As I announced a few months back I'm now at Be the Change, Inc where I head the efforts in all things Technology (mostly web) with the support of very capable vendors and staff. As part of my role, I help identify technology and develop strategy that will help the organization spread its message and lead to people become invested and take action in our first campaign. To fulfill this part of my job, I've started attending various conferences and Panels around the City. One of the Roundtable that I attend pretty regularly is the Internet Advocacy Roundtable hosted by Center for American Progress Action Fund and lead by Alan Rosenblatt. The Last round table I attend was titled "The future of E-mail Congress - New Solutions Offered and Old Myths Busted"( word doc of the preso) and there speaker was Daniel Bennett who is Co-author of "The Net Effect: How Cyber advocacy is Changing the Political Landscape" and was a columnist for The Cloakroom.
The gist of Mr. Benett's presentation is that he has developed a technique that will more accurately group emails that each representative receives from various advocacy group so that s/he will not waste staff time reading all the emails and will have a better tally of where constituents stands on any particular issue by looking at the total number of emailed received. According to him but unverified by anyone in the room, the system works with 95-99% accuracy and is easy to install and works with current e-mail systems on the Hill. He claims to have tested in some offices with great result and received positive feedback. In plain English, the system group letters according to a token or URL included each email. So any given e-mailing campaign would have the same token. For the techie crowd, see some documentation at http://advocatehope.org/tech-tidbits. Mr. Bennett then called on all the orgs present at the lecture to lobby the vendors to start implementing this new system. He claims that there is no financial benefit to him and I don't have any reason not to believe him. Lastly, Mr. Bennett claims staffer don't read the letters already so his solution would a least make sure they have a accurate count before the vote.
I have two thoughts about this improvement by Mr. Benett. As someone whose organization is trying to lobby congress to get legislation passed, this is fabulous. It's a great tool and we can use to hopefully sway a representative's mind and maybe get to move away from voting along party lines when we can get people from his district to e-mail him or her. As person that has friends that work on the Hill, I know this will make their live easier and they will be a little more efficient while at the office and maybe get a few more things done.
As a private citizen, this "improvement" is outrageous. Call me be crazy but I'd like to think that my representative or his staff would read the vast majority of e-mails and letters that come to them. It's their job! They were elected to serve the people of their district and that includes reading constituent's mail how ever outrageous they are. The Reps and their staff are supposed to do what is good for the constituents and the for the country as a whole. Just because 4999 people emailed about one side of the issue and 50001 email about the other side, doesn't mean the rep should cast a vote in favor of the highest bidder. While I appreciate Mr. Benett's persistence and hard work (he's been working on this solo for 5 years), I think his solution is the wrong way to go. His solution is fixing the wrong problem. I would even go as far as to say it's making Congress worse. We, as citizen and their employers, should not accept the fact Reps don't read our mail or letters. We should def not make it easier for them not to read our letters. While Mr. Benett's claim about staffers not reading mail may be true, I refuse to give in his cynicism and make easier for them not to so. And I sincerely hope others won't either.
Was that too harsh?.......Naaaaaaaaaah.
In our continuing quest to eat at all the neighborhood restaurants, we decided to try 
Over the last year or so, I've been working at the 
My last encounter was with a gentlemen protesting that the confederate flag should stay up. John and I had a discussion about the flag the night before. We have a different stance as the what the faith of the flag should be. Regardless, John first approached and asked about the gentlemen stance on the issue. The gentleman stated he wanted the flag flying over the state capitol building like it used to. I tend jumped and asked why? his answer was something like "because that's were it belongs." I told him he was wrong for unconditionally wanting to flag to stay up, and the NAACP was wrong for unconditionally wanting the flag to come down. The fact of the matter is that the flag means different things to both groups and neither group should impose its will on the other. I continued by stating that since both party would back down from their current position, it would be much useful approach the problem from another angle. I suggested forming an education panel comprised of people from both camps, that would talk about how schools in SC should teach the about the flag. And in that process, they may come with a solution about the faith of the flag. Another gentleman protesting with the gentleman I was talking to agreed with my point. As for the gentleman I was talking to, he took a second to think about what I said, and then presented another argument which I then countered. Eventually, we said goodbye and left. I doubt anything will come of that conversation. That being said, it showed me if you come open minded about issue and are willing to offer an alternative way to look at problem, they will listen. And that's the first step to solving any issue.
I've been following the primary on both side for what seems like forever now. So when a friend who is involved for MD for for Obama group called me to ask to go volunteer for Obama in South Carolina I jumped on the chance. We agreed to go down on MLK weekend. We left Friday after work, drove down to NC and spent the night at my friend's uncle place near Raleigh, NC. Saturday, we left around 2 pm and headed down to Columbia, SC. We checked in the most ghetto hotel available. The TV didn't work in the first room and we were moved to another. Since we had not contacted the 
This week is Restaurant Week here in DC. If you're not familiar with the concept, a bunch of DC's fancy restaurant's agree to do a 3 course meal for cheap--$20.08 for lunch and $30.08 for dinner. It is a funny way to get to eat at some restaurants that are clearly out of our price range on a daily basis. To take advantage of that, one night we dined at a restaurant called 
One of the nice things about Ceiba is that for Restaurant Week, instead of having a limited number of dishes to choose from, they let you pick any entree off the menu. It's a nice touch. For my dinner, I had a ceviche to start, and a crispy whole red snapper as my entree. The ceviche was delicious, a bit spicy while still having the great taste of the fish. The snapper was also cooked very well. I was a little nervous, as they literally brought the entire fish to me in a platter, head and all (pictured right).....yikes. But, under the skin, the fish was very moist and the accompanying sauce and vegetables were great as well (although I was nervous about accidentally eating the fish's brain). 
On a historical day in the history of this nation, much of the talk in the tech blog world was about how 
Moreover, since this election has be dubbed the "technology election", I would imagine on the day of the first caucus the tech blogging world would be a conversation about creating objective measures that could be used to examine exactly what affect technology will have and has had on the election. More frustrating than not being able to vote in this election, to no fault of my own, is people squandering the opportunity to bring important issues to the light before it's too late. Today's coverage of "Scoble-Facebook gate" was would be equivalent to something like CNN covering Britney's latest night of debauchery instead of covering 
Over the years the number of blogs I read on a regular basis has increased. However, the quality of the posts and the quality of the writing has remained stagnant. Why is that? I don't have the answer. If I did, I'd write a book and try to get deal for it. Maybe it's just me but I think that if you're going to call yourself a professional blogger your writing and your research should be at the level of a professional. Over the last two days, I've watched an interview on a profession tech blog where the interviewer was irritating. I'm not going to link to it because it's a new venture and I've the pleasure to meet the gentleman who is behind it. Nice guy. His niceness aside, his interviews are terrible. On the ones that I've watched the questions were similar to that of five-year old interviewing his/her parents for a school project. What made the recent interview even more unbearable to watch was the fact that interviewer kept interrupting the interviewee and made "huh-uh" noise after every sentence. Now to be fair to him, he is not the only guilty of crappy interviewing of the web. There are many more out there. I wouldn't have such a problem with this if these people would refer to themselves as amateur bloggers as opposed to professional bloggers. To all who claim to be professional bloggers; please take a writing class, an interview class and a research class. Calling yourself a professional requires more than the ability to copy and paste from a site larger than yours (with or without two lines of your own) or post low qualities videos and call them interviews. To put out such crappy work, undermines your blog and insults your readership. Then again it's very possible that I have a twisted definition of the word "professional." 
The U.S. State department has issued a statement congratulating the Kenyan people and Kibaki on the voter turnout and calling to stop to the unrest. 
This past weekend I got a chance to a attend a Jewish service for the first time. Although I have a number of Jewish friends and I've dated several Jewish girls (I can hear you saying it DK4), I've never attended to a Jewish service. Over the weekend, the gff's grandfather celebrated his 83rd birthday and decided to have a 
I fumbled on today's album while listening to a review of the movie 
