Liminal states

Katja Presnal’s Motrin Ad Makes Moms Mad

Motrin’s “viral” video making fun of babywearing mothers — timed for the start of International Babywearing Week — has, much to their PR firms amazement, led to a backlash.  As Allyson Kaplan’s Motrin’s Pain: Viral Video Disaster on Fast Company’s Radical Tech describes:

The viral video worked in the sense that it went viral but not in the way the marketers of Motrin were hoping for. Just hours after the campaign launched moms began blogging, tweeting and posting Facebook updates about how offensive the new Motrin campaign is to mothers. Women were so angered by the video that it became one of the most popular subjects tweeted about this weekend on Twitter. Talk about a PR disaster. Over 100 blogs featured headlines such as “Motrin Makes Moms Mad” to “Motrin Giving Moms a Headache”.

Tweets on Twitter are flying across the screen by the second using the hashtag #motrinmoms. Tweets read “RU FREAKING KIDDING ME? So many things wrong with that I don’t know where to start,” said @thecouponcoup. “I am shocked by that Motrin ad. Count me in on the boycott,” said @blondeblogger. “They totally do not get us at all,” said @DealSeekingMom.

Gosh.  Who’d a thunk it?

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Executive summary

Please take a minute to help by providing test data for an election monitoring project!

Details

Momentum on the Twitter Vote Report continues to build — Nancy Scola and Allison Fine’s excellent update from Monday already looks out of date, and as the steadily-growing partners list implies, we’re making excellent progress towards the ambitious goal of  providing national real-time feedback of election problems.  Most importantly, we’ve got a logo — designed by TechGrrl Deanna Zandt, and it’s gorgeous!

Also importantly, the planning for Friday’s Jam Session is coming along nicely, including on the software side: we’re getting user stories in place, as well as firming up the grammar for hashtags and the database design.  There’s enough in place that people are prototyping the first applications … and this morning, in the chat room, Dave said he was at the point where he could really use some test data for an iPhone app he’s working on.

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Welcome to those who have gotten here via my appearance on Meet the Bloggers! The Voter Suppression Wiki is a non-partisan hub of information and action around efforts to suppress votes in the 2008 U.S. elections. For more information, please see our strategy and talking points, Baratunde Thurston’s launch post on Jack and Jill Politics, and my series of posts on Liminal States (most of which are cross-posted on Pam’s House Blend and Oxdown Gazette).  If you’d like to get involved, please introduce yourself, check the help wanted, roll up your sleeves, and jump in!

If you’re hear to watch me, Brad Friedman and James Rucker on Meet the Bloggers, the video is at the end of the post.

If you’d like to help fight voter suppression, please get involved!

One of the things we’ve talked a lot about with the Voter Suppression Wiki is the importance of looking at bridging the gap from the online to the offline community.  A good way of understanding this is by imagining two congressional districts: Techville and Reality City.

Techville is relatively affluent, mostly-white, and as the name implies, a high-tech hotbed.  “Everybody” uses Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and a whole bunch of cool web 2.0 thingies I’ve never heard of — as my brother Gregory K would say, they’re pretty well connected.  Their local election board is well-funded and very proactive; they’ve got a great training program for election-day pollworkers, and many local high-tech companies encourage their employees to take the day off to volunteer.

Reality City, by contrast, is poorer, with a lot of minorities and Spanish speakers, and several large retirement communities.  It’s on the “wrong side of the digital divide”, so while there are some highly-wired residents  (especially students), computer usage in general is low.  Just like everywhere else in America, people are fired up about the election, and so registration has surged.  Unfortunately, there’s no money, so there aren’t enough voting machines to go around; and they haven’t been able to hire enough staff to validate all the registrations or find enough volunteers for election day.

Voter suppression is almost certainly likely to be more of a problem in Reality City than Techville; and so from an election protection perspective, that’s where we’d like to focus our efforts.  In practice, though, an online focus risks doing exactly the opposite.

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cross-posted at the Oxdown Gazette

The L.A. Times’ Tech blog* is reporting that Ted Ullyot — a former chief of staff to former AG Alberto Gonzales, a former AOL in-house lawyer and a former Kirkland & Ellis partner — is moving to San Fran to take the top legal job at Facebook.

— Facebook Sends Ted Ullyot a Friend Request, Dan Slater, Wall Street Journal Law Blog.

And just in case you were wondering:

As for his stint in the Bush administration, that was something he had long sought and something for which he remains grateful, Ullyot said. Despite the politically charged high drama, he said: “I have nothing but good to say about it.”

— Facebook hires general counsel as it continues to grow, Jessica Guynn, Los Angeles Times Technology blog

Unsurprisingly, there’s a protest group: We demand that facebook fire Alberto Gonzales’ right-hand man, Ted Ullyot.  283 members and counting.

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originally posted on Pam’s House Blend

Debbie Stone: Do you think it’s over?
Mike Tobacco: Yeah, sure.– the final lines from Killer Klowns from Outer Space, right before it becomes clear that no, it’s not over

Ah well.  After Monday’s brief shining moment of resistance from the House, the politics of business as usual asserted themselves.  With the aid of “sweeteners” (aka bribes) to bring holdouts on board, relentless arm-twisting from both parties leadership, and the sense even among skeptics that something needs to be done today, the bailout bill passed the House today.

Will the bailout bill as currently constructed work to stop the crisis? Most economists, even a lot of those like Roubini and Krugman who support the bill’s passage under the “better than nothing” theory, are skeptical — and so am I. I guess we’ll know in a few months, if not sooner. Which means that we should expect some major restructuring of the bill as things move forward.

And if as expected much of the money flows directly to the pockets of major shareholders and Wall Street executives, will Congress act to restrict profiteering? Lehman’s already handed out $2.5 billion in bonuses, and according to the Treasury’s reassuring conference call with financial institutions, the “restrictions” on executive compensation will be easy to evade. Again, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this.

One way or another, the fight for Wall Street accountability is far from over.

What next for No blank check for Wall Street? There are a few important things to do at this point:

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In addition to being a co-author on Tales from the Net, my brother Gregory K’s also a poet — best known for Fibs, fibonacci poetry, which wound up getting him a book deal after being featured on Slashdot.

In his latest, for this week’s poetry Friday, worlds collide:

I’M PRETTY WELL CONNECTED
(a Web 2.0 poem)
By
Gregory K.

I’m pretty well connected:
Facebook’s got my face.
I AIM and blog.
Of course I vlog.
Come see me at MySpace.

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Written jointly with Ronit Aviva Dancis

“Evan Bayh for Democratic VP Nominee” on Intrade Prediction Market

The last time we heard from Senator Evan Bayh was early July when he voted with the Republicans against all three amendments to strip telecom immunity from the FISA legislation. A month later, here was Max Bernstein’s Can Progressives Derail Evan Bayh’s VP Train via Facebook? kicking things off on Max and the Marginalized (“a band and a blog”):

At about 2am last night after a gig in Austin, we launched 100,000 Strong Against Evan Bayh for VP on Facebook. We have about 99,000 to go but we are growing at the rate of about 100 names per hour now.

FISA isn’t Bayh’s only issue in progressives’ eyes, of course; there’s also a few other minor matters, like him having co-sponsored the Iraq War Resolution, and the way his nomination would clash with Obama’s message of “change” (a point Mike Lux makes well in Opposing Bayh for VP) . So Max’ call struck a chord.

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Mail to the Senator Obama – Please, No Telecom Immunity and Get FISA Right mailing list. See the wiki for more context. 2200 members and growing…

Update, July 1: 8600+ members on myBO — moving into #2 in the top 10 groups. Coverage in The Nation, Wired, Slashdot, The New Right, and zillions of other pages. See the wiki for more! The Facebook group has over 300 people so far …

what’s an activism campaign these days without a Facebook presence?

so I set up the “Senator Obama – Please, No Telecom Immunity and Get FISA Right” Facebook group to make it easier to do outreach there. Many of us have a lot more FB friends than myBO friends, and with 20 invites/day it’s great for viral spread. In fact there are already 17 people there. A lot of people (including me) complain about Facebook groups’ lack of functionality, but they can easily get hundreds of thousands of members fairly quickly.

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I’m at a tutorial on Tuesday discussing “elections 2.0” at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, and one of the things I want to cover is Web 2.0 technologies’ positive role in countering deceptive campaign practices. I’m planning on using some examples from the Obama activism work I’ve been doing on Facebook, as well as some other sites I’ve tracked:

• the “know your rights” work the One Million Strong for Barack group did for Texas and Ohio. group members got calls from a couple of people who had attended the Texas caucuses saying how valuable it was
• the Courage Campaign’s “count every vote” petition in Los Angeles County, which led to counting most (not all) of the votes on the deceptive ballots
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From the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy blog:

We are pleased to announce that Clay Shirky will deliver the closing plenary keynote at CFP Technology Policy ’08.

Since the 1990s, Shirky has written, taught, and consulted on the social, cultural, and economic effects of Internet technologies and social media. His most recent book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, evaluates the significant role being played by technological advances on the formation and experience of modern group dynamics, citing such examples as Wikipedia and MySpace to demonstrate the Internet’s power in bridging geographical and cultural gaps.

Shirky’s hot-hot-hot around the internets these days, between the book (excellent reading!) and his Gin, Television, and Social Surplus talk at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference, so this is really exciting. And of course this ties in extremely well with the all-day Workshop on Activism and Education Using Social Networks running in parallel with other CFP activities the day before Shirky’s talk. Good news indeed!

We hope to have streaming video of the plenary talks, and will update the CFP blog with information once it’s confirmed; and we’ll be having some pre-conference discussions as well.  So please, stay tuned!

Andy Borowitz breaks the story in the Huffington Post:

In an act that campaign insiders said indicated an irrevocable break with his former pastor, Sen. Barack Obama today de-friended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Facebook.

It looks like all the fears about the divisiveness within the Democratic party are, if anything, understated. I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten. According to Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod:

“Every day, Rev. Wright was sending Sen. Obama new Facebook applications like ‘What Superhero Are You?’ and ‘What 1980’s Toy Are You?'” Mr. Axelrod said. “After awhile, enough is enough.”

Yeah really.

The One Million Strong for Barack group is reeling over the news. Discussion here.  Thanks to Wintana for posting this — there’s been a disgraceful lack of coverage in the mainstream media.

Facebook once again is in the middle of major flakiness right now: links to nowhere, spontaneous logouts. The best thing to do when something like this happens is to treat it as a sign that it’s a good time to take a break from Facebook for a little while. So I decided to write this blog post.

Given the high tensions on all sides, the ongoing troll infestation in the group, and examples in the election campaign of what certainly seem to be some Republican dirty tricks being played, it’s natural to wonder whether this is some kind of attack like those described in “How to Rig an Election”. Speaking as somebody who’s had a lot of software engineering and computer security experience, my initial answer is probably not.

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