* By Jeanette

If you asked me why Web 2.0 is becoming so popular before reading Lakshmi Chaudhry’s article, Mirror, Mirror on the Web, I would have said something like, it let’s users shape media, campaigns and give voice to world affairs, etc.

Now I would add that Web 2.0’s popularity allows people to assert their individuality, which is partially fueled by the idea that users believe they are special.

For organizations, this lends insight to the experience some supporters are seeking when participating in Web 2.0 activities such as contests, blogs and user-generated websites.

The Sunlight Foundation is sponsoring a contest for data mashups that display information about Congress for "Sunlight Week" Mar. 11-17.

Click here for the details. Not geeky? Try this out ... they've got their own contest which might score you an iPod into the bargain.

Oh, you mean the other DIA.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is seeing "mushrooming" use of these various Web 2.0 technologies that are becoming critical to accomplishing missions that require intelligence sharing among analysts...

"Web 2.0 mashup fans on the Internet would be very much at home in the burgeoning environment of top-secret mashups, which use in some cases Google Earth and in some cases other geospatial, temporal or other display characteristics and top-secret data."

Source. Via Smart Mobs.

A troubling question finally answered. Could the answer be in any other form but YouTube?

On the DIA Support listserv, a question about integrating YouTube with DemocracyInAction pages yielded this nifty Oceana action page with a YouTube embed.

Nice pairing. Cameron explains the trick to making sure YouTube plays nicely with DIA:

When embedding YouTube in DIA, the thing to look out for is the WYSIWYG ["What You See Is What You Get" -- the word processor-like HTML editor used in e-mail blasts and on some user-facing pages. -ed.] editor. It has a tendency to mangle code, so I would suggest disabling it when adding the HTML provided by YouTube.

Time magazine has named me -- I mean, you -- I mean, everybody! -- its Person Of The Year!

Far be it from me to dismiss that as the callow audience-pandering of an entity too marketing-savvy to name Osama bin Laden the person who most affected events in 2001. I mean, my technophobic reservations, notwithstanding, any choice that gets Luce's old middlebrow warhorse tweaking the "Great Man" theory has something to recommend it. But I defy anyone to ingest in unironic triumphalism this representative puree of web 2.0 pabulum: "[w]e made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs [presumably this means good guys in flight suits and not bad guys in dynamite vests, but the great thing about the web is that you get to have it your own way. -jz] and built open-source software."