Today I saw the below tweet from a genealogist that I follow, describing a new free photo enhancement feature from the Heritage.com genealogy website. In addition to choosing to enhance, and to colorize a photo, the new tool can identify a face in you photo, and bring it to life with some simple animation. And it’s really very very cool.
— Megan Smolenyakđľď¸ââď¸ (@megansmolenyak) February 25, 2021
So I thought I’d give it a try. These are my GGG Grandparents Vitus DeDera and Rose Bicek on their wedding day, September 21, 1912. Vitus was 21, and Rose was 20 on their wedding day. And as is common in photos of the era, smiles as we know them today were rarer. This wedding photographer didn’t shout out ‘say CHEESE’ before snapping this shot.
I’ve written about Vitus (Victor) and Rose, and what I’ve learned about their courtship here in my blog 15 years ago.
When I uploaded the above 109 year old photo to Heritage.com and asked it to ‘animate’ it, the tool first enhanced the photo, creating a much sharper image, and it then identified each face in the photo and asked me which one I wanted to animate. Not to play favorites, I naturally did them both. And here’s the results.
Vitus Dedera – animated
Rose Bicek Dedera – animated
Pretty cool, and a little bit unnerving isn’t it?! It’s amazing what a few blinks, a tilt of the head, and some lip movement can do to breathe life into a static image. Freaking realistic! And in the context of this photo, where I imagine Victor and Rose, holding still in their pose for this important photo, pondering their future lives together, their animated expressions convey a thoughtfulness that feels very genuine to me.
Of course, this technology would, I assume, work on any photo. But modern day moving images aren’t quite as, well, eye opening are they (see videos, animated gifs (hard G)). It’s in bringing old photos to life that I see the magic in this tool. It makes me think of the portraits on the walls of Hogwarts, or the Mirror of Erised in which young Harry Potter could see his dead parents as they were in life. Cool stuff, I’m gonna be making LOTS of these!
Few things are as satisfying as receiving the interest of others in what it is you have done and are doing in your life, and inviting you to speak with them about it. More humbling and flattering (and a bit intimidating as well), is if they want to record you, to better reach a larger audience and remain available long after the conversation.
In mid 2017, a friend and former colleague and employer, Nathaniel Pearlman, began a podcast called The Great Battlefield. What IS the Great Battlefield? Here’s how Nathaniel describes it in the opening of each episode;
A great political battle is being fought right now between progressives and the forces of reaction on the other side. This show is about the political entrepreneurs and other progressive leaders who are finding new or improved ways to fight.
It’s an excellent podcast, and Nathaniel’s genuine interest in his guests, their personal stories, and the work they are doing benefits from his personal expertise, experience, and thoughtful questions. And so I was very pleased to join him in a relaxed conversation about my own story about the path of my work in political technology, and the help of the many colleagues and collaborators along the way, himself included, upon whose smarts my career has depended. If you’ve got an hour to spare, give us a listen.
Three years ago, I wrote a blog post that I was and remain pretty proud of. It was titled Networks, Information, Engagement & Truthand in it I described the influence that two great American thinkers have had on my own thinking of the power of computer networks to advance and improve our political process, and the threat of âbad informationâ that could yet undermine it all.
One of the two mentioned thinkers was Thomas Jefferson. But I need to focus further on the other, J.C.R. Licklider. This is how I described my introduction to âLickâ and his work in that blog post;
Sometime around 1998, I read a wonderful history of the Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon called Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. And through that history, I was introduced to the work and writings of the other bookend of my thinking about technology and politics: J.C.R. Licklider.
In 1962, Licklider was the Director of the Information Processing Techniques Office at the Defense Departmentâs Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPANET was the predecessor of the Internet) and is considered among computer scienceâs most important figures. His prescient writings about computers, networks and their impacts, well, sort of blew my mind. The below excerpt from Where Wizards Stay Up Late captures the key Licklider (Just âLickâ to many) prediction that Iâve never forgotten:
âThe idea on which Lickâs worldview pivoted was that technological progress would save humanity. The political process was a favorite example of his. In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be âinformed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government.â He imagined what he called âhome computer consolesâ and television sets linked together in a massive network. âThe political process,â he wrote, âwould essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network to a good computer.ââ
The book didnât directly cite where this passage from Licklider came from, but the very next paragraph described his âseminal paperâ, Man-Computer Symbiosis. Written in 1960, Man-Computer Symbiosis describes Lickâs imagined future where âthe main intellectual advances will be made by men and computers working together in intimate association.â The paper is considered a key text in the field of computer science. (For a recent look back, check out this article, Another Look at Man-Computer Symbiosis by David Scott Brown, 1/3/18).
Given the placement of this mention of Man-Computer Symbiosis, immediately following the passage about âthe political processâ, I naturally imagined it as the source of the passage. Alas, it is not. And so for years I have shared this excerpt of Lickliderâs predictions on the impact of computer networks on our political process as I originally found it in Where Wizards Stay Up Late, still uncertain of its origin.
The Books That Led to Licklider
In 2001 a biography of J.C.R. Licklider titled The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop was published. I have a copy signed by the author at a bookstore event. And for years, my copy sat on a bookshelf, always hovering near the top of my âto-readâ pile, but never quite making it to the top spot until I finally finished it last year. And it led to a major breakthrough in my hunt for the source of Lickliderâs âpolitical processâ writing, and in doing so, to the reason that I owe J.C.R. Licklider an apology.
In The Dream Machine, Waldrop also singled out the same bit of writing that had captured my imagination for years since first reading it in Where Wizards Stay Up Late.
âThe key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information and knowledge through a good console connected through a good network to a good computer.â
In my blog post, I wrote;
Information itself can be good or bad, and technology cares little about which sort it disseminates and propagates. Avoiding ignorance, as Jeffersonâs hopes for civilization require, presume an ability to recognize and reject bad information to avoid being ill-informed. Licklider describes a âgood consoleâ and a âgood networkâ as needed for facilitating an âeffective interaction with information,â but not specifically âgood information.â An effective interaction with bad information is equally likely. Ignorance born of bad, but effectively delivered information can and does do damage to our political process.
Waldrop foretold my connection between Thomas Jefferson and Licklider, and also my notion that Licklider had innocently overlooked the possibility of âbad informationâ in his formulation. Waldrop wrote of Lickliderâs vision, âIt was a vision that was downright Jeffersonian in its idealism, and perhaps in its naĂŻvetĂŠ as well.â
More importantly, Waldrop did me the favor of citing the source of this passage. It came from a chapter titled Computers and Government that Licklider contributed to an anthology published by MIT Press in 1979 titled The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View. (In their defense, the authors of Where Wizards Stay Up Late included this volume in their bibliography, they just hadnât directly connected it to the âpolitical processâ passage.)
So to the Internet I turned, where I located and purchased a copy of The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View, so I could at last drink of Lickliderâs predictions for âComputers and Governmentâ direct from the source.
And guess what?! When I found my treasured passage in Lickliderâs 40-page chapter in its original content, I found that in the very next paragraph he addressed exactly the sort of potential bad actors and bad information that I had previously accused him of naively overlooking.
And THAT, is why I owe J.C.R. Licklider an apology. Licklider was fully aware of the potential pitfalls and dirty tricks that the network he was still helping to build, and he described several of those potential problems with the same level of prognosticative detail that characterized so much of his writing. Iâm sorry I suggested that this was a blind spot in his thinking.
And to correct this mis-characterization which I have perpetuated, below is a fuller excerpt from two out of forty pages that contained my oft-repeated political process passage, and Lickâs dose of reality that followed it. I have bolded the original passage, and added a few bracketed notes throughout.
It is technically possible to bring into being, during the remainder of this century, and information environment that would give politics greater depth and dimension than it now has [Remember, the NOW heâs writing about is 1979]. That environment would be a network environment, with home information centers (which would of course include consoles as well as television sets) as widespread as television sets are now. The political process would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. Many of the communications would be television programs or âspots,â but most would involve sending message via the network or reading, appending to, or setting pointers in information bases. Some of the communications would be real-time, concurrently interactive. The voting records of candidates would be available on-line [Generally speaking, they are], and there would be programs to compare the favorable information about themselves and critical assertions about their opponents. Charges would be documented by pointed to supporting records. Under the watchful control of monitoring protocols, every insertion would be âsigned,â dated, and recorded in a publicly accessible audit trail [But who makes and monitors the monitoring protocols?]. Because millions of people would be active participants in this process, almost every element of the accumulating information base would be examined and researched by several proponents, several opponents, and perhaps even a few independent defenders of honesty and truth. Nothing would be beyond question [The opposite has become the norm, EVERYTHING IS QUESTIONED], and the question would go, along with whatever answers were forthcoming, into the accessible record. Interactive politics would function well only to the extent that the citizens were informed, but it would inform them as the had never been informed before.
Such an environment and such a process would undoubtedly open up new vistas for dirty tricks. However, by bringing millions of citizens into active participation through millions of channels, it would make it more difficult for anyone to control and subvert any large fraction of the total information flow. It would give the law of large numbers a chance to operate, and within its domain tricks would be more like vigorous expressions of the feelings of individual citizens – unless, of course, a government [Russia, China] or a syndicate [Facebook] controlled and subverted the whole network. The clandestine artificial-intelligence programs, searching through the data bases, altering files, fabricating records, and erasing their own audit trails, would bring a new meaning to âmachine politics.â
It is not likely that any agency of the U.S. government will deliberately develop anything approaching computer-based politics, because congressman have such a reactionary attitude toward meddling with their traditional political process [Not so in todayâs hyper partisan atmosphere in Congress]. However, the development of networking for other purposes may create the facilities required for highly participatory political interaction. This is yet another reason for emphasizing the importance of computer system and network security, since it would be absolutely essential to orderly an effective interactive politics; one might even say that the security would have to be Watertight [A Watergate related pun?
Other issues and problems
The theme of government use of computers to control or repress the people deserves much more extensive examination, but the following notions will suggest some of the topics it might pursue:
Programmed instruction subverted to brainwashing in favor of a regime in power [Russian trolls and bots]
Programmed monitoring and censorship, achieved with the aid of natural language understanding programs
An automatic system that appends the governmentâs refutation to every article or program that is judged by the monitoring program to be critical of the government
Automated checking of adherence to government-prescribed schedules of activity and avoidance of government-proscribed activities
Automated compilation of sociometric association nets, showing who communicates with whom, who participates in what activities, who views which programs, and so on [Facebook]
[then, after much more good and insightful stuff, too much for me to re-type, Licklider concluded his chapter thusly]
Finally, the renewed hope I referred to is more than a feeling in the air. As a few thousand people now know – the people who have been so fortunate as to have had the first reich experience in interactive computing and networking – it is a feeling one experiences at the console. The information revolution is bringing with it a key that may open the door to a new era of involvement and participation. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information and knowledge through a good console connected through a good network to a good computer.
On Christmas Day 2018, I learned the terrible news that a friend and professional colleague of mine passed away four months earlier. During my eight years as a staffer in the United States Senate, Jeff was my closest colleague and friend. But I left the Hill in 2000, and Jeff did as well a few years later, moving to Florida. And so for years our interactions were reduced to their lowest common denominator of annual birthday greetings on Facebook. So my sadness at Jeffâs passing is compounded by my regret of having mostly lost contact.
Seeking to do something meaningful in his memory, and true to his very unique character, a fellow former colleague and I considered a few options, but then he nailed it with a four-letter type reply⌠SETI. If you knew Jeff, then youâll likely be quick to understand and agree. But if you didnât, then let me share this about Jeff;
If you work on Capitol Hill, your access to information is greater because of Jeff.
If you work in digital advocacy, your tools, emails, petitions, websites, streaming media, and sharing were innovated by Jeff.
If you sometimes see only clowns to your left, and jokers to your right, but bemusedly press on in the search for intelligence on earth, Jeff was stuck there in the middle with you and could laugh about it.
And if you believe in the power of technology to help boost that intelligence, to better ourselves as individuals and for all humanity, and if you hold out hope that there IS intelligence to be found in the universe, then you share a core conviction with Jeff that drove his work day to day.
So I invite you to join me in making a small contribution to a worthy cause in Jeffâs memory. Were he here Jeff would demur the effort. But heâs not, and itâs for us that we do this in his memory. And I know that Jeff would appreciate that whatever modest amount we might raise, is still more than nothing, and that is something. Thank you.
“Are you Master of your Domain?” “I am King of the County. You?” “Lord of the Manor.” “I’m Queen of the castle!” – Jerry, George and Elaine, in “The Contest“, Seinfeld, aired 11/18/92
I didnât know her. Her name was Kathleen Creighton, but she went by âCaseyâ, presumably a reference to her initials. Kathleen was well known on one of the earliest online communities, The Well (her WELL username was âcaseyâ). She was the BBS/online service reviewer for the San Francisco Bay Area computer newspaper MicroTimes, and a contributor to WIRED magazineâs Street Cred section. And, she was a tech savvy online pioneer who staked a digital claim on the domain name âcasey.comâ when she registered it in August of 1994. It was a time when the word, domain, would for many first bring to mind an episode of Seinfeld which added âmaster of my domainâ into our modern lexicon. But speak of an internet âdomain nameâ, and youâd likely draw a blank stare.
Thatâs what writer Joshua Quittner found and reported in his October â94 WIRED magazine article âBillions Registeredâ, in which he described the surprising number of Fortune 500 companies who had not registered their domain names, many of which had no idea what a domain name was or why they would want one. To demonstrate his point, Quittner registered the domain âmcdonalds.comâ in the process of educating the McDonalds Corporation what it was and why they should care. He ended that article inviting readers to email him at ronald@mcdonalds.com to offer suggestions on what he should do with the domain. He eventually relinquished it to McDonalds in return for a $3,500 donation to a Brooklyn school for computers and internet access. McDonalds was lucky.
Sadly, Kathleen Creighton passed away just a few months after she registered âcasey.comâ, before she ever had an opportunity to make any use of it. There was no web site, no email addresses, just a WHOIS registration record with a contact name and email address to whom my inquires went unanswered. When I next sent my inquiry to the technical contact on the registration record, they informed me of Kathleenâs recent demise, and transferred the domain to me. I had just happened to be the next âCaseyâ who was interested in staking the same digital claim that Kathleen had, and the domain became mine. Was I lucky? If so, itâs always come with the sad reminder that it came from somebodyâs passing.
The oldest capture of casey.com by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine is from December 27, 1996. And itâs a picture of the landing page of the Internet provider I used at the time (Capital Area Internet Service). The next capture is almost two years later, on December 2, 1998, shows a full website, and itâs awesome! A photoshop filter accident as the main image, image mapped navigation (WITH alternate text links), an animated GIF fake traffic counter, and YES, thatâs some Comic Sans! So when did casey.com launch on the World Wide Web? The clue is there under the the âlast updatedâ link in the upper left corner. Casey.com launched on January 24, 1998.
In the 20 years since, casey.com has evolved from a personal website, to a company site (during my self-employment phase when casey.com even sponsored my kids soccer teams), to a blog, and then to a neglected blog. Somewhere along the way social media diminished my necessity of having a personal website. Homesteading online has gotten simpler, and generic online tract housing now swamps the now old little houses on the digital prairie.
Even better than a URL, has been having an @casey.com email address. My âContactsâ application reveals how friends emails have changed over the years; @aol, @erols, @earthlink, @hotmail, @verizon, @gmail and so on as providers and their offerings come and go. It doesnât suck having an email address thatâs yours forever. One that rolls as easily as your name, because itâs your name. Sorry to all the other Chris Caseyâs out there, but Iâm chris@casey.com and have been for more than 20 years. More recently it was a thrill to give my new daughter-in-law her own casey.com email address.
A couple times each month, I receive inquiries not unlike my outreach to Kathleen Creighton those many years ago, asking if Iâd be willing to sell casey.com. The short answer is âNo, casey.com is not for saleâ. A longer more honest answer is, âEverything has a price. If your offer means a life of wealth and leisure, Iâm listening.â Â Who knows? Plenty of domain names have sold for that much and more (though they tend to be nouns, not names). But thatâs just a nice daydream. Deep down my real domain dream is that casey.com, my little slice of digital real estate, remains in my family for their use for many years to come.
âThe day the news of Caseyâs death was announced, people started testifying online. Dozens of people revealed that their first welcoming email came from Casey, and that she had provided free, unpublicized technical support as they learned their way around the WELL. At her funeral, her family was surprised to find Caseyâs family and face-to-face friends outnumbered by a factor of ten by all these people she had known âthrough the Internetâ.
My day will come too. But there are all kinds of Caseys; first name Caseys, last name Caseys, nickname Caseys, businesses named Casey⌠and whether itâs my own family or someone else who becomes its new master, casey.com will carry on after me. Until that time, with gratitude to Kathleen, to Casey, my turn as Lord of the Virtual Manor that is casey.com continues.
Coca-Cola paved the way. When a company launches a new version of their product, and it sucks, they sheepishly re-offer the original version and call it âClassicâ, as Coca-Cola did 31 years ago after customer backlash following the launch of New Coke.
I recently learned that Salsa has done the same with their online advocacy tools.
Iâm not new to Salsa. I actually worked for a competing vendor, NGP VAN, for seven years. Since then, I have had extensive opportunities to use Salsaâs tools. I learned through that experience that they didnât suck. Salsa had strengths and weaknesses when compared against what I was familiar with, but I came to learn and appreciate what was good about them, and to use them effectively.
When I recently started in a new job and sought online advocacy tools to use, I did a quick review of alternatives, but lazily went with Salsa as it was what I had used most recently. I had no reason to suspect that I was purchasing something different than the Salsa tools familiar to me. Their website describes simply âOnline Advocacy Softwareâ. So when I signed a contract purchasing âSalsaEngageâ, I expected I was buying the familiar tools that I told their sales rep I had used for years. When I first launched and began to explore them, I found a different looking interface, but just assumed they had been upgraded (Iâve looked at that âI want the new interfaceâ login screen checkbox for a long time already).
Instead, over the course of two months, I found that SalsaEngage was a completely new product. And I found it to suck. From the very start, the most fundamental first step of importing new contact records and attempting to assign them to a group code (now called a segment) proved ridiculously challenging. Attempts to learn how to do this from Salsaâs support only compounded my frustration⌠âYes, I have already read the online documentation that it took you two days to refer me to, and No, it still doesnât answer the question I asked.â
That was only the beginning. I soon learned that the only batch option for making edits to multiple records was to DELETE THEM ALL (maybe adding a group code, or updating some other common field would be useful instead of deleting them all?). I also found that the reporting on A/B testing of emails in one view didnât match the results shown in another view of Salsaâs interface (who clicked? who unsubscribed? If Salsa Engage has these answers, I couldnât find them.)
My patience exhausted, I informed Salsa that I wished to terminate our contract and requested a refund for the remaining 10 months of unused service for the year that we had prepaid. And I received the following reply,
âThank you for your message. Yes, we did receive your message and I was speaking with my supervisor before getting back to you. SalsaEngage is a stripped down, very on-rails tools that we offer for users who are not looking for a ton of customization or flexibility with their email, advocacy, and fundraising needs. After reviewing your concerns and frustrations, I believe that SalsaClassic would be a much better fit for you and your organization, and would be more than happy to setup a time to show you a demo of the tool to ensure that it can and will meet your needs. What’s more, after speaking to my supervisor, I can offer you SalsaClassic at the same price you were paying for SalsaEngage, which is at a discount.â
And there it was, Classic Coke! For the first time a distinction was made between the product I was given, SalsaEngage, and the product I believed I had purchased, Salsa âClassicâ. Despite the fact that I had described myself as an experienced Salsa user, there had been no previous mention that I was buying a âstripped downâ version of the tools I expected. Would I now like to receive what I had originally asked for? My response was simply, âNo! Thanks for the offer, but NO! Itâs too late.â To which I received the below reply from my Salsa âClient Success Agentâ:
I completely understand the frustrations that you experienced and I want to apologize again that you were not shown the SalsaClassic tool initially when you were looking at our services. However, after speaking with the upper management team, because your organization signed a contract with Salsa for 12 months of service, we are not going to be able to cancel your account. We can, however, offer you the SalsaClassic platform, at the rate you’re currently paying for SalsaEngage – and, I got approval for us to credit your organization for the two months that you spent on SalsaEngage that you feel like was a waste.
Really Salsa? Is this how you do business?
Contractually, Salsa may be able enforce our 12-month contract. Ethically, they misled me into purchasing a product that was not what I had every reason to expect I was getting. Then only after I had wasted my time learning how badly SalsaEngage sucks, offered me their never before mentioned âClassicâ version.
I let my Salsa âClient Success Agentâ know that I wanted to speak with someone in their âupper managementâ, and after a week of silence, I repeated that request. I was contacted by Salsaâs âDirector of Client Successâ, and made clear that the only successful outcome for me would be a terminated contract with a refund of the unused amount. He said that would be a âheavy liftâ, but that heâd see what he can do. That was a month ago, and Iâve heard nothing back.
I wish Salsa had done the right thing by offering me an apology and a refund. They chose instead to hold me hostage as a customer, bound either to an inadequate product or an outdated one. They can do that. My responsibility to our community is to share this story of my experience as a cautionary tale.
Somethingâs gone very wrong in the Labs. And I want you to know, in my humble opinion, this Salsa Sucks.
I’m playing around with some online advocacy tools and I created this petition as an experiment. If you’re reading this, help me out and sign the petition.
Way  back in May 2001, I spoke at a forum hosted by American University on the topic of Congress on the Internet. For my remarks, I humbly submitted my suggesgtion for what I believed to have been the  Top Ten Milestones for Congress on the Internet up to that point.
And #4 on my list was “Animations Abound: Waving flags, flying letters, & Rep. Traficant âBanginâ Awayâ”. The Traficant reference came from this blurb I wrote in a March 1997 online update to my book, The Hill on the Net. Here’s what I wrote;
THE ANIMATED REPRESENTATIVE
I wondered who would do it first. Which member of Congress would go beyond the standard official portrait on their home page and use animation to show themselves in action; smiling widely, giving a thumbs up, or offering a virtual handshake. I guess it should come as no surprise that a member who is well known for his animated floor speeches would not be happy with a gif that sat still. Representative James Traficant of Ohio has the first animated photo that I’ve seen on a member of Congress’ home page, and it’s a hoot.
The animation, shown at right, shows Rep. Traficant wielding a piece of 2×4, like a batter warming up to swing. On the board is his motto, “Bangin’ Away in DC’. He was well known for his outrageous one-minute speeches, which often included his appeal to ‘beam me up’. He was also well known for his uniquely difficult to describe hairstyle. (You can find some of his finest moments here and here).
Traficant was expelled from Congress in 2002, only the second member of Congress to suffer that fate since the Civil War, following his conviction for accepting bribes, making congressional staff work on his farm and boat, witness tampering, destroying evidence, and filing false tax returns. He served seven years in prison for these crimes. He died yesterday following a tractor accident on his Ohio farm.
Rest in Peace Rep. Traficant, and a hat tip to whomever it was on your staff that created that bangin’ animated GIF when they weren’t cleaning your boat.
It was in 2002, when I was working on Janet Reno’s gubernatorial campaign, that I produced my most memorable political animated GIF (and for the record, count me in the ‘Hard G Pronunciation’ camp). The campaign had smartly embraced the SNL spoof of Reno, a bit titled ‘Janet Reno’s Dance Party’. The Reno campaign hosted fundraisers under the same name, and agreed to my suggestion that we animate a dancing Janet for our website’s promotion of the events. Somehow, it seems to me anyway, that my jerky attempt at animation mimicked well how most might imagine Janet Reno awkwardly dancing. (Coincidentally, Traficant was no Reno fan, having once belittled her as “a good prospect to run for governor of Beijing“)
And another hat tip the humble animated GIF, which fell out of use, but is now enjoying a wonderful resurgence. If you’re interested in learning more, this history from PBS titled Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium is well worth the seven minutes. Enjoy!
At itâs current rate of growth it is expected at at some point this month, June of 2014, the number of websites on the Internet will surpass the one billion mark. The first website was launched on August 6, 1991 by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee. Â By mid-1994 there were 2,738 websites on the Web. And by the end of that year there were more than 10,000.
On June 2, 1994, the office of Senator Kennedy released a press release announcing the launch of their official website, the first for any member of Congress. It was developed and hosted by the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The same release shared a public email address for the Senator, joining just a handful of Senators accepting email from the public by that point. And it also detailed the Senatorâs previous means of online outreach to his constituents, including a network of dial up bulletin boards, ftp and gopher servers, and postings in Usenet newsgroups.
Press release announcing the launch of Sen. Kennedy’s website, June 2, 1994.
Being old enough to remember, and being able to remember, are two different things. And itâs truly difficult to recall the World Wide Web in mid-1994. Before Amazon.com, craigslist and eBay. Before Netflix, Google or PayPal. Before Whitehouse.gov, and only shortly after Yahoo. Every baby born since is arriving into a much more webbed world than their parents ever imagined. Every minute of the day approximately 255 babies are born world wide. And in that same minute on the World Wide Web, approximately 571 new websites are created.
When the Senateâs own website was launched almost a year and a half later in October 1995, Senator John Warner of Virginia, then chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, thanked the many staff of the Rules Committee and Sergeant at Arms and Secretaryâs offices involved in the effort. And he also included, âAdditional thanks to many of those Senators and their high-technology staff members who were early adopters of this emerging technology, and who indeed gave us the impetus to move forward to this day.â
Twenty years ago today I was 28 years old, and working for Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts as his Systems Administrator. I was excited by the possibilities of exploring the intersection of technology and politics, and I was very fortunate to collaborate with others much smarter than myself to push the boundaries of what had yet been done. Jeff Hecker, Jock Gill, John Mallery, Eric Loeb, and Laura Quinn were the firsts among so many others Iâve been able to work with over more than 20 years in online politics, and Iâm very grateful to each of them.
The first long distance telegraph message from the U.S. Capitol was sent by its inventor Samuel Morse, asking his recipient the deep question, âWhat hath God wrought?â. He didnât get an answer, but a question in reply, âWhat is the news from Washington?â. Today, much of the news from Washington comes from our modern telegraph, the Internet. How will it arrive in another 20 years, or another 100?
When Senator Kennedy passed away in 2009, I wrote this remembrance about his impact on online politics. If he had not become the first member of Congress on the web 20 years ago, some other member would eventually have been some time later. But Kennedy was, and among the very many much larger accomplishments in his long career in public service, itâs still one worth remembering.
A simple, cheap and functional stand for your phone.
The alarm clock on my dresser seems to be getting farther away. In the middle of the night, or first thing in the morning, without my glasses on, I have absolutely zero chance of decoding the greenish blur that I see into anything that resembles numbers. I need a clock closer to my bed. And I already have one! My iPhone, which is always at home on my nightstand as I sleep, recharging for the day ahead. But with the phone laying flat, a quick glance at the time with head on pillow ain’t easy. I needed a stand.
Search online and you’ll find you can easily spend from $5 to $25 for one. Happily I found an easier option for the price of two large binder clips from my desk. My thanks to this guy for showing me the way!
