Micah L. Sifry's blog

Dog Whistles, Community Organizing and Online Fundraising [UPDATED--Obama on Track to Raise $10M By Tonight]

2008-09-04T12:37:05-04:00

Online fundraising seems to work best when underlying receptivity to a message combines with a sense of urgency. Thus, last week, immediately after John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his VP pick, his campaign received a huge wave of donations -- $4.5 million in the first 24 hours, reportedly. That was the Republican base waking up.

Now, I suspect we are going to see an even bigger haul for Barack Obama today and tomorrow. If the Palin pick woke up the conservative evangelical community that, until now, was lukewarm on McCain, the hard-edged speeches from last night's Republican convention, which were watched widely (compared to Tuesday night, when GOP ratings slumped) by voters of all stripes, are not just firing up the Right.

A glance at Twitter users mentioning the words "Obama" and "donation" gives you a flavor of what is going on:
- @Carleenbrice tweets: "Woke up @ 4 pissed about how condescending Palin was. Just gave to a donation to the Obama campaign to express my anger."
- @dieactordie wrote: "Thank you SaPal! I just made a donation to Obama. You sure are energizing the base!"

I also have a hunch that Palin and Giuliani's attacks on community organizers are also going to fire up a very important constituency on Obama's behalf. A new Facebook group called "We are all community organizers" got launched last night, and its membership have been growing rapidly. The danger in stirring up this particular nest is that community organizers are network hubs, and while not all of them are involved in electoral work (often their jobs prevent direct partisan activity), this direct attack on their dignity may well push many of them into taking leaves of absence and going to work to help Obama.

The Obama campaign's own email response was also interesting, in this respect. David Plouffe wrote:

I wasn't planning on sending you something tonight. But if you saw what I saw from the Republican convention, you know that it demands a response.

I saw John McCain's attack squad of negative, cynical politicians. They lied about Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and they attacked you for being a part of this campaign.

But worst of all -- and this deserves to be noted -- they insulted the very idea that ordinary people have a role to play in our political process.

You know that despite what John McCain and his attack squad say, everyday people have the power to build something extraordinary when we come together. Make a donation of $5 or more right now to remind them.

Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack's experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed.

Let's clarify something for them right now.

Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies. [Emphasis in original]

And it's no surprise that, after eight years of George Bush, millions of people have found that by coming together in their local communities they can change the course of history. That promise is what our campaign has been about from the beginning.

Throughout our history, ordinary people have made good on America's promise by organizing for change from the bottom up. Community organizing is the foundation of the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement, labor rights, and the 40-hour workweek. And it's happening today in church basements and community centers and living rooms across America.

Meanwhile, we still haven't gotten a single idea during the entire Republican convention about the economy and how to lift a middle class so harmed by the Bush-McCain policies.

Etc. You get the idea. An old friend of mine, Janice Fine, is a veteran community organizer, and she uses the following role-play when she teaches other organizers how to organize. She pulls a person from the audience and then starts pushing them aggressively, while asking the person and the audience, "What do you do when you're being pushed around by a bully? What do you do? Huh?" Sooner or later someone answers, "You get your friends to help fight back." And a few people walk up to help push Janice back.

That's what's happening now. Sarah Palin's elevation first generated a big response for McCain, but the Republican attacks on the heart of Obama's campaign -- community organizing -- is going to foster a huge response. I predict Obama will raise $10 million online today and tomorrow.

Welcome to the Thunderdome.

UPDATE: The NYTimes Caucus blog is reporting that Obama has already raised $8 million and is on track to raise $10M by tonight. With 130,000 people kicking in, that's about $61 per donation, on average.

Viral Videos From DNC08 in Denver

2008-09-02T23:05:51-04:00

While network TV has cut back its coverage of the national political conventions to an hour a night, and within that hour we often get more of the network "stars" bloviating than straightforward speechifying from the convention floor, the internet is, as my colleague Andrew Rasiej likes to say, "the Tivo of our times." A glance back at the speeches and media moments in Denver and their YouTube views suggests a couple of episodes must have strong word-of-mouth, since people are going to watch the stuff they heard about but missed. These include:

John Kerry's speech, which was widely praised as one of the best of his career: More than 55,000 views on BarackObama's YouTube channel and nearly 45,000 views on TPMtv's channel on YouTube, more than any other convention speech featured there.

On C-SPAN's YouTube channel, the top videos from Denver are, in order, Obama's acceptance speech (241K views), Michelle Obama's speech (173K), and Bill Clinton's speech (153K). No surprises there. But number 4 is Rep. Dennis Kucinich's boisterous address, which occurred well before prime-time, but has 124,000 views on C-SPAN's channel on YouTube alone, and probably another 130,000 from others who uploaded his speech.

Despite some positive buzz on the blogs, neither Mark Warner's keynote nor Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer's feisty speech show up on the C-SPAN or Obama YouTube channels as drawing unexpected interest. Warner has about 15,000 views on those two channels combined; while Schweitzer has about 7,000 (plus another 40,000 on the DemConvention channel).

As far as media moments go, it's harder to zero in on the viral videos from Denver, but here's the one that stands out above the rest: Patrick Buchanan raving about Barack Obama's acceptance speech. More than 160,000 views so far. I guess the Nixon-goes-to-China aspect of this TV moment is pretty irresistible. This video of a Clinton delegate, an African-American woman, describing how upset she is with Hillary's withdrawal , also struck a chord, with over 100,000 views so far.

Daily Digest: Split-Screening Obama Speech and Palin VP Pick

2008-08-29T12:06:57-04:00

The Web on the Candidates

* There was a ton of live blogging, twittering and videoblogging last night, and we're not going to attempt to summarize it all here. Personally, I found glancing at Twitscoop, which shows the hottest terms on Twitter at any given moment, to be a wonderful way to take the pulse of the watch-erati as we all waited for Obama's acceptance speech. There were lots of obvious winners, like Crow (for Sheryl Crow) and Legend (for John Legend), but who knew that displaced manufacturing worker, average guy speaker and lifelong Republican Barney Smith would be such a hit? Obviously his line "We need a president who puts Barney Smith before Smith Barney," hit the populist chord of fame best of all.

* Speaking of covering DNC08 live, Keith McSpurren of CoverItLive, the live blogging tool that we're big fans of, shared these details with us:

"Who live blogs the Democrats? Basically, people who really don’t like Democrats. Over the past 4 days of the DNC, CiL has had a little more than 250 live blogs covering the activities in Denver. From Q&A sessions during the day, to small chats and of course, live blogging the speeches. Reasonable mix of regional television stations, newspapers big and small and of course, bloggers. Traffic was pretty level across the three nights at around 75k unique readers (total/day focused on DNC things). Granted, lots of people still do not know about CiL and we are by no means putting ourselves up as some accurate sample size of online journalism. Let’s just say, those are pretty good numbers for our service at this time and the number of new signups (people that will use the CiL service as writers) has had a big upswing as so many bloggers were sitting around each other saying "what’s that you are using”....but i digress. Last night, during the Obama speech, by far, the 3 largest live blogs in terms of audience size/reader comments and duration (how long their readers stayed online) were Redstate, Ace 'o Spades and Blogs for John McCain. There could be any number of reasons for this and I think we need to be about 50% bigger before i could say we have a representative sample (likely by election night in November we’ll be there). To be clear, there were many live blogs that i would describe as ‘supportive’ of Obama but they did not match up in terms of sheer audience size.

* Looks like the Republican bloggers who were buzzing early today about this Gulfstream (owned by McCain backer Lacy Clay) flight from Alaska that landed in Dayton Thursday night were on target, as multiple news sources confirm that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will be John McCain's VP pick.

* The Palin choice should make Adam Brickley happy: He's been plugging away on his blog Draft Sarah Palin for Vice President has been plugging away since February 2007, which is impressive as she only entered office as Alaska's Governor a month earlier! Right now, Brickley is looking like the Jerome Armstrong (remember his early call for Howard Dean, in 2002?) of 2008.

* It should also make the blogger behind PalinInvestigated happy: "Syrin" describes herself as a "Republican women" [sic] "committed to strengthening our Republican Party [and] empowering conservative women." Liberal investigative bloggers like Josh Marshall are already salivating at the prospect of digging yet further into Alaska's political cesspools, which he notes include a scandal around the firing of the state's Public Safety Commissioner, her former brother-in-law, who is in a bitter custody battle with Palin's sister.

* Want to know which candidates will raise your taxes? One solution: go to ObamaTaxcut.com and plug in your filing status, your number of dependents, and an estimate of your adjusted gross income. Using data from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and the Washington Post, the site has a frankly partisan aim: to show users that Obama would cut their taxes more than McCain. It was made by Zach Hensel, a graduate student who tells us that he "decided to make the site after seeing pretty much every McCain ad repeat the claim that Obama wants to raise taxes on everyone making more than $42,000." The site initially got a big boost in traffic from Digg, he says, but then got buried by Digg users saying it was "inaccurate." Says Hensel, "It seems that success on Digg generated some traffic that'll keep up for a while, though; most of the hits coming in now don't have referrers, so it's probably being passed around by e-mail."

The Candidates on the Web

* After hinting all day yesterday that he would announce his VP choice that evening and in effect step on Obama's speech, the McCain campaign instead took the high road and released a short TV ad on the web called "Convention Night," congratulating Obama on receiving the Democratic nomination. It was a classy move. "Tomorrow we'll be back at it," McCain added, and indeed, even before the day was done his campaign released a tough statement attacking Obama's speech.

* I don't know if it was the Palin choice, but in the rush to get the news up on the McCain website, visitors were treated to a broken home-page:

* While I knocked the Obama campaign yesterday for failing to insert the campaign's website url more frontally into the first three days of the Democratic convention, last night not only was "BarackObama.com" prominently featured on big screens at Invesco Field, the campaign also unveiled a state-of-the-art text-messaging push. Attendees in the 80,000+ person crowd were asked to text "DNC" to 62262, the Obama campaign short code, along with TV viewers, and you could see the results on a live interactive map above the field. My colleague Andrew Rasiej was on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday to talk about the value of text-messaging to the campaign.

BarackObama.com in Denver: "Phrase Not Found"

2008-08-28T13:55:07-04:00

Here are two words that have yet to be uttered from the stage of the Democratic National Convention: BarackObama.com or Democrats.org. I've slogged through the posted transcripts of the first three days speeches in Denver, and using the "find" tool on Firefox could not find one occurrence of either phrase.

Considering that the Democratic convention is drawing a healthy nightly TV audience of perhaps 25 million prime-time viewers, you've got to count this as more than just a minor slip by Team Obama. As I wrote last week, the party conventions are still very much conceived as "made for television" events, and the past three days have certainly succeeded at delivering a number of telegenic and well-timed TV moments, from Ted Kennedy's unexpected appearance to Hillary Clinton's call for Obama's nomination by acclamation (during the East Coast evening news programs).

But not once has a single speaker said, even in passing, "Find out more by going to BarackObama.com" or "Get involved building the Democratic Party at Democrats.org," or even, "Make an online contribution at..." etc.

Yes, it's true that Obama's web address is on all the signage being hoisted in the air by delegates, but that's hardly visible on TV and nothing like a direct reference by a prime-time speaker. I also hear there will be more direct asks tonight at the Invesco Field, where 75,000 Obama supporters will gather for his acceptance speech, including a request to attendees to text-message their friends during the event. We shall see.

Still, when you consider the impact of a top speaker calling out the campaign web address on live TV -- it spurred John McCain's record-breaking money haul after the 2000 New Hampshire primary, and the same move after Super Tuesday this year gave a second life to Hillary Clinton's fundraising -- it's definitely an opportunity missed, so far.

Blogger + NokiaN95 + Qik = New, Critical Journalism? Or, More of the Same?

2008-08-26T18:02:18-04:00

Will bloggers armed with cheap, high-tech tools change the news, or will the age-old rule that the closer you get to the powerful, the harder it is for you to criticize them, hold?

That question is on my mind as I watch, from afar, as Denver plays host not just to 15,000 credentialed traditional journalists, but also several hundred bloggers (many with credentials, some without). In many ways, the political blogosphere arose as many people reacted angrily and critically to a traditional press that they saw as too close to their subjects, or too intimidated by the powerful to report on them critically. Now that many bloggers are getting access too (and status), will they fall to the same dynamic?

I've been thinking about this particularly as I watch a new cohort fan out equipped not only with their laptops, cell phones and video cameras, but also with a potent new combo: a Nokia N95 phone (or its equivalent) plus direct pipeline to the live video web thru a service like Qik or Kyte.

At least 16 videobloggers are posting Qiks as they cover the Democratic National Convention, and you can follow their work here. They include a team from Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo; the Uptake; the Sunlight Foundation; the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, bloggers Liza Sabater, Baratunde Thurston and Erin Vest Kotecki; and our own Nancy Scola. TPM has gotten a lot of brand-name interviews, but so far in terms of views, a birds-eye view of the Michelle Obama speech and their chat with comedian Harry Shearer is head-and-shoulders above the rest. Baratunde also impressed me with his ability to drive and videoblog at the same time! But so far, they haven't really broken the mold by sticking their mikes and cameras in the face of someone who normally isn't asked many hard questions, and asking some of their own.

Now I know how hard it is to do live journalism in a setting like one of the political conventions--when I ran into Ralph Reed at a party thrown by Grover Norquist in NYC in 2004, I found myself somewhat tongue-tied and only managed a semi-tough question about his lobbying business. (That challenge suggests an interesting iPhone app for roving muckrakers that would serve up a list of tough questions for public figures via text message--contact me offline if you're a developer and want to help build it). So, it's way too early to judge the efforts of these political videobloggers (and for all I know I'm missing some of their better work as is). But the question remains: are they breaking the news model, or joining it?

Why I'm Not Going to Denver or Minneapolis

2008-08-24T22:45:57-04:00

My friend Jay Rosen noticed a tweet from me earlier where I said I wasn't going to the conventions this year, and instead planned to "watch the web watch the conventions." He wrote back asking how I planned "to add value to and interact with the convention?" Here's an extended version of what I wrote back to him in response.

I'm not sure how or if I can add any value to, or interact with the convention. Frankly, I don't think the official convention is much interested in interaction with its audience, unfortunately, as I noted in a post a few days ago. And having been to party conventions going back to 1984, I don't particularly have a need to witness yet another one in person. I'm sure Nancy Scola is going to do a fabulous job covering the conventions for techPresident on the ground, along with our other contributing bloggers who are going to be on the scene.

That said, I do think there's something new and interesting developing around these big political events, a kind of community experience that coalesces and takes shape via the web when many of us are either at, or paying attention to, something important all at the same time. So when I say I'm interested in "watching the web watch the convention," what I think I mean is I want to see how the world live web works during an event of this magnitude. And by NOT going and being in the center of the storm and instead watching and participating from a distance, I am betting that it may be easier to see some of the larger patterns at work.

As I wrote to Jay, I'm starting with a few hunches and/or judgments:

1. In terms of the official goings-on of the convention (i.e., the nightly speeches), it makes as much sense, or more, to watch those on TV (to see what 20 million TV watchers will see) as it does to try to watch them live from inside the arena. If anything, you have a better view from your couch--not just of the speakers, but also of the Chris Mathews of the world as they immediately put their frames on each speech.

2. I'm not very interested in running around and trying to "see and be seen" at all the parties and confabs that happen each day around the official proceedings. I can see some value in trying to glean the current state of the shifting forces within each party by attending these...and I can see some value in trying to expose the wheeling-dealing atmosphere of all the money-driven events. But it feels to me like other people will have those scenes well covered. And I'm pretty turned off by the Vanity Fair-Oscar party-A-listness thing, which pervades the nightly rush around the conventions. Everyone should go at least once to a national party convention, because it is an amazing thing to see the American political-industrial complex in the flesh. But after a while, it just gets depressing. My friend Marc Cooper spells out the reasons for that pretty well on his blog, here.

3. It's pretty cool how many people are going to blog and vlog the conventions, and I'm looking forward to trying to keep up with their work each day. Again, methinks you can do this more easily from home/office than from the floor of the convention or by milling around the hallways. We shall see...

4. I have a hunch that there's a big disconnect, however, between all the people talking. That is, there are the official speeches to the TV audience, and there are all the blogger/journalist/documentarians/vloggers who will be posting their reports and observations to the web. But while the latter group is listening to the former, who is really listening to the latter? We all believe in the possibility that many eyes watching from below + networked filtering systems = catching and spreading important information. But will that happen in Denver and/or Minneapolis? I don't know, but I suspect that watching the web watch the conventions may be more telling, than actually being there and being one more voice from within the din, speaking out.

Convention Rules; Missing the Boat in Denver and Minneapolis

2008-08-22T10:59:10-04:00

When will the political conventions enter the Connected Age? That question has been bouncing around my mind recently as we at techPresident keep fielding phone calls from reporters doing stories on Barack Obama's decision to announce his VP choice first by text message. Don't get me wrong: It's a great attention-grabbing gimmick, and it's helping his campaign build a powerful new tool to reach people (primarily the young), but it's hardly a revolution in politics.

The fuss over Obama's TXT gimmick reminds me of the fuss over the credentialing of bloggers to the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston. The traditional press also went gaga over that, and I can still picture the steady stream of reporters who trooped up to the nosebleed section where the bloggers were seated, coming to do a feature story on the only new thing that was happening that year. "Are you blogging right now?" they'd breathlessly ask, as we sat with our laptops open.

It's worth asking, though, why the convention organizers haven't done more to re-imagine their extravaganzas in light of all the new technologies of participation spreading through society. Not only are these gatherings still completely geared for television (don't tell the delegates, but they used to have a real role to play beyond being a colorful backdrop for TV anchors), they're designed for television circa 1990.

TV today is far more interactive, but that cultural change--which is itself a response to competition from the interactive internet--doesn't seem to have gotten through to the Hollywood producers and veteran lobbyists who, respectively, have long tackled the job of putting on the Democratic and Republican ~~TV shows~~ conventions.

Every week, something like 20 million watch shows like American Idol, and at the end of each show, millions of them vote on their favorite performers. No one is gaga about that use of text messaging; it's hardly rocket science.

This week, something like 20 million people will tune in each night to watch the conventions, but I'd be surprised if either the Democrats or the Republicans try to create any kind of interactive community out of that audience. Yes, they did a YouTube contest to find a representative "average person" to give them a free pass to attend, and yes, they're using tools like blogs and Flickr to keep us informed on how the conventions are taking shape. But in terms of making the actual events more engaging, they're probably spending more time worrying about the timing of the balloon drop.

Think of it: All they need to do is put up a big banner behind the speakers each night saying, "Join the conversation; go to www.democrats.org" (or www.rnc.org) and set up an interface to involve people in live chats by state or zipcode. State delegations could be enlisted to participate. Or, if that's too interactive for you, they could ask people to vote for their favorite speaker each night, just for fun. Or they could be promoting a contest to make a TV ad for the general election fight to come (stealing a page from the Mitt Romney campaign's "Create Your Own Ad" contest).

Even without such efforts, it's obvious that tens of thousands of people, maybe more, are going to be virtually participating in the conventions by creating and joining conversations online, or by going to convention watching parties in their neighbors' homes. Check out the usage of the tags "dnc08" and "rnc08," on Twitter if you doubt me. Lots of people--not just credentialed bloggers--are going to be posting their own original content from Denver and Minneapolis. Big political community hubs like DailyKos or Townhall.com will experience a surge in traffic and comments.

Indeed, if there's one lesson from the last two years, it's that for millions of people, politics is no longer a spectator sport. We've gotten involved in co-creating the campaigns and co-shaping the public discourse, and we like it. We're off the bus, out of the smoke-filled room, and crashing the gates. Old chokepoints like the presidential debates are bound to come under assault next. It's surprising, though, that the conventional planners didn't see this as more of an opportunity. Maybe next time?

Obama's New Mobile Platform is More Than TXT MY VP

2008-08-18T14:54:47-04:00

Barack Obama's promise to announce his VP pick by text-message -- a smart and obvious ploy to sign up mobile users for future campaign communications -- has been getting a lot of attention this past week, not just from us, but also in a smart op-ed by our friend Garrett Graff in the New York Times, and also today in a (rare for him) catch-up story by the Times' Brian Stelter.

What I hadn't noticed in all this coverage was a quiet but probably more important development: The Obama campaign just rolled out its new mobile platform, m.barackobama.com, which is expressly designed to work on most mobile phones that have internet access. Scott Goodstein, the Obama team's mobile guru, has an understated announcement here. There is no John McCain mobile website.

iLoop Mobile, the company that built the Obama campaign's mobile site, is understandably pretty excited about its work, as you can see from their press release. The platform has a number of cool features, including downloadable wallpaper and ringtones, news content fed dynamically from the main Obama website, the ability to download various white papers, and a goofy "Share the Hope" viral animation to send to friends. Other than the annoyingly cloying "powered by hope" mantra, the site makes sense.

I asked Katrin Verclas of MobileActive, one of the world's experts on all things mobile and political, for her take, and she wrote:

I have checked out the Obama site on a bunch of mobiles and it was ok but this is much, much better. Clean design, nice viral features (share the hope) that allows the campaign to collect additional phone numbers through text-a friend features. Clearly, there is a push in the campaign to collect as many numbers as possible -- presumably for get-out-the vote efforts and conversion to email and donations.

With growing mobile web usage, campaigns need to start paying attention to mobile users who search for and check out content about candidates on their phones. Web growth rates, as evidenced by mobile ad (source: Admob) traffic from the network’s publishers has grown by 104% over the last year, significantly spurred by iPhones, of course (which do not require a WAP [Wireless Application Protocol] site, however).

Candidates who adopt to the mobile web are smart even though they might not see immediate ROI. Obama is clearly on the vanguard, pushing the envelope in both SMS campaign outreach and now with a slick WAP site hoping to generate buy-in with the hip, young crowd.

Interestingly, though, when searching on a mobile for Obama -- search being one of the main areas of growth in mobile web traffic -- the main site still shows up, and there is no redirect to the mobile site from either a blackberry nor a Nokia N95 (which ideally should automatically render m.barackobama.com, reading that I access the site from a mobile...) I'll be curious to see whether that gets fixed.

McCain's "The One" Attack Video: Does it Have a Deeper Message?

2008-08-07T10:56:56-04:00

"The One," the McCain campaign's YouTube video poking at Oprah Winfrey's reference to Barack Obama's supposed chosenness, recently topped 1 million views (making it McCain's second most viral video). You may think the ad is just needling Obama (and his fans) for some of their more chest-thumping moments (i.e. "we are the ones we have been waiting for), and the general reaction to it from the political pundits was that the ad was amusing, that mocking Obama for being messianic was a bit tough but that mostly this was evidence of the McCain campaign starting to take the gloves off. Next story, please.

Well, maybe it's worth another look. The Matthew 25 movement--a group of progressive evangelicals that runs a PAC and has endorsed Obama--is charging that the ad is actually full of coded messages meant to convince evangelical voters that Obama is actually, literally, the anti-Christ.

Posting on the One Million Strong blog, Grant of Matthew 25 writes:

...this ad was not done by some campaign volunteer with a bit of editing experience for (as McCain suggests) his supporters amusement. This was a professionally cut, edited, and produced ad full of sinister dog-whistles for evangelical ears.

At best it is suggesting supporters of Obama are idol-worshipers. At its worst it is suggesting that Sen. Obama is some kind of anti-Christ.

The McCain campaign is unquestionably targeting the 44 million+ Americans who have read the Left Behind series. The makers of the ad chose all of Obama’s quotes very carefully and filled it with image after image equating Senator Obama to the anti-Christ, and especially to Nicolae Carpathia, the anti-Christ in the popular end times novels....

The anti-Christ, in the Left Behind series, Nicolae Carpathia set up a religion called THE ONE World Religion. Carpathia started his career as a young charismatic junior Senator. He made his rise, with Satan's support, by spreading a message of unity, hope, and peace, in an anomic world in the wake of the rapture....

The title or the ad is set up to immediately remind anyone familiar with the Left Behind series of the name of the false church set up by the anti-Christ - "THE ONE World Religion."

The text and voice over are exact copies of previews for Christian Specific end-times movies.

The images and quotes the McCain camp employed all allude to symbols of the anti-Christ. If the McCain campaign were simply cutting an ad about Obama being an idol that would be offensive enough; however, there are just too many parts of this ad which make no sense, for a professional production, unless they were trying to suggest Obama is the anti-Christ.

I'm not really fit to judge Grant's charges, but they certainly seem plausible. I know religion in America is a charged subject, but there's plenty of survey data showing that a substantial portion of Americans believe in the coming of the end-times; certainly the popularity of the Left Behind books leaves little doubt that there's a huge market here.

Also, you have to wonder about the context for this particular ad, if it is indeed aimed at reaching conservative evangelicals at some deeper level. Spend a little time over on GodTube ("Broadcast Him" is its slogan), the religious alternative to YouTube, looking for videos mentioning Obama, and the top results include (which strongly suggests that he is not) and "Barack Obama Christian Atheist Radical Christian Persecution".

So, is McCain playing with fire?

Checking the techPresident Charts

2008-08-06T12:13:12-04:00

It's been a while since I've checked in on our charts tracking how the campaigns are doing on the web, and even though we're now firmly headed into the August doldrums before the national conventions, some interesting trends are worth noting.

* Obama continues to dominate the online social network arena, gaining another 125,000 friends on Facebook in the last month.

* In terms of site traffic, it looks like July was McCain's best month ever. Hitwise shows him peaking at nearly 30% of all web traffic (with Obama taking the rest); Compete's data shows a similar boost for the Arizona Senator. Keep in mind that while his share is up, the overall amount of visits presidential campaign sites is way down from the early primary period. To some degree, McCain could only go up, given how low his web traffic has been up to this point, but I think this also reflects both his campaign's more aggressive online messaging efforts in July and a certain stasis on the Obama side.

* McCain's YouTube views also doubled over the last month, from 3.7 million to nearly 8 million. Again, this is a reflection of his campaign starting to "get" viral video: together "The One" and "Celeb" amount to about 2.6 million of those new views.

* McCain still trails Obama in organic mentions among bloggers, according to Technorati, but he's getting closer to parity. We aren't tracking sentiment, of course.

* Dark horse third-party candidate Bob Barr may well be catching on among the Ron Paul crowd. Our Meetup chart shows him taking off in the last two months, with about 6,000 people self-organizing in nearly 140 groups supporting his candidacy. That's a fraction of the almost 100,000 people in Ron Paul Meetups, but it still is a sign of real grass-roots support for the Libertarian Barr.

Commission on Presidential Debates Boldly Goes to Web 0.2, Launches a Dud

2008-08-06T06:50:07-04:00

This morning, the Commission on Presidential Debates and MySpace are announcing "MyDebates.org,," a "landmark partnership" that they claim "will do for the debates what TV did in 1960 for the Nixon Kennedy election." [The release they emailed around yesterday said there was a 5am PST embargo on this news, but given that their press release is now live on the web at http://www.myspace.com/mydebates, I figure they've broken their own embargo.] Their joint press release says this new site "will offer a host of interactive tools for viewers to virally engage in the political process." The release notes that "marks the first time that the CPD has paired with an Internet property to include online functionality into the event series and traditional debate format."

So, what are the "landmark" functionalities we're about to be treated to?

Visitors to the site will have the option of downloading a personalized application which, during the debates, will stream the television event live from the embed location (e.g. within a blog, social network, or website). The application will also provide users with an on-demand playback functionality as well as issue-based tracking, allowing users to track a candidate’s stance on issues they care about throughout the live stream. The full functionality will be available in the days leading up to the first Presidential debate on Friday, September 26.

Additionally, ‘MyDebates.org’ will feature high-quality video streaming and as the candidates are speaking, “issue icons” will light up as candidates discuss specific main topics. Users will be polled periodically throughout the debates with short questions with multiple choice answers (or iconic responses, e.g. thumbs-up/ down). This format will reduce distraction while eliciting specific and valuable feedback.

Translation: You can use a MySpace widget to stream the live video of the debate on your own site. Someone will tag the video content with some kind of icon-like issue tags, just in case you want to rewind to watch something again. And invisible pollsters will have the opportunity to poll viewers using this widget, for use in ways that you will have absolutely no control over.

Oh and there's one more bone: "The second Presidential debate, in a Town Hall format, will take place on Tuesday, October 7. ‘MyDebates.org’ will provide the Web platform through which Americans will submit questions which may be presented to the candidates during this event." I like that use of "may be presented." We wouldn't actually want to promise anything, would we?

That's it. This is pathetic. It's like saying, "I just bought a synthesizer and all I can think to do with it is play Chopsticks."

I don't fault MySpace for this travesty so much as I fault the Commission, for lack of imagination and courage. Recall that at least the MySpace/MTV forums during the primaries included real-time feedback from viewers that the audience could see, and the candidates even saw the aggregated responses, in real time. Also recall that Google/YouTube and the City of New Orleans have been offering their services for a candidates forum on September 18, and surely something creative could have come of that.

What they're offering us here is little more than live video streaming, which is like, so, year 2000. When you consider what YouTube and CNN did in the past year, along with what MySpace and MTV did, as well as what we did with 10Questions.com--in each case to expand voter participation in debates and in some cases open new kinds of feedback loops, you have to admit this is really disappointing. Honestly, it would almost be better if they didn't bother to include MySpace. (And one might want to ask, why only MySpace when plenty of other sites and services could provide this video service?)

Says Janet Brown, Executive Director of the Presidential Debate Commission, “Our educational partnership with MySpace builds on the unique power of digital media to further engage voters on the issues and help ensure their voices are heard in new and effective ways." She added, "I’m confident that this is the best way for new media to intersect with the general election Presidential debates."

"Best way"? This is depressing and should generate outrage. At a moment when we can start thinking seriously about Rebooting America and opening up the political process in all kinds of creative ways, the best the CPD could come up with was this? (In fairness, we should also blame the McCain and Obama campaigns, who no doubt told the CPD that they didn't really want any significant changes to what has become a very reliable and controlled format for the TV debates.)

I have to say, though, that while I'm outraged, I'm not surprised. The Commission on Presidential Debates has long been, along with the Electoral College, one of the more archaic and anti-democratic elements of the presidential election process. But unlike the Electoral College, the CPD isn't enshrined in the Constitution and has no particular claim on legitimacy. It is in fact a private entity that was created by the two major parties in 1986 (its founding chairmen were then-RNC chair Frank Fahrenkopf and then-DNC chair Paul Kirk) to supplant the longstanding role of the League of Women Voters as a nonpartisan forum for presidential debates.

Both parties had reasons to be upset with the League for its honorable insistence on inviting a third-party candidate to the 1980 debates, independent John Anderson. And so they foisted themselves on the process, began taking corporate sponsorships to pay for the debates, and established arbitrary criteria for who could or couldn't be included in them. As a creation of the two major parties, the CPD has also been much more subservient to the interests of the presidential campaigns, giving them tremendous leverage over the content and style of the actual events. Since the Commission took over, the so-called "Spin Room" for post-debate media-massaging has been actually institutionalized, with a large arena next to the press holding pen prominently labeled "Spin Room."

Now they're giving us a shack and asking us to call it a "landmark." Feh. Please wake me when it's over.

Netroots Nation 2008, Live Video Here

2008-07-17T17:04:01-04:00

I'm in Austin, Texas for the Netroots Nation conference today and tomorrow, and will try to do some live video interviews as I bump into people and post them here. I'm speaking tomorrow on a panel on "Transparency, Participation and Reinvention in Government in the Next Administration Through Web 2.0 Tools and Culture," which I think could have had the shorter title of "Rebooting Government in 2009" but you get the drift. I'm looking forward to meeting and talking with my fellow panelists, Justin Hamilton, Silona Bonewald, Andrew Hoppin, W. David Stephenson, and Jeanne Holm. Andrew and Jeanne are both with NASA, so hopefully they've brought some good schwag, like a miniature Saturn rocket or something. Ping me via Twitter (@mlsif) if there's something or someone on the agenda that you want me to track down.

PdF2008: Shirky, Teachout, Rushkoff, Jones, Clift Keynotes Are Up on Blip.tv + Final Plenary on Leadership

2008-07-05T14:54:12-04:00

We've posted another chunk of video of plenary sessions from "Personal Democracy Forum 2008: Rebooting the System" on our Blip.tv channel at pdf.blip.tv. You can watch:

* Clay Shirky on Politics As If Everybody Can Participate.
* Zephyr Teachout on The Internet's Still Unfinished Potential.
* Douglas Rushkoff on The New Renaissance.
* Van Jones on How Social Technology Can Help Solve Global Problems.
* Steven Clift on The Power of Information to Transform Government.
* Redefining Leadership in a Networked Age, with Brian Behlendorf, Scott Heiferman, Gina Cooper and Craig Newmark.

Collect them, trade them with your friends, get the whole set!

The FISA Protest and myBO: Can We Talk? Can They Listen?

2008-07-03T09:57:32-04:00

The online mini-rising to protest Barack Obama's support for the Congressional compromise to renew the FISA legislation has been getting a lot of attention, with much being made (by us and plenty of others, including Ari Melber in the Nation, The New York Times, et al) that activists are using Obama's own social networking platform, my.BarackObama.com, to organize and channel their efforts to get him to alter his stand. Indeed, as of today the Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right group has swelled to more than 14,000 members, which makes it the single largest self-organized group on the whole platform, which reportedly has close to a million registered members.

This is certainly a good example of what thinkers like Clay Shirky and Mark Pesce have been talking about, when it comes to "ridiculously easy group formation" (qua Shirky) and how "Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment" (qua Pesce). But right now the main reason this development is important is NOT because the group itself is that powerful; it's because attention-amplifiers in the blogosphere and the MSM are covering the story and thus threatening some of Obama's hard-won image as a change agent, which could conceivably weaken his vaunted fundraising and organizing machine. So while the Obama campaign is keeping a poker face about the importance of some of its members using the master's tools to challenge his position, it is no doubt paying attention, too.

The fact is, we're all entering completely new territory here. There have always been efforts to influence political candidates to take or change positions during a campaign (or afterward), but we've never before had a national campaign create an open platform for mobilizing supporters AND THEN seen a salient chunk of those supporters openly use that platform to challenge the candidate on a policy position. Indeed, while the net is inherently a two-way, many-to-many medium, no politician has yet used it to listen to his supporters as a group. Yes, the Obama campaign has asked its supporters to share their stories about their health care woes, and some of those anecdotes have made it into the campaign's blog or policy papers. But we have no norms for a collective, public discussion--even though we now have the capacity for one.

Zephyr Teachout has made the point here at techPresident that none of the campaigns have used the web, yet, to share power with their supporters--the most they've been willing to do is share tasks (like phonebanking or door-knocking). This FISA protest raises the question of power head-on: What were the arguments inside Senator Obama's policy circle over accepting or rejecting the congressional compromise bill? Who gets the candidate's ear? How did they get that access? The FISA fight also should force net-activists to ponder some questions too. How would you like to have input on the policy-making process? If you want a candidate to listen to you, what measure of standing should make your voice(s) relevant? Sheer numbers? Total donations? Your ability to make a lot of noise?

The hubbub over the FISA protest also raises another issue worth discussing as we ponder the future. Is myBO really such an amazing organizing platform? Yes, anyone can join and instantly get the ability to create their own blog, start or join groups, start or sign up for events, create your own fundraising effort, and connect with friends. The site also awards users points for all kinds of activities, creating a bit of a virtuous competition to do more with it. The "My Neighborhood" button is a nifty way to see people and events in your immediate vicinity. And the Obama campaign clearly has its eye on the most important things it needs to win in November: getting supporters to focus their energies on things like raising money, bringing in more supporters, phone-banking, door-knocking, and getting out the vote--as its "grassroots action guide" makes crystal clear.

But while myBO does make it easy to start a group online, it doesn't make it easy to grow it. You can't launch a group by inputting a bunch of email addresses into it, the way you can with a Google group, for example, which will automatically treat those people as members whether they like it or not. (One reason the campaign may have chosen this restriction is to insure that its email list, which includes everyone who joins myBO, is fully opt-in and thus doesn't get blacklisted by spam-blockers.) You can reach out and try to "friend" other people on the site, but you can't message someone directly unless you already have their email address. First they have to accept you as a friend.

Unlike Facebook, when you join a group or post something to your blog, on myBO your friends don't get an update unless they decide to visit your home page, another drag on the spread of messages internally. In reverse, this means that if you're the organizer of a group on myBO, you don't get a notification every time someone new joins. You can join a group and message everyone on the group's list-serve, but we all know how clunky list-serves can be for managing large group conversations. (Indeed, I just got on the FISA protest group two days ago and this morning I received a digest from it containing 464 messages, all from the last 24 hours!)

Limitations like these have led Obama activists to go elsewhere to do some of their organizing, or to build hybrid efforts that live partially on myBO and partially elsewhere online. For example, the FISA protest group on myBO has also created a Facebook group, in part because the newsfeed feature on Facebook is very good at spreading information across the social graph quickly. Or, as they say in their FAQ on their outside wiki site: "Facebook groups can grow very quickly, and it can be a great 'feeder' to the group on myBO.") Likewise, several hundred Obama supporters who are fans of Al Giordano's blog The Field have set up shop on the meta-social-network site Ning, rather than nesting on myBO.

I asked a couple of people for their opinion of myBO's tool set and got some interesting responses back. Mike Stark, one of the two administrators of the FISA group all in the news at the moment, said:

"My personal opinion is that the MYBO tools are pretty archaic. So far as I know, as moderator of the group, I've got no way of setting messaging defaults for new members, the blog is bare-bones, there's no IM capability, most people don't complete profiles (which is a debatable benefit - by not requiring a lengthy registration process, more people sign up for the site), and networking does seem to be 'a process'."

Another person who is a web developer and organizer said: "The lateral tools on myBO stink." In particular, this person added, the friend-finder tool is "definitely a generation or two behind compared to what LinkedIn or Facebook are offering." Also, this person noted, "Since the system doesn't handle multiple friend requests very elegantly, people may have had issues getting swamped with requests. And it doesn't seem to have any concept of a friend-activity aggregating feed, which maybe isn't so surprising since that's a decent chunk of engineering and really Facebook's key innovation."

Why dwell in such detail on the structure and functionalities of myBO? Well, as Lawrence Lessig wrote, "code is law." The structure of the conversation and organizing enabled on myBO could well be the prototype for whatever successor platform a President Obama uses to help him govern. By default, myBO is the place where millions of Obama supporters are most likely to cross paths online (you can go elsewhere online, of course, but this is the place with the most self-selected Obama supporters, by definition). There's a lot of power to be tapped here. How it is used, who gets to do what, and who listens to whom, are questions that will matter a great deal going forward.

UK Shows the Way Toward Public Data 2.0

2008-07-02T09:57:15-04:00

Our cousins across the pond continue to show that "government 2.0" isn't just something that we have to do "to" government, but it's something government can do "with" us. The Power of Information Task Force has just launched a contest called "Show Us a Better Way" that is calling for "ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated." They've put up 20,000 pounds for the winning idea, which is something like a gazillion dollars (these days). This is really kewl.

To make the contest really productive, the taskforce has brought together a wealth of government data-sets and useful APIs, including several previously unavailable treasure-troves, including neighborhood statistics (covering such things as access to services, community wellbeing/social environment, crime and safety, economic deprivation, education, skills and training), health care information, a list of all UK schools and the official notices of the London Gazette.

The kinds of things the organizers are looking for are detailed here. They include obvious mashups like crime mapping, and services like mySociety's "FixMyStreet." But then there's "RateMyPrison" (that's for visitors, not inmates, I think), the "Army Rumour Service," and a host of other fantastic civic software projects collected on a wiki that is worth its weight in gold.

I'm not surprised to see Tom Loosemore's name showing up helping manage the site's blog--he's long been a leader in this space from his days around mySociety to his work at the BBC. Kudos to all!