Category: Technology

Tracking Beers with Untappd

Beer, Diversions, Guide to Life, Technology

Chris on UntappdI will be the first to admit that I frequently demonstrate symptoms of OCD. It’s not crippling, or anything weird, but I frequently like to count and categorize things. In some cases it can be useful, for example it has added to my success and enjoyment of constructing my family tree. Other times, it serves no purpose at all other than to satisfy my own curiousity. That was the case when I spent a day  counting and categorizing my t-shirts, just so I could understand the big picture of my t-shirt collection. Or when I  took a photo of myself (almost) everyday for a year in order to make a short movie..

I also love technology and gadgets. And in the age of the iPhone, I’m a fan of many apps that allow me to check-into locations, track my runs, sort my music, and find my friends.

For the last two years, one app in particular has especially caught my imagination, bringing my love of tracking the mundaneness of daily life crashing into my love of gadgets, with another of my loves, beer. That app is called Untappd, and it’s a must have for any curious beer lover with a smart phone. For me, using Untappd has greatly enhanced my appreciation of beer. It has driven me to explore a broader variety of styles, visit breweries, bars and other places to imbibe, seek out new ‘distinct beers’ that I’ve never had before (at least since I started tracking them), to enjoy all of that socially with other beer loving friends on Untappd. Sometimes this quest for unique beers can be daunting. My wife rolls her eyes at me at every restaurant visit, as I quickly compare their beer offerings with my history on Untappd, looking for something new. And she has spent countless extra hours waiting for me as I peruse the beer section of the grocery store, like an indecisive kid at a candy counter. Once, when I brought home a six-pack of some very sub-par beer from the store, she asked, “I thought you loved good beer, why would you buy that?”. And she again rolled eyes as I explained that I needed to drink bad beer in order to be able to appreciate good beer, and besides, it was one that I had yet to check into on Untappd.

When Untapped added the ability to post photos with your beer check-ins, my worlds collided again. I’m well known for being my own favorite photo subject, and what better to join me in a picture than the beer I’m currently drinking and checking in? And having recently collected 500 such beer self-portraits, the occasion called for another movie starring me, straightforwardly titled 500 Beers.

All this beer drinking has also led me to revisit the hobby of home-brewing that I dabbled in for a few years in the mid-90s. The enjoyment of sharing your own home brew with friends is better still when it can be shared via Untappd. So get to know me, and if I have any to spare I will happy share with you a truly unique beer check-in courtesy of Casey’s Brews.

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What Gowalla Got Wrong

Technology, Travel

Last week Gowalla released the newest version of their location-based application, and they ruined it.  These aren’t easy words coming from me.  I have been an avid user and evangelist of Gowalla for over a year.  I would be more precise with that info, but the new Gowalla no longer lets me view my own check-in history.  Accumulating those check-ins was one of the primary points of using Gowalla, I was somewhere around 1,220 unique places that I had checked-into since I first started using Gowalla, but now neither the website or iPhone application display this information to me.  So where I have been and when, information I have saved one thumb tap at a time at locations both exciting and mundane (mostly the latter) is now lost to me.  Why did I bother?

Check-ins vs. Stories

The new Gowalla has abandoned the concept of the ‘check-in’ and replaced it with the ‘story’.  Originally conceived as a digital passport, Gowalla’s distinctive stamps could be collected by globetrotters and homebody’s alike.  I loved the opportunity to look for trips and featured stamps to collect wherever my travels took me, when such opportunities occurred.  Sharing photos and comments with my friends and family on Gowalla was wonderful.  But day to day my check-ins were for myself; my neighborhood, the park on the way to work, the grocery store, my office. I’m not so egotistical that I think anyone but myself gave a crap where I was, but I still checked-in, for myself.

But with the new Gowalla I’m not just ‘checking-in’, I’m telling a ‘story’.  Guess what Gowalla, the huge majority of my check-ins don’t amount to a good story, I was only interested in knowing how often I’ve been to that grocery store.  And it’s not just my own numbers I’m missing.  As I look at different spots on Gowalla, I can no longer tell how often anyone has been there.  Is this spot popular, or a one-off joke? Gowalla no longer lets me know.

Badges and Items

One of the motivating reasons to bother checking-in to new locations on Gowalla was to earn badges for doing so.  Badges were earned for a wide variety of reasons, sometimes just for where you were such as a state badge, or for the type of location you were at such as a coffee shop, or for completing a ‘trip’ or pre-defined collection of locations.  In the new Gowalla, all but the state badges are apparently gone.  I feel like the medals have been stripped off my chest!

Another distinguishing factor about Gowalla was items, virtual collectible knick-knacks to be gathered, dropped, hunted, swapped and hoarded.  Items made Gowalla a virtual treasure hunt, and while I expect many users enjoyed Gowalla without ever understanding or embracing the point of items, many others enjoyed the hunt and the fun of moving items in this quirky virtual world.  Well kiss them goodbye.  Your hard earned collection of items is gone. Sorry.

Guides

Why did Gowalla seemingly work to take all of the fun out of their app? I believe they are admitting defeat in the battle of the check-in vs. Foursquare, and seeking to re-invent themselves.  To me the appeal of Gowalla over Foursquare has always been their superior interface, custom stamps and unique user experience. Gowalla was to Foursquare as Macs are to PC’s, not as widely adopted but WAY cooler. But cool isn’t always enough, numbers count, and Foursquare has the numbers. So Gowalla had to abandon the ‘check-in’ and create a new justification for existing, as a travel guide.

With content provided by major entertainment and travel resources, as well as their own users, Gowalla is well equipped to be a wonderful digital travel guide, suggesting spots for me to ‘check-in’, no wait ‘start a story’ at that I might otherwise have overlooked.  But my commuter lot and grocery story aren’t worthy of a travel guide, or a story, and any reason I ever had for checking into them before has been taken away.

I remain hopeful that some of these features that have made Gowalla such a pleasure for me to use will return.  I understand that technology companies much strive to innovate, improve, and be profitable.  But they should also recognize when they’ve made a mistake and damaged their product or business and attempt to recover.  I hope that Gowalla can do so and bring me back, but for right now they have lost me and I’m ‘checking-out’.

 

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April Fools or Real Life?

Politics, Technology, The Hill on The Net

Excerpted from The Hill on The Net: Congress Enters The Information Age

In March 1994, an acquaintance forwarded to me an E-mail message he had received from a mailing list to which he subscribed.  The message referred to a column by John C. Dvorak that appeared in the April 1994 issue of PC Computing magazine, and described a legislative effort under way in the United States Senate.

In his column Dvorak described Senate Bill 040194, a bill “designed to prohibit anyone from using a public computer network (Information Highway) while the computer user is intoxicated”, and also make it illegal to “discuss sexual matters”.  The bill, sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy and co-sponsored by Kennedy, was crafted by members of Congress who know so little about computer networks that they think the “Info Highway” is an actual road.  The column reported Senator Pat Moynihan asking “if you needed a driving permit to ‘drive’ a modem on the Information Highway!  He has no clue what a modem is, and neither does the rest of Congress”.

One ominous result of the bill was the FBI’s plans to conduct wiretaps “on any computer if there is any evidence that the owner uses or abuses alcohol and has access to a modem.”  A new law enforcement group called the Online Enforcement Agency was said to be placing want ads soliciting wiretap experts.

With strong support from Baptist Ministers and no member of Congress willing either able to understand technology or “come out and support drunkenness and computer sex”, the bill was on the fast track to passage.  Readers were told they could register their complaints with Ms. Lirpa Sloof in the Senate Legislative Analysts Office, whose “name spelled backwards says it all.”

I would have probably found the column to be more amusing had I not been frustrated at how it had chosen to pick Senator Kennedy as a target.  But the last thing I’d expected was that anybody could actually believe it to be true.  I did have the advantage of certainty.  I knew this story was not true.  And there were plenty of clues in the story itself to help reader reach that conclusion.  The title, “Lair of Slop”, is an anagram for April Fools.  At the end of the column, “Lirpa Sloof…Her name spelled backward says it all.”, April Fools.  And the bill number itself, 040194, a date, April Fools Day.  But even these clues did not prevent a large number of people from believing it.  It didn’t take long after PC Computing hit mailboxes and newsstands before the first calls and E-mails began arriving in Kennedy’s office, followed shortly by faxes and letters.  The offices of the other Senators mentioned in the article also started hearing from outraged constituents.

I was surprised that people could believe the story, but my surprise grew even more when people I knew personally and who knew of my efforts to put Senator Kennedy online told me of their concern over this bill.  Even Jonathan Gourd, sysop of North Shore Mac, the BBS on which Kennedy’s online efforts had begun, posted a message to his system encouraging readers to contact Congress and protest this bill.  The whole tale was taken as fact by an even wider audience after initial messages of alarm, posted by people who’d read and believed the article, convinced many others of the Senate’s evil intentions without them having had the opportunity to read the story and perhaps catch the clues for themselves.

It was apparent that this story had the potential to become an “urban legend” of the Net.  Just like other oft retold and wildly inaccurate stories such as the one about the proposed FCC modem tax or the dying boy who wanted Get Well cards, the Senate’s Information Highway Drunk Driving Bill was proving to be a tale with legs that could rapidly traverse the Net.

In an attempt to prevent Dvorak’s column from spawning another net legend, I posted an explanatory message (with the article included) to the ACE groups mailing list and encouraged readers to repost it where appropriate to help prevent the rumor’s spread.  This message did get around and was reprinted in the widely read RISKS-FORUM Digest among other places.  On March 30 a brief article about the hoax appeared in the Washington Post.  These efforts seemed to work, calls from concerned constituents decreased.

In late October I received an E-mail message from a gentlemen who described himself as a Ph.D. in physical chemistry and an Internet user.  He wrote that he had read the article and was concerned about this bill.  Explaining passionately why he felt the bill was wrong, he offered his own expertise to Senator Kennedy as a scientific consultant to help prevent such misguided legislation.  I e-mailed him an explanation and by that afternoon he’d sent a note expressing his own embarrassment at having missed the clues and believed the story.  He was the last person I heard from on the subject.

In the year following Dvorak’s April Fools stab at the Senate, the Senate passed the Digital Telephony or wiretap bill.  It’s purpose is to protect the government’s ability to eavesdrop on the Information Superhighway.  In June 1995 the Senate passed the Communications Decency Act, a bill sponsored by Senator Exon of Nebraska, an effort to “clean up” the dark alley’s of the Internet and make them safe for children.

I have a much better understanding now of the people who didn’t see the humor in John Dvorak’s April Fools joke.  Ironically, Senator Leahy has been the Senate’s most outspoken advocate for protecting the Net from misguided and damaging government intrusion, and not the sponsor of such as Dvorak’s column made him.  Kennedy and Moynihan, both made out as ignorant of the Net in the article, were actually both among the 16 Senators to oppose the Exon bill when it came to a vote in the Senate.

 

 

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My Online Evolution, Part I

casey.com, Technology

For most of the last 15 years I have had some sort of online presence or other.  Working at the intersection of politics and technology means I have a closet full of campaign yard signs and a GoDaddy account with a collection of domain names, most important among them being my own, casey.com.  Over the years, both the technology and the content of my online world have evolved along with the tools and my own interests.  Once such change came this week, when I moved my blogs from TypePad to Posterous (on which this will be one of my first full postings).  Over the last couple of years, Facebook and Twitter have largely replaced my personal blog as my primary online outlet and I could no longer justify paying $15 a month for a blogging when very good free alternatives were available.  The process of moving old blogs posts from one system to another is a bit like moving from one home to another.  The tasks gets can get sidetracked as you re-read old posts, just as you might get off task while moving by going through an old box of photos.  And it was that sort of reflection, combined with a New Year’s determination to write more, that inspired this blog posting.  Probably of interest to few but myself, but it’s always been the case that I am my own main target audience online.

Casey_web_1998

My own online presence was established sometime in 1997.  The earliest capture of casey.com from The Internet Archive is dated December 27, 1996 and shows a welcome screen from CAIS, the Capitol Area Internet Service, my first ISP.  Sadly, the whole year of 1997 is a black whole, and it’s not until December 1, 1998.  The oldest ‘What’s New‘ entry from January 28, 1998 says the whole site is new.  I’m pretty sure it’s my oldest site, I don’t remember another, but aging is a terrible thing and my memory often fails me.  If The Internet Archive says this is my oldest web site, who am I to argue?  Looking back, I’m still pleased with this simple page, and my current web site is not dramatically different.  I’m sure I was proud of my image mapping (alternate text links provided of course!), and my gag on the then popular feature of an odometer style hit-counter still makes me smile (it’s an animated gif with endlessly spinning numbers).  My “Web World” is divided into simple buckets; Family & Friends, Work, Diversions, and My Book.  It’s telling that the Capitol Dome appears three time, Admiral Ackbar once, and that I once wore a suit and tie.  I still wear the shirt from that photo with Ackbar, but I rarely wear a suit anymore.

Casey_web_2000

Sometime in June 2000, I launched a re-designed site.  The content was essentially the same, but a new large family photo dominates the page.  This was shortly after I left the U.S. Senate after eight years of working there, and a subtle plug for my new Internet Consulting firm can be seen along with my book plug.  And gone are those old school image maps, I was using Adobe ImageReady at this point, and all about the slices and mouseovers!

Casey_web_2001

The new look only lasted about a year.  My business partner left to go to law school, and so CaseyDorin Internet Productions became simple casey.com, and what had previously been my personal web site, was now my business site, launching in August of 2001.  It started as a clean and simple plain HTML site, but at some point around this time I was introduced to Movable Type web publishing software.  A friend installed MT on my server and I began using it for my client sites.  The animated soccer ball led to team photos of my son and daughter’s soccer teams that I had sponsored.  It was already fun watching my youngsters and their teammates play soccer.  It was cooler still watching them do it in jersey’s with my casey.com logo on the front!  My website’s focus had changed to be primarily for my business, but my personal life was still closely connected to it.  For four years I was my own boss and only employee, and casey.com showcased a wide variety of Democratic clients with whom I was fortunate to work with.

02_cardinals01_twisters

2004 was the year of the blog, and I jumped on the bandwagon big time.  Just look over in the right column of this current version of my blog, and you’ll see how my output has never been higher than it was in 2004 and 2005.  My interest in technology, writing, an online exhibitionism converged, heated up by the Presidential election year.  I spent the last three months of the campaign working full-time at the DNC.  And while it was devastating for Kerry to lose and give a second term to Bush, it would also mean the end of casey.com as a business.  For some time I had been encouraging clients to use NGP Software’s contribution and campaign database tools as the back end for the web sites that I built for them.  Now NGP offered me a job, building a team to continue what I was already doing and I jumped at the opportunity to work there.  It took me until the following year to once again makeover my website, returning it to it’s original ego-centric purpose in March of 2005.

Casey_web_2005

This new site reflected the growth of my online world.  No longer just a destination where my personal content could all be found in one place, it was instead a portal that combined my own content, especially blogs posts and such, but contained a variety of links to my activities elsewhere on the web, such as my auctions on eBay, photos on Flickr, swag on CafePress, and a number of randomized links to the things that interest me such as The Cubs, Apple Computer, and my own family tree.  This site also included a prominent link to the Internet Archive for casey.com to share it’s evolution with visitors. 

Everything changed in 2007.  With my blogging output already in decline, new online outlets became available to the made it easier to find an audience of my friends, and to share my thoughts online in a rapid-fire manner contrary to the more thoughtful type of writing I typically sought to create for my blog.

My first post on Facebook was on February 9, 2007.  Here’s what I said…

Chris Casey Wednesday, pipes freeze, burst, water in basement
Thursday, powerbook dies, hard drive failure, everything lost
Thursday night, wife succumbs to the flu, major upchucking…
TGIF!

February 9, 2007 at 10:19 am

I joined Twitter in May of 2007, but after a single tweet I set it aside and forgot about it.  I really just didn’t ‘get’ twitter.  It wasn’t until July of 2008 that I became an active tweeter.

First_tweet

Here’s my second tweet from three months later …

Second_tweet

But after that slow start, my tweeting picked up, especially at the next year’s Netroots Nation conference in in Austin.  And I know exactly why.  It was in Austin in July of 2008 that I stood in a long line and bought the 2nd generation iPhone, a gadget I had waited a very long time for.  Mobile access to Facebook and Twitter allowed me to embrace each wholeheartedly, and I now reached my online world in tweets and status updates rather than through blog posts.  My people would see what I wrote, and I prolifically wrote more while saying less.  According to TweetStats, I now average 3.3 tweets a day.

It’s interesting that I announced my location in my first two tweets (also my only two tweets for all of 2007), as it foretells the later arrival of location aware services that the currently all the rage thanks to our gps-equipped smart phones.  At the close of 2009, I began exploring location services on my iPhone.  I was familiar with Foursquare (first checkin on 12/29/09) and Loopt, but knowing that there was likely other options out there, I iput the question out there on Facebook, and I learned about Gowalla.

Casey_facebook_gowalla

My first check-in on Gowalla was when I created my Neighborhood ABC Store on January 8, 2010.  For a time I used it equally with Foursquare, but I enjoyed the interface and interactions much better on Gowalla and now effectively use it exclusively for ‘checking-in’.  I’m exactly the sort of OCD geek that finds it appealing to make sure the world knows I’ve been to the neighborhood McDonalds, have earned my Voyager pin and plan to one day complete that Sea to Shining Sea trip as well!

And then here I’m am, writing about this all, in my good old (new) blog here on Posterous.  Once I publish this post, it will be tweeted and added to my Facebook wall.  I guess this post will require a ‘Part II’, because I haven’t even mentioned Ancestry.com, Find-A-Grave, PayPal, eBay, Flickr, TwitPic, etc. etc….

But I’m ready to move ahead with Part I here, so just stay tuned…

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Premiere Posterous Post

Technology

So I’m doing some New Year’s re-ordering of my online life.  I’m geek enough to always have to have a few domains and a few blogs and of course now a bunch of social networks as well.  But it doesn’t mean I need to pay a lot for them.  Currently looking at moving my blogs from TypePad to Posterous.  This is the first test post.  Stay tuned and excuse their boring nature, I’ll let you know how it turns out.

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Two Suggested Features for iTunes

Music, Technology

itunes.jpgDear Apple,

Thank you for iTunes and iPods. For several years now they have brought music back into my daily life, while running, commuting, shopping, driving and at dinner with my family (not really on the last two). Thank you also for the ‘shuffle’ feature. It turns my iPod into my own personal juke box loaded only with my songs. It’s great to explore and re-discover my own music library through the random play of ‘shuffle’.

But I have two ideas to share with you, that I think would be very well received; rock blocks and linked songs.

Often, hearing a song by an artist makes you crave a little more of the same. Radio stations figured that gimmick out long ago. Why not have an iTunes shuffle setting to allow users to play their own shuffled ‘rock blocks‘? The iPod settings would allow the user to specify how many songs by an artist should be played in a block, 2… 3…4… and voila! The same benefits of shuffle, but with the bonus of blocks.

The second idea struck me while listening to music on my bus ride home. The song I was enjoying was ‘The Crooked Beat‘ from the Album Sandinista! by The Clash. It’s a mellow song about going out to listen to music, rhythmic and sleepy, with some nice horns and trippy echos. And in the last 15 seconds of this 5:29 song, the echos come back strong and a guy shouts out what’s always sounded to me like ‘birddog’, and the pickup in speed leads immediately to the fast opening of ‘Somebody Got Murdered‘, among my many favorites from this album. Only in shuffle mode, it didn’t. My iPod didn’t know any better and randomly pulled something totally wrong for the next song. I wanted to cry. Were I able to do so, I would adjust the settings for ‘The Crooked Beat’ using linked songs to ALWAYS have it be followed by ‘Somebody Got Murdered’. And that is but one of thousands of other songs I would similarly link.

But Chris, you ask… if you’re so eager to hear rock blocks and songs played in their album order, why don’t you just listen to whole albums as you grew up doing? Well, from time to time I still do. I suspect it’s a shrinking audience among iTunes users who think of an ‘album’ as a collection of songs intended to be listened to in sequence. Years ago CD players introduced shuffling and multi-disk options that began the birth of the personal jukebox, and the demise of straight through album listening. But with these features, iTunes could give listeners a nice middle ground between shuffle and album play. I know I’d like them.

Sincerely,

Chris

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CyberTed’s Legacy Lives On

News, Politics, Technology

Among the flood of news coverage that immediately followed the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy last Tuesday night was an article in the Washington Post which mentioned that The Senator’s web site included, with the news of his passing, his famous closing words from his 1980 Democratic Convention speech, “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die”. Much repeated in the days of tribute that followed, they are a fitting label for his legacy. The Senator’s web site itself wasn’t the news; it was simply a conduit, a routine and expected place from which to learn information about Senator Kennedy and his work. Because of course, every Member of Congress has a web site.

That wasn’t the always the case.

Kennedy on North Shore Mac BBS - 1993In 1993, any Senate office that was attempting to explore and utilize this recently heard about ‘Internet’ thing generally had to find their own way, without any institutional help from the famously slow-to-change Senate. At the time, I was working as Senator Kennedy’s Systems Administrator, a poli-sci type with no real technical background, hired on to support Kennedy’s network of Macs. When our office began to post his press releases and to solicit public comment via a network of dial-up computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), we found the effort was regarded as both newsworthy, and praiseworthy. While not everyone who found Sen. Kennedy online necessarily agreed with him on every issue, his effort to use new technologies to share his positions was widely reported and universally applauded.

A happy coincidence helped to boost Kennedy’s online reach beyond the BBS’. After reaching out to the White House staff who were likewise breaking new ground for President Clinton, I was put in touch with two of the students at MIT who were helping that effort, John Mallery and Eric Loeb. They were enthusiastic and eager to extend the work of MIT’s ‘Intelligent Information Infrastructure Project’ to include our nation’s Legislative branch. In short order they had setup the means for Kennedy’s press releases to be posted to an FTP archive at MIT and into two Usenet newsgroups. And eight months later, in the spring of 1994, they worked with our office to launch Kennedy’s web site, the first for a member of Congress. The site was located at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, as senate.gov provided only FTP and Gopher services by that time. And at the same time we announced Kennedy’s web site, we followed the example set by Senator Robb by establishing a public email address for The Senator and facing up to what remains today as a challenge to Congressional offices, managing and responding to torrents of inbound email.

Kennedy Campaign - 1994In 1994 Kennedy had more than his Senate work to occupy him. He faced a strong challenge for his Senate seat by Republican Mitt Romney. Polls showed Kennedy was in a very tight race, with some even predicting his defeat. In the fall, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) had contracted with Issue Dynamics Inc. to help develop a basic web site for each of their Senate candidates. Aware of Kennedy’s efforts to bring his Senate office online, the DSCC gave his campaign staff direct access to manage their campaign site and to make it their own. Senate rules designed to prevent incumbent Senators from using franked mail in support of their campaign were now interpreted to require shutting down their official online presence for 60-days prior to any election in which they were a candidate. The campaign’s web site kept Kennedy online, while his Senate site was shuttered.

Launched only a few weeks prior to Election Day, the campaign site contained issue papers, press releases and endorsements (the notion of actually raising money online was still little more that a geeky politico’s daydream). For his part, Romney was missing online, and was chided in the media for it. Kennedy ended up beating Romney handily. A Newsweek article reporting on the growth of online politics dubbed him ‘CyberTed’ and reported of his online campaign, “It helped counter his image as an out-of-touch baron who reeked of Old Politics. And it impressed the world of computer jocks, thousands of whom work in the important Boston branch of the industry.” The Internet had played some small part in keeping Kennedy in office.

I left Kennedy’s office in the spring of 1995 to join a new ‘Technology and Communications Committee’ created by the new Senate Democratic Leader, Senator Tom Daschle, to help other Senate Democrats follow in the path Kennedy had blazed online. But continuing to lead and to innovate online remained a high priority in Kennedy’s office. My successors there saw to the continued development of his Senate web site, as well as bringing the Senator online by other means such as into Q&A sessions with constituents in online chat rooms. By June of ’96, Senator Kohl became the 50th Senator with a web site, and it took four more years until all 100 Senators had one, when Illinois freshman Peter Fitzgerald launched his site early in 2000.

His online experience did more than just generate good press for Senator Kennedy; it informed his positions on important votes for which many of his less net-savvy colleagues were ill equipped to fully understand. One early example came when the Senate voted in 1995 on Senator Exon’s ‘Communication’s Decency Act’, a far-overreaching effort to censor adult content on the Internet, the bill passed by a vote of 84-16. Kennedy was on the right, but losing side of this vote, and it was left to the Supreme Court to overturn the act as unconstitutional two years later by a unanimous vote.

Outside groups have also played an important role in pushing Congress to do more than just ‘be’ online. The Congressional Management Foundation’s periodic ‘Golden Mouse Awards’ recognize the best of Congressional web sites and provide all offices with needed assistance and best practices for use in developing their online presence. Newer organizations such as The Sunlight Foundation support efforts to make Congress ‘more meaningfully accessible to citizens’, with the Internet at the core of their efforts. And early online guides to Congress such as CapWeb, which helped net surfers find Congress online, have passed the torch to newer resources such as Tweet Congress, which helps all to find members who are on Twitter.

On Saturday I joined hundreds of other current and former Kennedy staff on the steps of the U.S. Senate, waiting on The Senator’s funeral motorcade to make a scheduled stop, en route from Andrews Air Force Base to Arlington Cemetery, for a brief and final farewell from the institution he served for forty-seven years. With the motorcade more than an hour behind schedule, I wasn’t alone in following the tweets from ‘kennedynews’, which kept us informed of their progress. Kennedy’s current team has done him proud this last week by their use of the Internet to share news and information about his funeral arrangements as well as the legacy of his life in public service.

It’s easy to take for granted that the Internet has become an expected means of communication for public officials and for the candidates who aspire to become one. And the time has long passed when anybody was impressed by a politician just for being aware that the Internet existed, and for attempting to use it. Senator Kennedy benefitted from such early praise, and might have left it at that. But he ‘got it’ and instead chose not to let up after those earliest steps. He chose to value innovation, and to make the use of new technology a high priority in conducting his very public life.

The Senator’s legacy will live on in the legislation he passed and the causes that he championed.

Teddy’s legacy will live with his family, friends and loved ones.

And CyberTed’s legacy will live on… online.

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An Apple Store in DC?

Rants, Technology

An interesting story in the Washington Post today describes how the prigs on the ‘Old Georgetown Board‘ have thrice rejected Apple’s proposed design for their planned retail store in Georgetown. Tonight Apple will take a fourth swing with a design that’s pretty similar to their first one.

In tough economic times, you would think a shopping community such as Georgetown is would eagerly embrace a new Apple store. Personally I’d rather see an Apple store downtown, closer to my office. Georgetown is not a convenient place to get to. So please Georgetown Board, reject Apple yet again. And hopefully they’ll find a more welcoming place in DC to open up a store.

Apple Tries, Tries Again To Open in Georgetown
The Washington Post, 2/6/09

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