There is terrific article in today's Politico on the impact of the Internet on the 2008 election written by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum entitled The Web: 2008's Winning Ticket. This is a must read for online political operatives.

Legal issues with privacy in social media stem from the nature of social media – an inherently communicative and open medium. The cliché is that in social media there is no expectation of privacy because the very idea of privacy is inconsistent with a “social” medium. Scott McNealy from Sun Microsystems famously drove home the point with his aphorism of “You already have zero privacy. Get over it.”

What would happen if Oprah endorsed my law firm? Are you wondering? Are you really? I don’t have a book to shill, or product to hawk other than my supreme skills in contract negotiation (I suppose). And parsing fair use, privacy and copyright law. But I do have thoughts on this week's two cosmic developments in the book publishing world: Google settles its 3-year old lawsuit with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, and Oprah intends to endorse the Amazon Kindle.

I do wonder: Which is the more important anthropomorphological event? (Is that even a word?)

I'm at today's discussion (thanks to Verizon for the great meeting space), and will update here and there with any notable comments and links...

12:35pm: David Almacy of Waggener Edstrom is the first speaker, talking about the early evolution of the White House web site. Interesting stuff on trying to measure impact and negotiate government regulations -- PLUS the inside scoop on the genesis of the BarneyCam.

12:38pm: Almacy -- who was Internet & E-Communications Director in the Bush White House -- talks about the ad hoc syndication efforts as they tried to get outside WhiteHouse.gov. Getting iTunes to create a government podcast section, getting RSS feeds into Google News, etc.

12:40: Tivo distributes podcasts. Who knew?...

We'll be doing some upgrades and housekeeping here this weekend, so please bear with us if the site is down for a few minutes here and there.

Just to keep the drumbeat going on my last post that we should move from the e-mail Congress grassroots strategy to a web-based system, I do think Congress has a role to play. I argue they shouldn't be forced to ramp up their server capacity to accommodate the deluge of form e-mails but, in return, they should agree to pay attention to web-based grassroots appeals.

Twitter is not a broadcasting medium. Much has been written about Twitter as the first “true” realization of the power of real-time social media. Twitter is an advocacy medium. Just ask Shaun Dakin.

Even though we have large cracks in our economic floor, innovation and product development have not gone by the wayside in the Tech industry (Apple and Google). Of course, these products were in the development queue before our country noticed its' maxed-out credit cards, dwindling bank accounts and dried-up LOCs. Companies will be cutting advertising budgets and it will have an impact on our digital strategies (less advertising revenue, less budget for growing online functions and features); however, we should be focused on coming out strong in 2009.

Two channels to pay attention to in 2009 are IPTV and 2D barcodes.

I was speaking yesterday with Cheryl Platt of EFX Media, a terrific marketing and media company based in Alexandria, VA. Cheryl is Senior Business Development Executive at EFX and, more to my immediate point, thinks about things a lot and creatively. Both Cheryl and EFX create targeted internal and external communications strategies for companies, with a great strength in video. On this point, I was asking Cheryl about her iPhone, or as Cheryl calls it, her “third screen”. I had never heard the term, so I wanted to learn more.

Oh, all right. I don't take it all back, but I do have to revise my previous opinion about Facebook.

Now that I've been using the sight for over a month, I have to concede that it's handier and more fun than I originally thought.