produced by Fleishman-Hillard.

In the third installment, “How and Why Does Congress Use Twitter,” congressional staff discuss the different uses and advantages of Twitter.

Previous editions of “Inside the Hill” are also available:

Congress and New Media: The World Has Changed

What Makes An Award Winning Website

By Erica L. Fitzsimmons

A few more thoughts on the new Facebook changes, privacy concerns and what Four Square and Gowalla should be concerned about.

The recent Facebook platform changes may have advantages for advocacy professionals as I discussed in my earlier post, “Facebook Takeover,” but due to widespread privacy concerns, several Facebook members are thinking about quitting the wildly popular social networking site.  And by several, I mean approximately 60% of them — according to a survey conducted by IT security firm, Sophos.
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The state of Maryland, the attorney general of Pennsylvania and a group of researchers are taking on political campaigns using social media platforms.

Maryland’s State Board of Elections is submitting a proposal on June 3 requiring candidates to include standard language on their Facebook pages and their associations with these campaigns. In addition, the proposal would require candidates to create a system of authenticated official Twitter accounts. If this proposal passes, regulation could begin as early as this year.
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International Correspondents: The Internet election? (CNN)
Some believe this is Britain’s first social media election, while others disagree.

Washington Post Launches New PostPolitics.com Site
(Advocacy 2.0)
Last Wednesday The Washington Post announced the launch of a new political homepage, PostPolitics.com, which features articles, columns and blogs produced by Post staffers.

A few Thursday evenings ago, NBC aired a rerun of last year’s highly anticipated The Office episode that featured Pam and Jim getting married. When I watched the episode again two weeks ago, I could not help thinking about a crucial lesson to be learned for any organization planning their next advocacy campaign.

If you watched Pam and Jim’s wedding, you will recall that the writers heavily borrowed the memorable wedding routine from the extraordinarily popular YouTube video JK Wedding Dance. It’s the one where the wedding party dances down the aisle to Chris Brown’s song, Forever.  The video became so popular (now over 44 million views on YouTube) that the entire group was invited to recreate the routine on The Today Show.

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Last week at the Politics Online Conference, I sat on a panel where the question of e-mail versus social media was posed.  Is social media replacing e-mail?  Are members who join through social media more or less valuable than members collected via e-mail?
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This weekend, nearly 300 top transparency and open government experts from non-profit, technology developer, and government staff communities gathered at George Washington University to attend the Sunlight Foundation’s Transparency Camp 2010. The purpose of this second annual “unconference” was to clarify the needs for making government transparent, both from a philosophical and a how-to perspective.

As with all of these self-organizing, “barcamp-style” unconferences, participants are actively tweeting their thoughts throughout the sessions. The depth of these sessions and Twitter discussions is such that this article cannot adequately cover them. Thankfully, the tweet-stream is available online here (or you can follow the hashtags #TCamp2010 and #TCamp10 yourself).

Some of the key points raised in sessions include:

1. Making government data accessible in online, machine-readable format is essential.

2. Transparency is essential to improve trust in government by making it more accountable.

3. Transparency is a long-term need, so building a strong foundation to ensure it continues to develop is essential.

4. Building a foundation for transparency means we cannot use as a short-term success metric how many people use what we are building now (that audience will grow over time).

5. Digital divide issues remain important and they are building universal broadband network, getting computers and mobile devices into the hands of underserved communities, training them on how to use these tools, and developing a culture that encourages people to use these resources.

The conversation will continue on Twitter and elsewhere, so book mark the Tweetstream link, follow along, and add your thoughts.

I recently gave a lecture at American University’s Public Affairs and Advocacy Institute on how to use social media and other online strategies for advocacy. You can watch it here.