PdF notes: Microsoft expands campaign efforts, a convo with the Economist

Greetings, here's some of the stuff we didn't get to during the busy Personal Democracy Forum 2010 in New York:

Microsoft introduces the "Campaign Cloud": Hot on the heels of the Google/YouTube campaign toolkit refresh, the software giant makes its own news on the campaign front. Microsoft has teamed up with online campaign vendor ElectionMall to create a nonpartisan, one-stop-shop for scalable online campaigns. ElectionMall CEO Ravi Singh said his company looks to apply the same tactics used by President Barack Obama to campaigns of all sizes.

Conversation with The Economist: The Economist's technology and policy correspondent Brendan Greeley took to the stage to moderate a panel on online media and was kind enough to sit down with Hillicon Valley afterwards for a conversation on technology, politics and the future of media. Some highlights:

On the open government movement: "You can tell a movement has arrived when companies start advertising around it."

On the importance of file formats: "Politicians are using [PDF files] to run document dumps. It's very difficult to parse PDF files, it's much quicker to do so in html or text," Greeley said. "Adobe both recognized the importance of these issues and presented itself as a solution, but in doing so created a problem."

On the progress made on innovation by the government: "I think it was amazing, when you look at all government 2.0 data release sites, there were problems ... but I was struck that everyone said 'this site is in beta'," Greeley said. "Beta means you're still figuring things out. That's something governments don’t say, ever. The fact they have borrowed language and working habits of open source coders is encouraging. It's a huge culture conflict."

On bloggers v. journos: "The distinction isn't between a blogger and a journalist, it's 'Is someone willing to pay you to write all day?"

MIT grad student maps Gulf spill: One of the most impressive presentations of the conference was from Jeffrey Warren of MIT's Center for Future Civic Media. Using a process originally conceived to map sprawling slums outisde Lima, Peru Warren and his collaborators have been mapping the spread of the oil spill currently affecting the Gulf coast.

The maps are created using a kit with easily procured materials, including a small helium tank, two trash bags, a kite, a weather balloon, a cheap digital camera and string. Volunteers release the maps into the atmosphere, where they are able to produce images hundreds of times more detailed than those available via satellite.