PERSONAL DEMOCRACY FORUM... THUMBS UP!

Christine and I attended the Personal Democracy Forum last Friday. It was a great combination of my two interests in life: technology and politics. I went for GoingOn Networks to explore some partnership possibilities while Christine's CEO was speaking there.

The some sessions were basic in terms of how technology affects conversations and communications since the conference was in NYC :), but some were informative and interesting, such as Thomas Friedman's talk.

Dave Winer has some commentary about Friedman's talk here, which I agree with to some degree. Friedman seemed to come from a media elitist perspective where the "Internet" is a vast resource that can be unreliable and led to such false notions has Al Gore being Jewish. Of course, we all know about the unreliable nature of newspapers, such as the NYTimes, but prior to today's information resources there were no checks on these "trusted sources." In the years before the Internet was available, how many falsehoods went unchecked within news reports from mainstream newspapers and TV stations?

It will be interesting to see how YouTube, blogs, and other new media mediums will affect this election cycle. Anyway, more from:

JD Lasica here and here.

Molly Webb from Demos has some thoughts here.

Robert Bluey a good post here.

"Google CEO talks new media politics" from CNET.