One of the things that DailyKos is really good at is finding issues that are key for Progressives. That right hand column is full of the findings of the day.
One of the things that DailyKos is really awful about is being able to switch away from the latest train wreck. This, coupled with the largely volunteer nature of this site, mean that our situational awareness is uneven. We over-cover outrages and we miss important strategic issues.
I’ve been working with an enterprise intelligence system called Silobreaker for the last six or eight months. There were some initial bumps getting going, but we recently got our first funded seats for this system, and we’re making daily use of it for various issues.
I’m not sure if I should talk about what we’re doing with it for various organizations, so I thought I’d do an example to show you the power of the system. I saw an article that mentioned R.A.T.S., short for Supreme Court Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia. I thought I would see what I could find about them using the system.
First, I created a Silobreaker list. You might think it’s just another search engine, but everything that comes into the system is sorted and named – there isn’t any SEO noise in Silobreaker, it’s mostly good quality sources. So this list lets me identify the things I am going to inspect.
Silobreaker has a variety of analytical tools. I chose to fire up a Network based on this list. It found the other five justices and some current issues, in particular the odious Citizens United decision.
I also like to check the In Focus view – this is a list of keywords that pop up in connection with the List of names. I didn’t find anything eye catching this time, but I always look.
I did find something when I switched to the top stories view. Clarence Thomas did a Friday dump of his financial records.
And then @RepWeiner had this to say:
Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) was awaiting Justice Thomas' disclosures at 4:30 p.m. He tweets: "Pretty crazy that the Scotus does a pre-memorial day friday dumping of its financial forms."
And then not long after that Congressman Weiner’s account gets cracked, someone posts an off color picture under his name, and slime merchant Andrew Breitbart tries to make something of it. Unfortunately for Breitbart Ministry of Truth was wide awake and ol’ Andy got his ass kicked here, then I got busy talking about Indict Breitbart on Twitter, and an avalanche of grassroots displeasure ensued.
So … remember Team Themis, where the U.S. Chamber was going to pay a domestic spying operation to bother us? You think this clumsy effort aimed at Weiner has anything to do with him pointing out Thomas trying to sneak his document dump on a Friday?
If you’re concerned about Thomas and you dig a little bit you’ll find Protect Our Elections. They Do. Not. Play.
We’re facing massive corporate funding, buying not only politicians but Supreme Court Justices, too. If the battle is over the message we’d best be arming ourselves with the same tools our opponents are aiming at us.
I wrote a document entitled Applying Silobreaker which I have uploaded to Scribd. If you’re still not sure why you’d use Silobreaker this is a good place to start.
I’ve produced a WebBrain guide to Silobreaker, which is kind of clumsy as compared to using the proper Personal Brain client, but the text and structure are right, it’s just that the screen shots are too small. This is another tool funding thing – Personal Brain is $149 or $299 depending on which version you pick. I really like this and I’m doing more with it that I am writing these days. If you want to check it out there is a 30 day eval and I’ll send you the WebBrain that was used to make that URL.
Things are so out of balance in this country that one partially disabled guy pecking away at his laptop keyboard in his spare time can upend some big corporate effort.
We're about to relight the afterburner that powered our reform movement in 2006 and 2008 and I'd like us to be just a tiny bit more disciplined about where we strike and when. Good tools for deciding what to do and when precisely to do it are going to be key, so that's where I'm spending my time. You want to know more, you know how to reach me ...