Cam Barrett hired by Kerry campaign
Pioneering blogger and community software guy Cam Barret of
CamWorld, late of the Clark campaign, has been
hired by the
Kerry
campaign.
Good. Cam's a pro, and I think he'll bring the Kerry online community up
to speed very quickly. We've now learned lessons from the Dean and Clark
campaigns about what works and what doesn't, and the strengths and
limitations of online activism.
I look forward to seeing what Cam and his team come up with.

A terrorist attack in Madrid today killed nearly 200 people, the worst
terrorist attack in Spanish history.
Shakespeare Social Networks
Using PieSpy to detect
social networks in Shakespeare (via
/.).
Now this is cool. Social networks like Friendster are amusing for a
while, but like
Clay Shirky said the other day, I already know who my friends are.
Inputing metadata into social networks has the same problem of metadata
input everywhere: it's really
hard.
That's why I'm a believer in the value of derived metadata: textual
similarity and grouping, binary similarity,
full text search, PageRank. Social networking software can use observation
to graph the network, like the
Shakespeare example and
OrgNet's email analysis and
Red versus Blue
book buying analyses.
What I would love to be doing right now is writing a custom CMS and
network analysis program for political opposition research. I think this
would be incredibly cool. You could use publically available data, Google
and Lexis-Nexis searches, and intern blood, sweat, and tears to keep the
data on your targets up-to-date, then use derived networks to map
relationships between donors, supporters, and candidates. Would be cool.