Friends, with me hitting the road early tomorrow for a wedding and PdF operating on a skeleton crew given this week's conference in Barcelona, we're calling it a four day weekend. Blogging will slow to a point that may well look like nothing's actually happening, and there for sure won't be a digest tomorrow (Friday). I know, it's painful for us all. But we look forward to getting things going again full-blast on Tuesday.

• Community colleges and their students answer the Obama White House's call for YouTube videos telling stories of "the community college experience affected your life," as part of this week's first White House Summit on Community Colleges.
• Seems as if not only the Libya-rooted .ly country code is blocked in at least one federal agency, but the Grenadian .gd too.
• Meg Whitman's on Pandora.
• CoverItLive's got an intriguing new thing called Ticker which is like liveblogging, but forever.
• "When it comes to whipping the Internet into a frenzy of anxiety, nobody does the job better than radio talk show host Alex Jones."
• And Obama prepares to sign a bill expanding accessibility requirements when it comes to the web.
• A little nugget from the news-to-me files, David Axelrod mentioned on Letterman last night that his son works for the Huffington Post, in its Denver shop.
• What's all this "I like it on" business?
• The O'Donnell campaign relaunches its website as a "new hub for all things Christine." From the announcement email: "We make it easy for you to use the power of the Internet and be as active as you want to be in electing Christine O'Donnell the next Senator from Delaware."
• The Department of Transportation puts out "Voices of the Recovery Act," a map of videos from people working on stimulus projects.
• When it comes to Twitter, politicians could learn something from sports writers.
• And the World Bank launches Apps for Development.

Rutgers professor Dave Karpf finds Princeton professor Julian Zelizer's "Facebook Politics" response in the great Gladwellian social change debate, a take we took up here, to be rather "second-rate." And Karpf's reasons why pick up on a new (to me, at least) thread as far as the discussion of the last few weeks goes. Just because a webby movement falls apart doesn't mean that it wasn't, when it mattered, a movement:

When Zelizer writes “Obama’s team may still have all the cell numbers that they collected before announcing their vice presidential pick, but few people are answering or texting,” he’s making a common mistake about the movement feel of the Obama campaign and social movements in general.

Social movements tend to recede in participation after they achieve some major policy goal. Passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act doesn’t end racism, but it nonetheless leads to smaller rallies.  Likewise, political campaigns (movement-like or non) recede in participation after election day.  When Obama for America became Organizing for America, it was clear from the outset that total participation would have to fall.  The shared project of winning an election was past.

The rest is here.

Last night on the 15th floor of the New York Times Building in Manhattan, the Times' in-house team of data-minded folk held another public event in their "Times Open 2.0" series, this one on the topic of open government. Folks presented, questions were asked, and the long and the short of it: we've just passed the "Hello, World" moment in the evolution of open government. The tools have been, if not mastered, at least learned. In lieu of answers, there are some hard-earned questions about where things go from here. Some notes, in that vein, of last night's presenters, what they've learned, and where they're headed next:

• Big Apple Ed

  Adda Birnir, J. Soma, and Kate McGee Reyes built Big Apple Ed, the third place winner in New York City's Big Apps contest, launched to draw attention to the then-new NYC Data Mine. "The nut of the site," said Birnir, "is that it provides a profile for each of the 1,600 schools in New York City." The team picked education out of a desire to work on something meaty. "It's controversial," said Birnir. "It's important." Soma suggested that developers have some humility about the worth of the data they have at their finger tips, suggesting that a could baseline of thought for apps developers is that, "your data is dirty and your algorithms are wrong." Other lessons learned: Birnir said that having a diverse team can help in figuring out what the data is telling you, and Soma said he's found that the "data hoarders" working inside government tend to be normal folk who just haven't fully gotten on the open-data train yet. Next up for the team is, they hope, working with journalists to ferret out stories in the data. Soma wrapped by putting in perspective the modern age's relative flood of government data, and what it means for developers. "It's an amazing responsibility," he said, "and an awesome power."

• One Bus Away

  Nick Grossman, Director of Civic Works at OpenPlans (formerly The Open Planning Project) talked about his organization's work in attempting to help New York City figure out how to build an affordable, do-able real-time bus API. One way to do it: hire the guy or gal who already figured out how to do it elsewhere. That's what they've done, by bringing on one of the creators of Seattle's One Bus Away app and charging him with adapting it to Gotham. The ultimate goal, said Grossman, was to build an Open Platform for Transportation, such that cities won't have to re-invent the wheel every time they want to track their buses or monitor their parking meters. Want to help? The transit hackers group is at Groups.Google.com/group/transit-developers. You might also dive into the conversation through #opentransit on IRC.freenode.net.

• Also of the rinse-and-repeat mindset is James Turk, a developer and open source coordinator for Sunlight Labs*. Turk discussed the Open States Project (and his slides are here.) The problem, said Turk, is that there's no GovTrack.us for the states of the United States, no hub that integrates, as GovTrack does on the federal level, the legislative feeds coming out of the various legislative bodies and resources. There are more than a hundred state legislative websites, said Turk, and Sunlight is aiming to rally volunteer developers to make some sense of them. One thing going their way is that often one state, once tackled, can serve as a model for another state -- making Open States a good gateway project for aspiring open-source developers. The work flow is basically thus: figure out how to scrape data from state websites without pulling them down, blending together different datasets to present the fullest possible legislative picture, and then pushing it out to the world through APIs or data dumps.

• Frank Macreery and Matthew Beale built PushpinWeb, which got an honorable mention during the Big Apps contest. Beale placed himself and Macreery in the "weird gooey middle" of development shops as a two-person team. And the landscape for folks like them, he suggested, was occasionally rough. The biggest monster: "hostile datasets" being pushed out by government. What makes a dataset so adversarial to the go-it-alone developer? Undocumented file formats ("binary even," bemoaned Beale), proprietary file formats like ArcGIS, missing update schedules, and the sheer bulk of some government datasets -- the last of which, said Beale, "really spooks off casual developers." One way to make the job simpler, they found is to stick with the tools that you know, which for them meant relying upon Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Sphinx to build their app.

• The Trees Near You app

  Finally, Brent Camper, who built Trees Near You, another Big Apps honorable mention honoree. Camper admitted no particular affinity for trees, but saw in the relevant city data sets a way to use visualizations to present a different, greener view that even New Yorkers might have of their fine city. Using your location, Trees Near You tells you, yes, the trees near you, with insights into which species they are and how big they were at last measure. Camper struggled with inconsistencies between datasets of different boroughs, and with the lack of documentation that came along with the released data. Both were overcome with a lot of work and a little luck; what the species codes in the data meant was a mystery until he found a key in the Google cache of the New York City Parks Department website. For other folks looking to build map apps off of civic data, Camper recommended both a tool set -- OpenStreetMap, plus MapNik to render map tiles and Cascadenik for styling those maps, with TileDrawer to serve the whole thing up -- and reading material: Seth Fitzsimmons' "OS X Spatial Stack."

Next up in the TimesOpen 2.0 series is Wednesday, October 6th, on the "real-time web."

*Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation, which runs Sunlight Labs.

I wondered, can online politics be local? In a comment, Jill Zimon, recently-elected member of the Pepper Pike (OH) City Council, says, yes, absolutely:

[A]s a local candidate last year in a town with about 5000 registered voters in NE Ohio, I absolutely used Facebook, as well as other online tools, to supplement face to face and phone contact. And I've not seen a disintegration in following - what I did was convert the contacts to an email list populated with people who love getting updates, something that no council member (I was elected to city council in 11/09) had ever done, by snailmail or otherwise. The pages for my campaign still exist on FB but I have to say that my general personal FB page and wall are followed by constituents too.

I'd agree that we just don't know a whole lot yet, but frankly, I have found Facebook, in conjunction with my other connecting activities, to be a great way for me to keep up on locals and vice versa. Because we're a small city, information that goes around the schools or the school district, related to individuals or businesses that have personal or other successes - they are often "reported" first on Facebook - long before a weekly local paper comes out and because local, too small for the metro paper to cover (the Plain Dealer).

There certainly seems to be plenty of room for actual practitioners of online politics to join the pundits in offering insight in the great Gladwellian social change debate.

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg's war on obesity and diabetes takes it to the web video front. (via Danielle Gould) A new video, posted on YouTube as part of the New York City Department of Health's "Packing on the Pounds" campaign, shows a man sitting and a diner counter and downing packet after packet of sugar, as his fellow diners look on in unconcealed disgust. The kicker? The orange soda and cola they're drinking contain the same amount of sugar the beast next to them is eating.

The video wraps with this message: "You'd never eat 16 packs of sugar. Why would you drink 16 packs of sugar?" The first video in the NYC DOH campaign, in December, was a rather disgusting affair showing a man drinking a soda can-full of pure fat. "Roughly three out of five New Yorkers are overweight or obese, and sugary beverages are fueling the epidemic," said New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley in a release. “While this video is lighthearted, its message is serious. The sugar consumed in these drinks can lead to obesity and other health consequences, including diabetes and heart disease."

How effective is a video like this? This sort of visual depiction of some of the hidden facts of modern life can be eye-opening, if done right. At the very least, the companion signs on the New York City subway make me fairly horrible should I ever consider drinking a non-diet Coke. Job done.

Photo credit: emdot

After a prominent Cuban blogger reported having trouble posting to Twitter via her mobile phone, the Cuban government took great umbrage at the implication that it could be responsible for the break:

The Cuban government denied today that the island is limited access for Cubans to social networks, after the Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez yesterday denounced the possible involvement of the authorities in blocking their access to Twitter.

"Cuba is not blocking access for any citizen to send messages to online social networks like Twitter and Facebook and this is a calumny that has risen against our country," said Cuban Vice Minister of Informatics and Communications, José Luis Perdomo, told the official news agency Prensa Latina.

"Any person who wishes to send that type of message you can do, because we do not hinder the possibility of any political way, or have nothing implemented for it," Perdue said in a statement dated in Moscow.

According to people tracking the situation, and backed up by a tweet from Twitter's Spanish-language support account, Cubans are having difficulty tweeting through their phones because of a change in how Twitter processes the "long codes" used by Cubans to post to the service. It's a particularly problematic hitch in the service when it comes to a place like Cuba, where restricted Internet access makes Twitter a mobile-centric service. Twitter is said to be looking into the situation.

(Note: the above excerpt is a Google Translate translation of a section from the orginial EFE story.)

Cherie Blair, whom you might remember from her stint as Britain's First Lady, got together this morning with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announce the launch of something called "mWomen," a project that promotes "mobile technologies as tools for women's empowerment and international development." In the development world, mobile and women are seen as something of a potentially transformative combination, as mobile technologies challenge some of the dynamics -- mobility, access to formalized banking -- that can limit women in much of the world. That, and the fact that women-centered development is an interest of both Blair and Clinton, make this space something worth keeping an eye on. Which you can begin to do by watching today's mWomen launch, helpfully archived on the State Department's website.

Disclosure: Personal Democracy Forum is working to facilitate a one-day "Tech Camp" on November 20 in Santiago, Chile for the U.S. State Department. We maintain a wall between that work and our editorial work, including that here on techPresident.

• Since today is, rather wonderfully, a day to contemplate the geo-political implications of the top-level domains (e.g., the Libya-rooted "ly" in bit.ly), it's worth nothing that Organizing for America, the next generation of the '08 Obama campaign, also has their customized URL reducer: ofa.bo. As for "bo" (a reference, I'm guessing, to the President's initials, as was the case with the campaign's MyBO social network, not the President's dog), it's the TLD belonging to the democratic republic of Bolivia.
• Bonus: a list of all the TLDs and what they all stand for.
• Facebook rolls out groups, exportability, and a privacy dashboard.
• New York City Senate CTO Andrew Hoppin has some preliminary praise for Andrew Cuomo's plan to open up New York State.*
• The art of Wordlebombing.
• Facebook's co-founder donates to a pro-marijuana campaign that can't advertise on Facebook. Maybe.
• Who's Who in the tech policy debates.
• Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez reports trouble posting to Twitter via text message, a significant handicap in Internet-poor Cuba.
• Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) ties today's enmity between Democrats and Republicans to "The Apprentice," Internet flame wars: "I cite as evidence the popularity of attack journalism on cable television, the growing incidence of bullying in schools, the use of the Internet to anonymously smear those one does not like, and the audience appeal of television programs in which people are fired or voted off islands."
• And here's how they hacked the DC online voting test to get it to play the Michigan fight song.

Ben Metcalfe warns that folks should think twice about making use of ".ly" domain names, after, it seems, the Libyan domain registry that manages that top-level domain, or TLD, refused to re-new Violet Blue's adult-themed vb.ly link shortener.

That the Libyan government plays a central role in managing the ".ly" domain space was one of the arguments you heard in favor of the U.S. government taking the step of creating the its own go.usa.gov link shortener. (It's a quirk of the Internet's origin story that it's the U.S. government that controls the ".gov" TLD worldover.)

It raises a half-serious question. What of Mitt.ly, Mitt Romney's custom link shortener? Metcalfe thinks that the Libyan decision might have much to do with economics, with the country belatedly realizing the value of its TLD, in addition to uncomfortability within Libya with the content being served up by vb.ly; Blue posted a letter from the Libyan domain registrar arguing that "our Country’s Law and Morality do not allow any kind of pornography or its promotion." One way that the Libyan government could make a big splash is by revoking the TLD of an American presidential candidate, and an Mormon one at that.

Update: Ben Smith follows up on the fate of Mitt.ly, and finds Romney taking matters into his own hands:

[H]is spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, said they've already begun moving the shortener to more congenial parts.

"We're learning about this for the first time and taking steps to change the domain for our site," he said.

The destination, I'm told: Mitt.tt, formally the province of Trinidad and Tobago.