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I have an op-ed/article up this morning at Pajamas Media on the Culberson-Capuano internet rules dispute:

Congress Debates Muzzling Congressmen Online

….There is certainly a legitimate and longstanding interest in preventing the misuse of federal employees or funds by prohibiting them from having any connection to campaign activities, a point on which Republicans and Democrats can easily agree. Furthermore, Capuano is correct to call the current rules “antiquated” and more restrictive, on paper at least, than his proposals. However, the old rules have been widely ignored by congressmen and have never been enforced, which left members of the House free to post online and engage in virtual interaction as they pleased. Enforcing the new, somewhat milder restrictions, as Capuano intends to do, amounts to a severe regime of prior restraint on speech.

More ominous still would be the precedent of the U.S. government designating “official” external websites – imagine having the power to select “official” newspapers – that would have to hew to House regulations and be as free as possible from political or commercial advertising. Given the ubiquity of blogads, most blogs, bulletin boards, and discussion forums would be shut out of the conversation with our nation’s elected officials. Essentially, Capuano is demanding that the internet adapt itself to the House of Representatives instead of the House adapting to the reality of the internet.

Read the rest here.

In addition to the posts on this issue this weekend by Matt Stoller and Mark Tapscott, my friend Lexington Green points to this new piece calling for a bipartisan coalition by Patrick Ruffini at The Next Right.

This may cause my friend Jeremy some dismay, but he gets a hat tip for this link:

Democrat Michael Capuano Tries to Stop Members of Congress from Using the Internet

Speaker Pelosi weighed in on the matter:

“We share the goal of modernizing the antiquated franking regulations to address the rapidly changing realities of communications in the internet age. Like many other Members, I have a blog, use YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Digg, and other new media to communicate with constituents, and I believe they are vital tools toward increasing transparency and accountability.”

So Pelosi is good on this stuff, as she should be.  She has an exceptionally talented New Media staff who can do great work because there are no Franking Restrictions on leadership offices.  The right is largely correct on the substance of their claims, though they are making some partisan accusations that aren’t grounded in a real understanding the problem.  Soren Dayton at the Next Right asserts that Pelosi is violating the rules through her use of social media, because he didn’t know that leadership offices aren’t subjected to the rules.  What is actually going on is that Pelosi’s excellent use of blogging, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Digg is unwittingly providing an extremely successful pilot for how members and committees can and should use the web to interact.

I had not realized that either and I thank Matt Stoller for the information in his post. If Speaker Nancy Pelosi uses her considerable authority to push through better, common sense, rules for the House to allow rank and file members to have the online presence that she has created, I’ll be more than happy to retract my previous remarks and apologize.

Tim of Ubiwar had a near-simultaneous post on Social Media yesterday that was congruent with mine and expands on aspects that I did not. Highly recommended:

Noise and News

An excerpt:

Alexander van Elsas wrote an excellent piece on mobile phone functionality in which he referenced a recent post by Scoble, Why Google News has no noise. Scoble’s thesis is that he is able to spot trends in news before the main web news carriers, Google News for mainstream news, and TechMeme for tech news, before either they or their readers can. The enabling media for Scoble’s prognostications are social aggregators like FriendFeed and microblogging services like Twitter. I won’t go into the details of exactly what these are but essentially they are services delivered direct to the device of your choice which provide frequent updates of what your friends and acquaintances are doing, thinking, writing, at all hours of the day. With a lot of people in your network these alerts can be relentless.

Scoble likes this, as do many others, because it provides him with a background of noise which allows him to discern patterns in the network of social interaction across these services. Scoble is a journalist by background and inclination and, arguably, he is a new sort of journalist through his work at Scobleizer, and ‘swimming in the noise’ these services provide is food and drink to someone of his bent:

So, how come services like Twitter and FriendFeed have so much noise? Who likes the noise? Who likes the news?

I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news.

This is an important and valid point. Scoble is watching the new news ‘wires’ to get a jump on the bigger outlets but also to discern the patterning in the information coming from across the globe. This process is aided by aggregative nodes which filter reports of activities into streamlined summaries of many people’s information. Once such example is ‘bridge blogging‘ which enables one bilingual individual to aggregate locally-generated ‘news’ in one language and to disseminate it in another. Scoble likes to avoid these nodes wherever possible but they serve a purpose, as any blogger will tell you.

I’m very curious about the pattern recognition part. Are Scoble and Jason Calacanis and other uber-geek bloggers following tens of thousands mentally upjumping in terms of discriminating patterns or are they gravitating to those signals in the noise that they are already predisposed to “see” anyway?

Twitter, as a Web 2.0 app, is often confusing at first glance, because the typical Twitter-user homepage resembles gibberish; an effect that comes from reading only one side of a person having many conversations, interspersed with random thoughts, links and reports of mundane minutia – 140 character microblogging. Even clicking “with others” isn’t much help as the asynchronous nature of the exchanges make these conversations very, very, difficult to follow.

This has led Dave Davison of Thoughts Illustrated, who has great experience in high tech angel investing, to ask of Twitter, “What is the Return On Attention? (ROA)” and ultimately, he came to the conclusion that twittering, unfiltered, is mostly attention-wasting noise.  As a consequence, Dave now uses one such (multiplatform) filter, Friendfeed and no longer twitters.

So then, what good is Twitter? Here’s the “Return on Attention” that I’ve found from using Twitter:

Conversation Within An Existing Network:

I kick around ideas, shoot the breeze or just stay in the loop with what is happening with Shloky, John Robb, Michael Tanji, Selil from SWC,  Adam Elkus, Charles Cameron and Shane Deichman. Additionally, Chirol, Sean Meade, Curtis of Dreaming5GW, Critt Jarvis and Dan of Tdaxp are alo on Twitter but “tweet” very irregularly.

Note that many of us have actually met in person, some more than once and/or have been interacting online together for years. This is where Twitter is going to yield the most value, given the 140 character limit of the “tweets”; a shared understanding is necessary to maximize the utility of this app.

Network Building:

Adding to the above group, which has clearly defined interests in 4GW, strategy, intel, COIN, futurism and technology, teaching and writing, was relatively easy. Joining us after a time were Fantomplanet, Jeffrey Carr of IntelFusion, Sandbaggerone, Fester of The NewsHoggers and Powerweirdo ( of many sites). The signal to noise ratio in this group is very high – and what noise exists, social chatter, joking, etc. serves psychologically as a positive reinforcer.

Gateway/ Breadcrumb Trail:

When I “follow” someone on Twitter or if they elect to “follow” me, I eventually get around to checking out their website, blog or links with greater scrutiny. This is how I found Jessica Margolin’s Solvation blog, Carr’s IntelFusion and started reading some of the blogs of the hi-tech/Web 2.0 gurus and entrepreneurs who “follow” me but for whom I mostly don’t reciprocate on Twitter because, like Robert Scoble, their combined sheer volume of “tweets” would drown everyone else out.  I have excepted  David Armano and Scoble; the former, because I have been repeatedly  impressed with his command of visual information and he keeps his tweets to a reasonable number and Scoble because, despite his maniacal aspect, he is a “hub” for that entire subculture and occasionally posts up high value links like this.

I pretty much find something interesting every day on Twitter or by somebody who uses Twitter – like this piece on 5GW. It’s a useful app, if you accept the inherent limitations of the platform or if you intend to bring your entire network with you and speed up the  conversation.

Interesting.