• Italy | "Internet is freedom": Lawrence Lessig at the Chamber of Deputies
  There were high expectations for Lawrence Lessig's lecture at the Chamber of Deputies yesterday afternoon during the event "Internet is freedom". Some days before, the organizers asked people to tweet about the theme of the conference: the chosen hashtag was #difenderelarete, a reference to some recent bills attempting to limitate freedom of expression on the web. There were thousands of tweets and even more during the speech, making the topic the most popular of the day in Italy.
  But, apparently, mainstream media still don't get it: the lecture was preceded by a speech of the President of the Chamber, praising the Internet as a force of peace and innovation, and that is the only part of the conference that has made it to the news so far.

• Germany | Creating a more transparent Frankfurt
  Frankfurt-Gestalten.de (Create Frankfurt) is a new space for citizen participation: the aim is tracking local political decisions, making them more transparent and motivate citizens to connect locally and to discuss on how to change their neighborhood.
  The website offers information in form of geo-referenced data and documents properly tagged. It also offer an email service and space for comments and proposals.

• U.K. | What kind of campaign will Britain see?
  On the Guardian Kevin Anderson reflects on how (and if) British political operatives and activists will adapt Obama's strategies in this campaign: "If Facebook is good at organising groups, are there constituencies where issue-oriented organising might play a role in the outcome of an election? If the debates are the real innovation in this election, what role will the Twitter "spin room" play in public opinion?".
  Guido Fawkes, one of the top political conservative bloggers, leaves the first comment: "TV is king". What if?

Those of us on the West Coast - or who stayed up extra late - were able to catch President Obama's town hall live on TV from China along with the accompanying Twitter chatter. There were some amazing nuggets from the town hall. It provided a genuine dialogue with the president, who opened up on his thoughts on everything from terrorism to the open Internet, but much of that will be lost in the Twitter streams the next day or so because Barack Obama admitted (*gasp*) that he has never used Twitter.

Over on The Hill, Jordan Fabian has the story of how some advocates inside and outside Congress are pushing for congressional franking rules to get clear on how members of Congress can use Twitter. Such a clarification would be an upgrade to the ambiguous understanding now that encourages senators and representatives to either tweet first and ask questions later (as hundreds of Members of Congress do, according to Tweet Congress), or to not use Twitter at all (as hundreds of others of them choose to do). Such franking ambiguity is one of those institutional roadblocks to participation we're always going on about, and the worthwhile question becomes: what are franking rules good for in the Twitter age? Absolutely nothing? Huh.

Well, for one thing, the always helpful Wikipedia tells us that the very word franking comes from the Latin word "francus," meaning free. Franking privileges have traditionally been given to the high and mighty so that they might be able to communicate with their constituents without running up huge bills. (In some cases, all they need do is scribble their names where we commonfolk put a stamp.) On the flip side, restrictions on franking privileges were necessary so that those free stamps and the like wouldn't give too much of an advantage to those in office over those who might really want to replace them in those jobs. When Congress discovered email in the '90s, the traditional way of thinking about franking was stretched, awkwardly, to cover that game-changing technology. But it is being stretched to a breaking point when it comes to Congress and Twitter...

Newark's Mayor Cory Booker shares President Obama's deep understanding of the power of digital media as a means for community organizing. As of yesterday, Mayor Booker has 833,779 Twitter followers, and 14,768 Facebook supporters.

According to the US Census Bureau the Population of Newark is 281,402 (2006 estimate) which means that Booker has more than 3 times the population of Newark following him on Twitter and the equivalent of 5% of the population of Newark as Facebook supporters.

When he post to his Facebook page, you can see by the volume of "comments" and "likes" that his Facebook supporters are actually engaged in conversation with him. So, what is he doing that fosters engagement?

Authenticity and humor are powerful tools when it comes to getting your audience to engage with you, and Mayor Booker understands this. He, jokingly, used Facebook and Twitter as a platform to challenge Obama. He asked his Facebook supporters and Twitter followers if they thought his jump shot is better than Obama's.

He uses Twitter to warn the citizen's of Newark should they litter, they are in danger of getting pulled over by him.

And he shares words of wisdom that inspire him.

So Mayor Booker--I am not sure if you jump shot is better than Obama's, and I promise you that I won't litter in Newark-or anywhere else for that matter. I thank you for your words of wisdom and I applaud you for your understanding of social media engagement.

I've been chewing over the CRS's Twitter report this afternoon. Spurred on by a case of Twitter burnout, I thought I might calm the fears of ashamed netroots writers: "out-tweeting" someone is no big deal. One of my followers tweets all day long about why I should buy an inflatable boat. Nobody listens.

So while GOP congressmen may be tweeting a lot, is anybody listening? They have lots of followers. But does that matter? Are those followers paying attention? Are these representatives using Twitter to their advantage--to attract and sustain supporters and to help constituents--like Whole Foods and Southwest Airlines have used it to improve customer support and add a human face to their brand? Or are they the DC equivalent of the inflatable boat guy, incessantly linking to press releases that nobody ever reads?

A few months ago, Governor Schwarzenegger used his Twitter account to request radical ideas for solving California's budget crisis.

This request must have gotten a good response, because the tweet has spawned its own Web site for citizens' policy ideas, with a full set of hash tag standards.

The site was launched on August 25. It aggregates all tweets with the #myidea4CA hashtag into a Digg-style vote up/vote down list of ideas. Like Obama's first virtual town hall, the most popular ideas regard marijuana legalization. (Given the recent high-level attention marijuana policy has received in California, this shouldn't be a surprise--nor should it be discarded as a comical foible of online democracy.)

I'm pretty confident that danah boyd's was the most talked about talk during the Personal Democracy Forum 2009 Conference in New York City. I can say this because she was mentioned more than 750 times in the twitter stream during the 2 days of the conference. Michael Wesch got a lot of buzz - almost 600 mentions - and Jeff Jarvis and Mark Pesce (who gave a really powerful talk last year too) did well, each getting almost 500 mentions. But boyd topped them all.