Online Media Cultist

ABC News has produced a daily column simply called The Note since the beginning of 2002, according to Wikipedia. For political junkies and Washington’s inside-the-beltway “chattering classes,” it’s an essential read that takes a Big Picture look at the nation’s political state of affairs, and then drills in and links out to the must-read stories of the day.

So The Note has been around for almost seven years, a lifetime in politics and a lifetime online. It’s famous and infamous in political circles, with a loyal and passionate readership.

So the question is: why does ABC News hide The Note on its website?

Head to the front page of ABC News, and there are a bunch of political stories and blogs highlighted, but no sign of The Note. Make your way to the Politics section, and The Note makes no appearance above the fold. Scroll down, and finally you can find a small area called The Note amongst five others listed below a More Political News heading.

Ah, you say, just grab the RSS feed so you don’t have to take such effort to grab your favorite political column while spilling coffee on yourself in the morning. Well, not so much. There’s no direct RSS feed to grab The Note. Tauntingly, there is an RSS link right near the top of the page, but it’s a general RSS feed for political news. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and buried amongst a dozen links in a More Coverage section is a link to Sign Up for The Note!

So, if you really want The Note delivered to you, if you’re really determined, you can register for ABC News, submit a username and a password, and then have The Note delivered to an e-mail address each day. I actually did this for a while, years ago, but was disappointed with the delay (in hours) it took for the column to reach me.

Is ABC News actively burying one of its best known and most popular columns? Maybe they’re focused on grabbing e-mail addresses for marketing purposes (even though you have to be nearly obsessed to find the link to Sign Up for The Note!)?

My best guess is that ABC News is an enormous organization and that conflicting interests and legacy ideas are conspiring to hide high quality content away from readers.

It’s always fascinating to take a look at what’s going on beyond your own country’s borders. Here in the U.S. we have a tendency to not do that enough, I think.

No doubt the Internet is having a profound impact on countries around the world, and it’s interesting to look at how non-Western governments are reacting to tremendous shifts in the ability of people to communicate, collaborate, and organize with one another.

As you might imagine, the reaction isn’t always glorious and benign on behalf of some governments. Just over the last few days, we see that Turkey blocked a website that insulted Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, “the founder of modern Turkey,” and Indonesia has enacted a law that will restrict access to “pornographic and violent sites” under the guise of a scarily-termed “information bill.” And not surprisingly in Bhutan, a country that saw the introduction of both television and the Internet only nine years ago, access to “foreign influences” is limited by the current government.

There are signs though that countries and nations and cultures – just like here in the U.S. and in Europe – are grappling with how best to deal with this new era. And it’s not all negative news.

China, a country well known for throwing down the hammer on journalists and publications that it doesn’t like, has opened up access to BBC News online after years of blocking its access. Hilariously, the Chinese government denied both the blocking and unblocking, noting that the “connection was reset.”

I can’t help seeing governmental intervention in how the Internet is accessed and used as a rearguard action, at least in the grand scheme of things.

Last July, I wrote about Hillary Is 44: Whereas HillaryHub.com is like an official campaign television commercial, Hillary Is 44 is more along the lines of a third-party “issue group” campaign. For the time being, Barack Obama is the target. For example, the notion that Obama is the presidential campaign’s front runner is referred to as “hubris and delusion.”

Now it seems the mystery of who is behind the site has been solved. Apparently it’s “a New York political activist named Alex Rodriguez.”

In any event, The M.O. still seems to be to hate on Barack Obama.

Every political junkie has his or own way of absorbing up-to-the-nano information. And on Super Tuesday, there’ll be lots to keep track of (in fact there is already, with Obama taking an early big win in Georgia!).

For the moment I’m checking in with Memeorandum and Drudge Report, with a dallop of Google News and CNN.com for good measure. A little bit later I plan on tapping into MSNBC.com’s live feed which allows me to pipe in their television coverage live.

It makes sense for all channels featuring live news coverage to do this. And I think most people wouldn’t mind a sponsorship logo or even the occasional ad running in the lower third or fifth of the video player to help pay the bills.

If you’re at all a fan of the sport of politics, this has been a fascinating political season, and we’re just now gearing up for the frenzy of the proverbial playoffs. With each fresh cycle, there’s an ever increasing amount of websites dedicated to convincing, explaining, exhorting, spinning, pontificating, and synthesizing what’s going on in electoral races.

Here are a few I’ve come across in just the past few days:

Presidential Watch ‘08 contains a bunch of cool “heat maps” and trending data charts that pull raw statistics into a very cool visual form. If you’re into data visualizations, check out this map of the political blogosphere.

Meanwhile, Republican presidential aspirant Ron Paul may be the biggest online political story of the year. While he languishes in the single digits in polls, he has gathered millions of dollars thanks to hardcore support from libertarians (a political breed who tend to congregate online more than others) and an online presence that encourages fund raising in manic flurries based around specified event days.

Now, in a move unforeseen back even in the heyday of Howard Dean, a Ron Paul social networking site has sprung up, a “social alliance” that invites people to “join the revolution.”

It’s great fun to see the online world become further enmeshed into the political process, and while there is always any number of ways to “abuse the system,” I can’t help thinking that more information, more communication, more collaboration, and more access can only help the political process as a whole.

I don’t receive as much spam as I used to, which I attribute to gmail doing a pretty great job at sifting out the junk. However, there’s always the strange the occasional ones that get through, including a rather striking and depressing clunker that I received today advising me of the dangers of electing a president of the United States named “Barack Hussein Obama?” (it’s headlined: FW: WHO IS BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA?”

It goes on to spread the truth on the “facts,” that Mr. Obama is black (wow, really?), and a “radical Muslim.” It helps us in understanding all of this by capitalizing these words throughout the e-mail.

It must be political season, and time for the most xenophobic and ignorant people to come out of the woodwork to spread their messages of hope and fear this holiday season.

On a much brighter note, this is the most exciting political year from a pure spectator standpoint in a long, long time. The best part, in my view, is that there is any number of highly qualified candidates – no matter what your ideological point of view – to choose from.

A piece in Toronto’s Globe and Mail points out that Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, home of popular Internet domain registration service Register.com, is the listed contact address for those web publishers who wish to remain anonymous.

In other words, for a few dollars more, you can run a website while remaining relatively anonymous from the rest of the planet. This is great in terms of civil liberties and freedom of the press: people are now free to express themselves and their opinions – even highly unpopular ones – without fear of reprisals or government intervention.

However, things get a lot stickier when known terrorist groups and other rage-filled soap boxers take advantage of these freedoms to collaborate, communicate, break the law, and conspire to commit unlawful acts online.

The Globe and Mail piece points out:

The FBI estimates somewhere in the range of 6,000 terrorism-supporting websites are currently active. Last week, the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies published a report stating that, in terms of nefarious online activity, terrorism promotion had eclipsed hatemongering.

This is the new jihad – the evolution of a propaganda effort that, just a decade ago, consisted mostly of Osama bin Laden speeches on video tapes smuggled out of a hideout in Afghanistan. Today, the public-relations arms of terrorist organizations – run less by grizzled warriors than by 20-something computer geeks – deal in digital currency, getting their messages out instantly and universally using the scope and anonymity of the web.

It’s the downside to the Internet, that the bad guys get to use all the toys and play with all the goodies that the vast majority of us use with good or at least neutral intentions. Pamphlets and rallies and mass propaganda helped to fuel the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and today Osama bin Laden can speak a few words on tape and have it distributed across the planet within minutes if he wishes.

It’s scary stuff, and I don’t have a lot of answers about what can be done to combat it. More transparency, more openness, more communication, more listening, more tolerance, and more understanding. These are ideals that the Internet brings to all peoples of the world. I continue to believe that the Internet is an incredible force for change, the vast majority of which is good.

Great debates are being engaged today about how much privacy web publishers should have, about how monitoring should take place, and how protected online speech should be. I’m hopeful that a balance will be struck that will protect ordinary peoples’ privacy while giving law enforcement the tools they need to catch the bad guys.

It’s a brave new world, but I have to believe that technology is making it a better one.

During Sunday’s Republican presidential debate, Rudy Giuliani brought the biggest laugh of the night in answering a question about a defining mistake. “To have a description of my mistakes in 30 seconds?” he said, shaking his head. He added that he could only properly confess his mistakes to moderator George Stephanopoulos’ father, a priest.

Perhaps one of Rudy’s lesser life mistakes was not getting his 17-year-old daughter Caroline on board with his campaign. In fact, Caroline’s Facebook profile caused quite a stir this week when it was discovered that she listed her political views as “liberal” and proclaimed membership in the “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)” group. The profile, which is viewable by people who attend Harvard, where Caroline is headed, and the Trinity School in Manhattan, has since ended its affiliation with the Obama group.

Interestingly, Caroline uses a slight variation on her last name on her Facebook profile. However, that coupled with the fact that the profile was semi-public did not prevent the story from leaking.

Aside from shining some light on a major presidential candidate’s inner family dynamics, this story displays how the Internet and social networking sites are pulling control away from politicians, celebrities, and public figures over their image and public relations.

ParisLemon sums up this sentiment well, writing: “Yes, Facebook is indeed awesome. It is only here that we could see that Rudy Giuliani’s own daughter apparently doesn’t even think he’d be the best man to run the country - she’s supporting Barack Obama.”

Andy Beal thinks that this story may cost Rudy a few votes “a year from now.” I disagree. If Republican primary voters can get past Rudy’s multiple marriages, I doubt that his daughter’s political disloyalty will help to sway voters. However, it may help build an overall case that Rudy isn’t the traditional Republican savior that conservative primary voters are looking for.

The New York Times notes that Obama is besting Giuliani in the overall social networking game, with 500 Facebook groups devoted to Obama (”One Million Strong for Barack” has over 300,000 members). Obama’s MySpace profile has 160,000 friends as compared to 7,000 and change for Rudy. And on Facebook, the Giuliani campaign has yet to set up a presence.

techPresident has the best advice for both Caroline Giuliani and the youth population set worldwide when it comes to dealing with the Internets:

Hey kids, guess what! Put something online, and it might just be a little public.

If the next President of the United States is a Democrat, the answer would seem to be yes.

Pretty wild to think about future White House Press Secretaries writing a daily blog, or simply have a full time blogger on hand to jot interesting news and notes about West Wing goings on.

Of course, it would all be spin doctored to a fine sharp point. Would an official White House blog have open comments? That might be the most interesting question. And I wouldn’t envy the person who would need to wade through and moderate all of the not-so-nice feedback!

Democratic Senator and Presidential candidate Chris Dodd is planning to appear on Bill O’Reilly’s popular talk show on Fox News with the express purpose of defending YearlyKos, the annual convention sponsored by the left-leaning Daily Kos, and by extension the liberal blogosphere.

TPM Café reports:

The move is significant because it will make Dodd the first Presidential candidate to personally appear on a leading right-wing show for the explicit purpose of defending the liberal blogosphere. It’s got to be seen as a sign of the times — and of current shifts in Democratic politics — that a Presidential candidate would view such an appearance in defense of Kos’ liberal blogging community and the netroots in general as an asset to a Presidential campaign.

Indeed, with Democratic candidates tacking left in an effort to distinguish themselves from Sen. Hillary Clinton and at the same time pick up support from the liberal base, the Internet has become a significant part of attempting to catch fire among the grassroots, or netroots as it’s now called.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama announced their candidacies online instead of the traditional hometown American flag-drenched fests we’re all used to. “Video messages” are now a common way for candidates to get around traditional media and talk directly to audiences. Obama himself has been known to publish articles on Daily Kos and Clinton, who will not be outflanked by anyone on any front, has launched HillaryHub.com, a place to pump out positive Hillary stories round the clock.

John Edwards, for his part, has embraced “web 2.0″ early and often, keeping in touch with fans and followers via Twitter. A piece in today’s edition of ABCNews.com’s The Note also details how the Edwards campaign has moved net-savvy operatives into the highest slots while getting rid of those who have not embraced an aggressive online philosophy.

All of this is to say that it makes sense that Chris Dodd, currently far back in the pack in presidential polls, would want to get some media attention for defending the liberal blogosphere. I think his conversation with O’Reilly – a guy who lives to take things out of context (and who better than bloggers to call this out early and often?) – will be an interesting spectacle.