Too Bad You Never Knew Ace Hanna

Drinking from the Firehose: Why Obama Should Stay the Hell Off Twitter
Colin Delany [@epolitics] gives an interesting perspective on the question whether leading politicians should use Twitter:
But I’d also argue that Twitter is fundamentally a bad match for a Chief Executive, for exactly the same reasons that so many other people are drawn to it. [...]

It’s been a while since I’m back from the Personal Democracy Forum Europe. For a post-mortem of the conference I suggest these posts by other participants.
Micah L. Sifry: Hackers and Hacks: A Post-Mortem on PdF Europe in Barcelona
Markus Beckedahl: Erster Tag PdF-Europe
[Update]
Anna Ebbesen: PDF Europe – Day one round up
Astrid Haug: PdF Europe – Day [...]

Klaus-Peter Schöppner: „Partei der Mitte“: Der Chancentod der CDU
An interesting analysis of the state of things for the CDU before the German election campaign 2009.
Henry Farrell: Political scientists in public debate
This is a nice conversation starter about the roles political scientists should play in the public discourse about politics.
Joshua-Michele Ross: The Rise Of The Social [...]

Adam Rogers: Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League, and Making Magic
In all the Watchmen-Hype that is thrown our way, this is a welcome piece of reflective commentary on comics, superheroes, and some extraordinary gentlemen. Wired interviews the author of Watchmen, Alan Moore.
Bruce Sterling: What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at [...]

The German TV-program Elektrischer Reporter just published an episode about online activism. At the end of the program, after comments by among others Richard Rogers and Patrick Meier, you will find a sound bite by yours truly on political activism on the net:
Digitaler Aktivismus: aus dem Netz auf die Straße

It’s been quite a while since I returned from the conference “Social Web – Towards Networked Protest Politics?” in Siegen. So it seems high time for a little roundup.
The topic of the conference was the influence which different forms and uses of Social Media have on the practice of political activists. The papers covered an [...]

To Seth Godin we are living in a new world. A world where success does not depend on doing things the way they were done in the past. A world where playing it safe actually means betting the house. A world where the best way to success is to break with everything that seemed true [...]

In 2004 the French blogger and serial entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur [loiclemeur] posted on his blog 10 Reasons why Should a Politician Blog. For him blogs are a great way for politicians to start closer and deeper conversations with their constituencies. Le Meur‘s reasons are convincing and blogs have proven their value as communication tools [...]