Thanks to the GREAT design and development work by Development Seed and George Hotelling, CitizenSpeak was recognized by the 10th Annual Webby Awards as one of the Official Honoree Selections. I'M TOTALLY THRILLED!!!!

Pradeep Suthram from Picnet made a great suggestion for promoting CitizenSpeak campaigns. He suggested that people post the URL for their CitizenSpeak campagin at their MySpace or Friendster page. I just noticed that Blasphemy Squad posted a link to the CitizenSpeak campaign “Say No To HR4437: Enforcement First means Immigrant Families Last” on their MySpace at http://tinyurl.com/.

If anyone else has used, is using or plans to use this tactic, add a comment or email about how it worked.

If you’re going to Nten in Seattle this week, stop by the online advocacy or the open source speedgeeking sessions to learn about CitizenSpeak. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Thanks to Marty of Green Media Toolshed for pointing out the quote below from BuzzMachine in which Jeff Jarvis discusses the need for organizations to empower individual activists to control the means of mobilization:

“On the individual level, I want to own or control my stuff, don’t you? That is a given that too many companies and institutions forget. Thus my first law of media and life: Give us control and we will use it. The corollary: Don’t give us control and you will lose us. So I want to control the things I create: my content (this blog); my identity (my addresses); my collections of neat things (my bookmarks); my analysis (my tags); my reputation (my eBay rating), my behavior (my history, my clicks). What does control mean? I want to be assured that somebody else can’t muck with or kill it. I want to be able to use it wherever I want — and that means I need it to be portable. I also want to control the things I consume: my content (obviously, I pick the sites, shows, words I take in); my advertising (I’d like transparent targeting… and so should advertisers, because it would be a helluva lot more effective).

From PoliticsOnline:

“The results of USC Annenberg School’s fifth annual Survey of the Digital Future are in, with some substantial findings on how the Internet is changing the political landscape as we know it.

The Internet has become a valuable tool in political campaigns
61.7 percent of Internet users and non-users alike agreed that going online is important to political campaigns. The Internet has also become an important tool for gathering information about campaigns, with 41.1 percent of Internet users logging on to find campaign information. Of those who sought information on the web, 91.1% searched for information about issues and candidates they supported, and 77.4% sought information about issues and candidates they were undecided about.

Internet increases political empowerment
For the first time since the digital future project began, the number of Internet users who believe they can wield political power by going online is on the rise. This year, 39.8 percent of Internet users agreed that surfing the web gives people more political power, up from 27.3 percent last year.”

For the militant materialist in your life, check out Andrew Boyd’s book, ” Life’s Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for the Post-Hip” - a book of 365 post-modern maxims—one for every day. Some of my favorites:

1. Leverage fictitious capital
2. Learn to play a financial instrument
3. Maneuver between pastiche and mish-mash
4. Shop as though money were a consensual hallucination.

You can also enter the contest for the leap year 366 maxim.

Check it out at at http://www.wanderbody.com/pomotogo/index.html

Thanks PoliticsOnline (www.politicsonline.com) for mentioning the new and improved CitizenSpeak site in this week’s NetPulse. For those of you who don’t know it, NetPulse is a great enewsletter for political activists and academics about, in their words, “politicking on the Internet.” This same issues also contains a link to the ITU’s study, “The Internet of Things,” and a great quote from Kofi Anan’s WSIS opening speech:

“The information society’s very life blood is freedom. Without openness, without the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers, the information revolution will stall, and the information society we hope to build will be stillborn.”

“The time has come to move beyond broad discussions of the digital divide. By now, we know what the problems are. We must now get down to the specifics of implementation, and set out ways to foster and expand digital opportunities.”

Just like to thank Ellen Papcak Rose for finding the spelling error in my earlier post. Ellen is an awesome awesome artist living in South Africa. The bulk of her work is graphic design for aids organizations. You can now buy her fabuolous artwork on tshirts and mugs at http://www.cafepress.com/spazastudio. Enjoy!

I really hate to admit this but I totally suck at foreign languages. I’ve taken Spanish, French and even Russian and only when plastered can I manage a couple sentances that usually winds up being a mix of all three. Hence my need with help translating CitizenSpeak campaign field captions into Spanish. My sister’s father-in-law did all the translations for the old CitizenSpeak. I don’t have the nerve to ask him to do it gain. Totally appreciate any help!

Proof that charge cards are dangerous things, I just entered CitizenSpak in the Webby award competition.