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• National Broadband Workshop Reimagines 21st Century Citizenship The enduring lesson from yesterday morning's workshop on the Federal Communication Commission's National Broadband Plan? Americans need accessible, affordable broadband so that they can do things like... participate in workshops where we create a national broadband plan. In any case, the assembled experts from inside and outside government, including U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra and our own Andrew Rasiej, offered broad strokes of what hearty bandwidth makes possible. For starters, they observed, beyond the gates of the White House, the U.S. government is in a unique position: what it does with tech ripples out...

• OFA Challenges List to Counter "Special Interests" During August Health Care Battle On the difficult question of is it astroturf?, Organizing for America has its take. The field arm of the Democratic National Committee is framing the anti-health reform protesters popping up at local townhalls as an extension of the same bought-and-paid special interests that oppose the reform push back in DC. Organizing for America's New York state director, reports Politico's Jonathan Martin, is firing up the organization's massive list...

• Is "Astroturfing" Dead? The question arises in the context of the disruptions of and protests outside townhalls on health care, captured in videos that we highlighted yesterday. Here's a case where the political and journalistic conception of "astroturf" -- political organizing that looks to be grassroots but is actually driven and supported by some masked interest -- breaks down, in part because of the web, and there's no real workable framework to take its place. So how do we decide how much attention, in the Internet age, a noisy political faction should be paid?

• Townhall Showdowns Are Being Caught on YouTube, But to Whose Benefit? If you've been watching the YouTube videos floating around of elected officials like Lloyd Doggett or Arlen Specter or Tim Bishop getting shouted down by angry, organized opponents at public events, what we're seeing isn't exactly new. But the fact that we're seeing it at all is somewhat novel. Captured in full color and audio, these videos paint a far richer pictures than a bland "Protestors Greet Representative Smith" headline suggests. But here's the open question: do omnipresent YouTube videos of agitated protestors actually help their cause? Or will they instead turn out to be an arrow in the quiver of health reform advocates?

• Birthers of a Nation: How the Obama "Birth Certificate" Issue is Playing Online The news that American Southerners are the most likely to question whether President Obama is actually a native-born citizen got a lot of attention last Friday, when a Research2000 survey on that question was released by DailyKos. We thought it would be interesting to see what various trend-culling tools might add to this picture. Google Trends, for example, shows the top ten states where people are searching on the phrase "Obama birth certificate"...

• Faces of Health Care Reform: Inside Organizing for America's Ground Game Last week, we floated the idea that what Organizing for America was doing in collecting personal health care narratives from supporters amounted to busy work for the organization's legendary base. In retrospect, that was Magoo-ish of us. It's too easy to become obsessed with the inside baseball of how health care legislation is being hammered out and miss the work being done in the 3,537,431 square miles of America that isn't DC. Yesterday afternoon, Nancy had a conversation with Organizing for America new media director Natalie Foster that suggests that, while OFA is certainly still figuring out how to be effective from the outside, the health care stories they are collecting are one tactical carry over from the campaign that still can carry some punch...

• Seeing Your Own Reflection in Health Reform Visualizations When we heard about the National Taxpayers Union's new visualization comparing the words being used by President Obama to describe health care reform and the actual words in the House bill, we decided to take a closer look. National Taxpayers Union is using a pair of word clouds to make the case that the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 is full of "the oppressive language of big government," while at the same time Obama's speeches are emphasizing more positive concepts like "freedom," "rights," and "choice." But a closer examination reminds us that in politics, data can both illuminate and obfuscate...

• From the U.K., a Guide to Good Government Tweeting Neil Williams, who heads up digital communications for the U.K.'s Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills, is just out with a 20-page how-to on government tweeting. Sure, Twitter carries risks, writes Williams. But there are upsides: Twitter can give government a human voice, establish it as a thought leader, and open up channels through which the public can connect with its overlords. Williams offers some principles useful for any tweeter...

• Nowruz: Making Sense of YouTube Insight It took going to the source, but we now have some clarity on how to interpret YouTube's Insight statistics on how popular various videos are in different places in the world, a question that came up when everyone from us to Politico's Ben Smith to the White House tried to use the figures to make the case that President Obama's video to the Iranian people on the Nowruz holiday made an impact inside Iran. After a tutorial from YouTube's Aaron Zamost, it's clear that Obama's Nowruz video did in fact enjoy a great deal of popularity in Iran -- but interpreting the map requires understanding how YouTube thinks of popularity. YouTube uses a popularity index that blends two things...