Congratulations, Sen. Byrd!

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Tonight at midnight, Senator Robert Byrd will set the record for the longest tenure in the U.S. Congress.  His time in the House and the Senate adds up to over 56 years.

Byrd, of course, began his career as a “community organizer” – founding his own local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.  It was here that Byrd’s leadership skills were first on display, as he recruited the first 150 members to the chapter.  Klan officials urged him to go into politics.  Byrd has, of course, been exalted as a leader among Democrats in the Senate.  And when the opposing Republicans took control of the chamber from 1981-1987 and 1995-2007, finally found a minority group he could agree with.

Still, who knew that the founder of the local chapter of an organization dedicated to the harassment of racial, ethnic, and religious groups could one day be crowned as the longest-tenured Member of Congress in history?

It’s in the dictionary now, and can’t be “unworded”

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The verb “unfriend” is in the Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year.  (It is also now officially a word.)

Of all the verbiage to come out of social networking and new online environments, it’s interesting that unfriend – the negative act of rescinding a connection – takes this honor.  The inclusion and exclusion of words in dictionaries is more a measure of culture than technology – technology creates new terms every day, but to be included in popular language those terms must have a crossover appeal that removes them from the realm of technical jargon and into the realm of word you might read in a newspaper article.

When most of us “unfriend” someone, it’s not because of an offline relationship that has gone south, but because the online relationship was more than we could handle.  Anyone with a Facebook account has had the friend who constantly sends requests or shares too much information.  Most people on Twitter have followed a friend who peppered their feeds with such witticisms as, “Making a sandwich and can’t decide – grape or strawberry jelly?!?”  Speaking of Twitter, after a spike earlier this year their new user numbers seem to be leveling off,and big companies that were excited to enter the medium have become absentee Tweeters.

In other words, we are settling into these new online environments by shifting from the mindset of signing up every new and shiny community or connecting with every long-lost high school class.  Perhaps we are getting better, both in terms of who we connect with and where we connect, at prioritizing what is best and most useful for us individually – and unfriending the rest.

App shoot

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

Upon reflecting more about recent, high-profile rejections from Apple’s App Store, one thing is becoming apparent: with the iPhone/iPod platform is gaining popularity, more developers are investing time and resources writing software for it only to see their creations rejected.

The closed-door approach makes sense for Apple – since their platform is the first of its kind, any questionable use would reflect back on their highly-recognizable brand rather than an anonymous developer.  If Saturday Night Live legend Garrett Morris developed a game for the iPhone called “Gonna Get Me a Shotgun and Kill all the Whities I See,” Apple would bear the brunt of the protests for allowing it rather than Morris.  (When Morris famously – and hilariously – sang that line on the air in 1976, the NBC switchboard probably got more calls than Morris’s home phone.  By citing the actual sketch, do I avoid somehow being called a racist for quoting it?)

But the closed door has implications for potentially revolutionary uses of mobile technology.  In 2008 a developer created an excellent application for the Obama Campaign, allowing volunteers to prioritize their contacts for get out the vote calls.  If the time and effort invested in creating an app is possibly wasted, how will small, volunteer-driven campaigns for local or Congressional offices – the types of campaigns who could really use the technology – justify exploring the possibilities of the platform?

Is there a “settle out of court” app?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

According to Althouse, Apple rejected an iPhone application called “BobbleRep.”  BobbleRep was a directory of Members of Congress illustrated by bobbleheaded caricatures – or, as Apple called then,  “content that ridicules public figures.”

The app itself sounds pretty useful – you can find out who your representatives are based on your GPS coordinates.  It provides contact information so you can call their offices.  The caricatures make it fun to look at, but the actual operation is potentially very useful.

For Apple, though, these are dangerous waters.

Aside from the silliness of rejecting an app because of political cartoons, it adds another high-profile app rejection.  The countdown to the inevitable anti-trust lawsuit has already started.  And Google just reported that it spent $1 million on lobbying in the third quarter of 2009 alone.

Not to mention that when it comes Members of Congress being ridiculed and embarrassed, caricatures are the least of their problems.

From the “well, someone is making money, right?” file

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The New York Times has a story in its tech section on Sunday that could just as easily have appeared in Style.  The piece profiled Rent the Runway, a company which rents high-end designer dresses online – just like Netflix does with movies.

Dressflix, if you will.

The silver lining of a down economy is that new markets emerge, and the astute businesses that find those new markets can carve out a niche for themselves.  That’s especially true for Rent the Runway, which makes money by helping people save money.

MSNBC would never say that (about a Democrat)

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“Barack Obama is a stupid #$@&ing socialist!”  So said the Twitter feed @MSNBCHeadlines, which has since been discontinued after a profanity-laced Twitter tirade (twirade?) on Friday, as documented by TechCrunch.  Previously, it had just served up exactly what it promised – MSNBC headlines, without comment or blue language.

It’s easy to chalk this up to the feed being hacked, but as TechCrunch reports that Twitter account was never owned by MSNBC.  So here’s another possibility: @MSNBCHeadlines was a sleeper Twitter account built for the express purpose of saying things like “Chris Matthews sucks.”  But in order to maximize the impact, the owner of the account simply fed MSNBC headlines for a few months to build a follower base.

It’s pretty easy to do, and it might not be the last time we see something like this.  With big 2010 House and Senate races coming up, now would be the time to register a Twitter account like “@PASenateHeadlines.”

Let’s say you work for Joe Sestak, the Democrat Congressman challenging Arlen Specter for the nomination.  It would be easy to feed the account with the daily news stories about the race that run in various newspapers around the state thanks to Google news.  There wouldn’t need to be any slant to the stories, and the lack of a slant would attract more followers; interested parties (especially reporters) would follow the account just to get straight news from various sources that they may have missed.

The account exists on autopilot and seems innocuous for a few months.  Then, weeks before election day, you take more direct control of the account.  Instead of automatically feeding it any old story about the Pennsylvania Senate race, you serve up more consistent anti-Specter news.  If you have some potentially damaging information about Specter (like video of him hanging out with George W. Bush) you could use this Twitter feed to attract attention.

Maybe @MSNBCHeadlines got hacked.  But maybe it was a prank that provided a blueprint for an effective campaign tactic.

Benchmarks for 2010

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

It isn’t the most refined ad in the world, but in a post at RedMassGroup Massachusetts Republican Congressional candidate Tom Wesley is holding incumbent Rep. Richard Neal’s vote in favor of the health care bill against him:

Neal is pretty entrenched in MA-02, having not even faced a Republican challenger since 1998.  No Republican has represented the district in Congress since 1949.  But with depressed, blue collar economic areas such as Springfield and Chicopee, there may be a chance for Wesley to at least make a representative effort if the Republicans can hang the health care bill (and it’s price tag) on Democrat incumbents.  While 45% of the vote in November 2010 wouldn’t put Wesley in office, it might be a sign that Congressman Neal would head back to Washington, D.C. in the minority party.

How big was the fall of the Wall?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Today, the world commemorates the symbolic victory in the Cold War against Soviet Communism.  It is telling about the nature of humanity how that oppressive regime, despite having occasional military advantages, collapsed under its own weight.

There is no shortage of excellent intellectual commentary about what the Berlin Wall meant – and means.  But sometimes it is the mundane or non-intellectual items which put the development in the best perspective.

When the news of the wall falling broke, my fifth grade history teacher told me that it was one of the most significant events of my lifetime.  Still, it was hard for a ten-year-old to grasp history.  A few years later, I heard an Elton John song from the mid-80s with the line “The reputation / of the woman you’re datin’ / Is ’bout as nasty as the Berlin Wall.”  As poetry goes, it wasn’t Bernie Taupin’s best effort.  But the fact that the Berlin Wall was such an easy simile puts the wall itself in perspective.  It wasn’t just a dividing line – it was a kill zone for anyone seeking the fundamental human right of freedom.  Nasty indeed.

The relief the world felt after the wall unofficially ended a half-century of nuclear brinkmanship was also chronicled by songs that actually made it to the top 40 charts.  Trite?  Maybe.  There are millions people unshackled from Soviet slavery who could offer poignant, personal testimonials about what the fall of the Wall meant to them.   But what better way to see the broad impact of an event than to examine how it seeps into society’s personal time – such as art and pop culture?