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A L S O__T O D A Y Information theory and practice By Matthew DeBord Once upon a time, "information" didn't even exist. Now it's everywhere. Two new books tell how that happened - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Discuss the programs you can't function without and why in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y You've got sendmail By Andrew Leonard Eric Allman's free program makes sure your e-mail gets through. Now it's going commercial (12/11/98) The 21st Challenge No. 16 Results By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau Mystery misdirected e-mail (12/11/98) What does technology want? By R.U. Sirius Kevin Kelly talks about his "New Rules for the New Economy" (12/10/98) Is Rio grand? By Janelle Brown With the new MP3 player, the future of online music distribution is here now -- it's just a bit slow (12/09/98) Internet activism, Czech-style By Mark Schapiro The Communists are yesterday's target -- today, it's the phone company's Net-access rate hikes (12/08/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - 21st Log Make money fast on the Internet!

Internet censure-ship How did the Censure and Move On Web site build its anti-impeachment campaign -- and can it make a difference? BY JANELLE BROWN | So much for representative democracy: If the polls are accurate, then the impeachment proceedings on Capitol Hill have nothing to do with what a majority of "the people" actually want. So what can "the people" do about it? A lot, say the founders of Censure and Move On, an online campaign that for the last two months has been working to persuade the government to rebuke President Clinton promptly and get on to more important things. More than 300,000 people have signed a petition calling for censure -- and an impressive percentage of those have also continued to participate by sending e-mail messages, writing letters and personally meeting with representatives. Just this week, 76,000 people called their representatives' offices as part of a telephone campaign organized with People for the American Way, Michael Moore and Working Assets. But is this kind of activism having an impact? We asked Joan Blades, who organized Censure and Move On with her husband, Wes Boyd. Together, they previously co-founded the software firm Berkeley Systems (best known for the After Dark flying toaster screen-savers and You Don't Know Jack game). The Internet, she says, is changing the rules of activism -- and the government is starting to listen. Why did you decide to do Censure and Move On in the first place? Around the time of the Starr Report coming out, we were hearing from a huge variety of people that it was time to move on. You could walk into a restaurant and you would hear people talking about it, and talking about how crazy it was. People are, and were, very worried about the distraction from the business of government. We heard a tremendous amount of consensus -- a majority stating something that was totally different from what was going on within the Beltway, so there was a real disconnect between what was happening and what the public wanted. The public is fully educated on this issue. When people talk about not wanting a direct democracy, that's because the democracy is not educated. In this case, the people are very well educated, thank you. We thought putting up a Web site at MoveOn.org and starting a petition might be a way to give the people a voice. And frankly, we had our socks blown off. We had hoped it would go well, but we had no idea the numbers would ramp up in the way they did. Did you initially envision MoveOn.org as merely an e-mail petition? Or did you envision this as the multiple endeavor -- with letters, visits, phone calls -- as it ended up being? The original vision was as an e-mail petition, but we also realized we'd need to print it out because representatives don't necessarily give the same weight to cyberspace as they do to written words. We figured, if things went well, we'd probably have to print it out. When we put up MoveOn.org it was before the Judiciary Committee voted to go ahead with the inquiry, and we were hoping very strongly that it would be a short process. After the committee and then the House vote to go ahead with the inquiry, we realized that the next thing we had to do was pay a lot of attention to the election. [So we organized] the Oct. 29 event where we had Move On volunteers in 44 states going to 219 different representatives to have constituent meetings at noon nationwide. That was a first. N E X T_ P A G E .|. Why does Congress ignore e-mail -- and can the Move On campaign put a dent in the impeachment campaign?