Advomatic got a great press hit today that we're happy to share with you. VoIP News, a niche news and information publication dedicated to covering all aspects of the VoIP and Internet Telephony marketplaces wrote about our Click-to-Call system.

Robert Poe writes:

Advomatic application lets advocacy groups wage calling campaigns using an online interface.

For the third year Advomatic was a major sponsor to the convention of netroots activists now known as Netroots Nation.

We spoke on panels, we worked the booth in the exhibitors hall, and we did a great deal of facilitating numerous interpersonal networking events... ie. parties.

There were also daytime shenanigans. In one unibrow classy instance, the mens room at the convention center was renamed:

When our old boss Howard Dean showed up, Adam Mordecai and I scrambled across the street to hear his idears:

The flexibility of Drupal plus Advomatic's expertise in implementing custom politech solutions for important progressive fights results in the next generation of online advocacy.

Last year, one of our clients, Senator Dodd, filibustered AT&T's amnesty bill. For this fight, Advomatic was able to do what we do best - fit the optimum advocacy tool to the specific political fight and connect the campaign with the right audience.

By building a portable click-to-call widget we got the most effective advocacy tool into the communities of action who were most primed for the fight. And we did it fighting fire with fire: phone spying versus phone advocacy.

When Black Eyed Peas' Will.i.am released the "Yes We Can" video mashup of Obama's speech / song, many wondered why the file was uploaded to a relatively unknown site called DipDive.com.

Phase 2 of the DipDive project is phenomenal.

Collective video making - as users upload or share photos of Obama rallies to the site, the individual pixels of the video become collaged into a digital mosaic.

The Nation, America's oldest weekly magazine and most widely read journal of opinion reported recently on the "new tools and new talent" that is infusing the Democratic Party and buttressing the progressive left.

It is fitting that when the article describes early instances of the online infrastructure progressives built and the flaws of the older generation technology we inherited, the article quotes Adam Mordecai who described Howard Dean's the innovative websystem the nascent Advomatic built for Iowa.

Recently, there has been an extraordinary amount of sneering, dismissive media attacks on America's young people and the utility of the internet in politics.  This website, Future Majority, dedicated to beat reporting on millennial politics has tried to correct the condescending, disdainful narratives time and time and time and time

Here at Advomatic, we're getting pretty good at the whole widget thing. The data thing has been our forte for a while, but now there's the widgets that we keep nailing, and of course we're still pretty good at the whole the speaking truth to power thing. Let's discuss:

The non-partisan Drum Major Institute for Public Policy (DMI) issues annual reports analyzing the impact of domestic legislation on America’s middle class. Literally grading Members of Congress based on whether their votes are for or against "legislation significant to America's current and aspiring middle class."

From praise to prizes to cash, Advomatic projects have been on a roll recently. It's a pleasure to offer this run down of some recent client-partners and the encomiums heaped upon their websites:

Ever since NewsCorp put out that self-aggrandizing study on how MySpace is the best place ever to buy advertising, I've been thinking about what it means. The study was designed to double monthly advertising revenue from $30m to $60 and so much of the methodology is about brand identification and how well MySpacers react to banner ads versus flash ads etc. However, buried in the company's Press Release and tucked away in the study itself are a few gems that I think further one of my theories about how Millennials need and use Social Networks.

Take this quote for example from the PR:

”MySpace has thrived as a global community driven by self expression, discovery and connection of now more than 100 million people around the world who use it each month,” said Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace. “Users are empowered to create and share, build and maintain relationships and in the process have created an entirely new medium that is deeply integrated into their everyday lives. Smart marketers know how to... meow meow meow [buy ads].

But did you catch that? I gotta say, that's pretty true, Chris DeWolfe. Users are empowered to create and share, build and maintain relationships and in the process have created an entirely new medium that is deeply integrated into their everyday lives.

But why...

I've had difficulty explaining my networking concepts without resorting to some exasperated cliche like, "that's just how I think about it."

Well, turns out that scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health are coming to the conclusion that that's actually how the brain thinks.

Of course that's how I think about it. It's literally how I think...

Ray Oldenburg is an urban sociologist who writes about the importance of informal public gathering places. In his book The Great Good Place, Oldenburg demonstrates why these gathering places are essential to community and public life. He argues that bars, coffee shops, general stores, and other "third places" (in contrast to the first and second places of home and work), are central to local democracy and community vitality.

By exploring how these places work and what roles they serve, Oldenburg offers a compelling argument for these settings of informal public life as essential for the health both of our communities and ourselves.

China's "Netizens" number 130 million - and are growing 30% every year. Second only to the U.S., China is installing Broadband everywhere and internet cafes are the size of K-Marts and as abundant as Starbucks.

In 2005, Guo Liang of the Chinese Acadamy of Social Sciences published a study showing that only two thirds (and dropping) of Net users had email accounts, and of them, only a third check their email on a daily basis. Forty-two percent of Netizens did not use a search engine. Seventy-five percent had never made an online purchase.

Instead of replacing encyclopedias, newspapers, storefronts, travel agencies, yearbooks, and the U.S. Postal Service, Chinese people --both addicts and non-addicts-- were flocking to Video Gaming virtual worlds and million person-chat rooms. This is not the business-oriented Web of the West.

Guo's study explained that the Chinese internet user's online presence had very little in common with their real lives; they went online to escape. What and why?

This is a great photo set from Steve Garfield. He was in the blogger meeting with Senator Edwards and walked away impressed. You can read his and other New Englanders posts at a few blogs such as this.

Edwards, in an unorthodox move, is not asking you to join a campaign. He is asking you to join a movement.

The point is, if you open up your system to potential supporters, give them the tools that they need to organize, you reap the benefits.

Thanks to services like Flickr that offer open APIs and open source projects like Drupal, now these photos can go viral.

Can you imagine if everyone who took pictures at all 6 of Senator Edwards' events this week could easily add to the online chorus of folks whose pictures are a testament to powerful call to action that John Edwards made around the country?

We can. Advomatic builds on truly open source systems to harness this wave by magnification not centralization.

Over here at Future Majority, I answered a question about how one can make MySpace work. I brought up an example of "virtual-to-field back to virtual mobilization." The hugely unfunny and equally popular comic Dane Cook is the example.

The basic point is that the best political tools on the internet have been invented by people who have done field work on campaigns. These online tools have been invented to help power and steer existing physical campaign infrastructure.

Culture grows and spreads through environments organically. It evolves. When culture spreads via built environments, its evolution can be intelligently designed.

Consider this example: What I know of as Lindy Hop, that athletic, exuberant, acrobatic dance, was essentially invented at the Savoy Ballroom in 1935 by Frankie Manning.

Like so many things at the time, national interest in Lindy was piqued thanks to footage from a Lindy Hop competition getting included in Paramount, Pathe, and Universal movie newsreels. We're talking a reach way bigger than YouTube. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

What is the culture of MySpace? Youth culture in my town's high school was dominated by the jocks and their rivals, the burnouts. The closer the burnouts were to jocks, preps, or worse their parents, the more miserable they felt about themselves. The further away from the mainstream, the greater their self-respect and higher their cred among fellow burnouts.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in The New Yorker in 1999 called "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg." In it, he tangentially explains how it's been mathematically proven that Kevin Bacon is NOT the most connected actor, that distinction goes to Burgess Meredith (Rocky's trainer).

Why? For value, the 70 year length of Meredith's career was overshadowed by the extraordinary range of productions Meredith acted in -- from Oscar winners to B-movie shlock, to commercials, to theatre, to character work on TV, he's worked with them all.

What Meredith was to movies, Lois Weisberg is to Chicago. Gladwell dubs her a 'connector' - she knows everybody (including Meredith), she introduced Arthur C. Clarke to Isaac Asimov, just by chance, you know, whatevs.

The New Yorker had an article recently about a consultant who monitors blogs and messageboards for her client. She keeps her eyes peeled for keywords, "flame-ups", coded messages, and signs of attacks. It's something like the Tactical Messaging Department of Advomatic.

Only her client is the United States of America and she does her work for National Security:

Rita, who was born in Iraq and speaks fluent Arabic spends hours each day monitoring the password-protected online chat rooms in which Islamic terrorists discuss politics and trade tips. source

She describes her compulsive observations of these communities an addiction. The CIA calls it a breakthrough. "Occasionally, a chat-room member will announce that he is turning in his user name and password and going to Iraq to become a martyr, a shaheed."

Then Rita Katz takes action: