Joi Full ICANN

Joi Ito has written an interesting post about his time on the ICANN board and his views on the process.

"With all of it's tumultuous history and bumps and warts, ICANN, in my opinion, is the best way that we can manage names and numbers on the Internet and any new thing to try to do what it does would be less fair and probably wouldn't work."

Ito is known for doing great work for OSI and as a VC. He has served on boards of the Mozilla Foundation, Technorati, Socialtext, Creative Commons (current chairman), and Six Apart Japan. (See his Wikipedia entry if you want to be impressed.)

Fly, Be Free for the Holidays... Or Not

For those traveling over the holidays, check out this amusing comic at The Moderate Voice from The Hartford Courant. I still don't understand why we had to pour out one ounce of water from my daughter's sippy cup the last time we were going through a security line. (Of course the time before that, they let us through with a lot more... so random.)

Rove v. Kos

This is going to be good. Karl Rove (Bush's Brain) and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Daily KOS) duking it out in Newsweek throughout the 2008 campaign. According to the Washington Post, Rove and Kos will each have a column.

For those who see this move by Newsweek to be unorthodox or even mundane, let me say this - by putting two major figures who have shaped politics from the right and left over the recent past, we the people will have a unique angle on watching issues in this debate shift. And we will have the opportunity to hear what they think. Plus spin. I expect less spin from Kos because that's not his schtick, but Rove will undoubtedly be riding the spinwagon till the bitter end. Here are two people who are smart, articulate and knee-deep in the views of their parties' political base. I believe they'll call it as they see it and put up some great arguments for their respective causes.

Now, about the issue the Washington Post article notes of people moving from politics to press and vice versa, I understand why there's concern - the folks in power worry about leaks and message control. But if you are a person with loyalty or integrity, that doesn't happen. As someone who works on campaigns and also is a blogger, I won't talk about the internals of campaigns I work on in any way that compromises any remotely confidential information, if I write about them at all, and I won't say anything negative about the candidates because I feel it's both ethically wrong and just plain stupid. You shoot yourself in the foot if you do that. Republicans should know by now Rove isn't going to air their dirty laundry.

In cases where it goes the other way and campaigns hire people who have worked in media, they need an agreement from the get-go what those people will and won't divulge and how, once they are working on the campaign or in the government office. It didn't work out so well for the Edwards campaign early this year, but Hillary Clinton made a good move in hiring Peter Daou in 2006 from Salon.com. With media blurring into all aspects of our lives via the Internet and citizen journalism, media and political organizations should be working together more than ever.

Net Neutrality Panel in DC Monday

The Washington DC ACM Chapter has organized a great panel on the current net neutrality debate for this Monday, Nov. 12th from 7:30-9:30pm at 108 Funger Hall, 2201 G Street NW. Panelists include Harold Feld of the Media Access Project, David Robinson of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, and Hal Singer of Criterion Economics. Check the event listing for more information.

Election Day Tomorrow - Make a Difference!

Just a reminder, particularly to Californians and San Franciscans who read this blog - tomorrow is election day. You can vote for Mayor of San Francisco or Palo Alto City Council and School Board or Menlo Park Fire District or whatever fits your locale, but don't think this election doesn't matter - local politics are important and your vote will make a much greater difference in this smaller, local election where only several thousand people submit ballots. So find your polling place and even if you haven't remembered to change an address or whatever, submit a provisional ballot and get it done.