Public Please

I recently lauched a website, The Petition Archives, which I entered into the Apps for America contest.
The Petition Archives collects, geocodes, publishes, and preserves personal email petitions targeted at public figures, including government officials, corporate executives, and media personalities. Instead of sending a private email to a public figure, the Petition Archives allows you to [...]

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At the 2008 Democratic Convention, C-Span has started a Qik group to directly broadcast parts of the convention in the field via video on the Qik website. The C-Span Qik group appears to be private (I tried to join it without success so far.) Currently, the C-Span Qik group contains only two Qik [...]

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Howard Dean, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, dodged a tough accusation today from a C-Span caller that some Democratic presidents were war criminals. The C-Span caller argued that the Democratic party had previously supported presidents who were war criminals. The caller claimed that Lydon Johnson was a war criminal with his [...]

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I am sad to report that the C-SPAN Video Library, a supposedly non-profit venture, is still less public than many for-profit video sharing websites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, because:

C-SPAN does not allow you to embed its videos onto your blog or homepage.
The link to the video, provided by C-Span video player, sends you [...]

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It appears that John McCain eavesdropped on Pastor Rick’s questions at a recent question and answer session between Pastor Rick and the presidential candidates. At MSNBC’s “Forum On The Presidency”, McCain broke the “cone of silence” he was supposed to observe before answering Pastor Rick’s questions.
After winning a coin toss, Barack Obama answered Pastor [...]

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I am trying to get a list of email addresses to all elected officials from the federal government, so I thought I’d just ask for it. I went to USA.gov to find out how to Contact Elected Officials. I looked for email addresses on the contact pages of U.S. Senators, U.S. Representatives, and State [...]

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According to several state-controlled Chinese media outlets, including China Daily and the China Tibet Information Center, thousands of Chinese people are signing an online petition against bias in the Western media. In particular, the petition responds to the Western media’s coverage of the violence in Lhasa. China Daily translates the site’s grievances and [...]

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According to the New York Times’s “Health Database Was Set Up To Ignore ‘Abortion‘”, managers of PopLine, a federally funded reproductive health database at Johns Hopkins University, removed the word “abortion” from the list of potential search terms. The article reports that the dean of the school, Dr. Michael Klag reversed the restriction after [...]

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Today, I had the good fortune to attend a lecture on NGOs and civil society in China by Nick Young. As a journalist in China, Nick provided detailed coverage of the emerging non-governmental organization sector in China. He unpacked some of the tensions between the grassroot NGOs and, what he calls, the “corporatist” [...]

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Have you read about a bill in an online news article and wanted to read the bill? Good luck because most online news articles neither name the bill nor hyperlink to it.
Consider the waterboarding bill that Bush vetoed. According to the Washington Post article Bush Announces Veto of Waterboarding Ban, George [...]

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