Don't believe me? Check out Twitscoop for the goods.
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Don't believe me? Check out Twitscoop for the goods.
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Don't believe me? Check out Twitscoop for the goods.
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Don't believe me? Check out Twitscoop for the goods.
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Thankfully, the girls have returned with another classic.
The lyrics are as funny-bad as ever, and the special effects take it up a notch.
I love that "trapped in a box" effect!
Unfortunately for McCain, these appear to be some of the only videos in support of his candidacy, even if they are satires. If actual McCain fans would produce some videos maybe there'd be enough competition to push the girls to the next level.
]]>John McCain is “taking a serious drubbing” on YouTube, writes the Los Angeles’ Times’ James Rainey, who cites video after video on YouTube that attack McCain for being less than a straight-talker. “Six of the top 10 videos returned by a ‘John McCain’ YouTube search Thursday pegged the 71-year-old as inconsistent, extreme, wooden or a combination of the three,” Rainey writes. Ouch. We continue to ask: where is the voter-generated video in support of McCain?
In his invaluable weekly report from across the political blogosphere, the Blogometer’s Ian Faerstein analyzes the fallout from Barack Obama’s “gaffe” in which Obama said that his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz (in fact, his great-uncle helped liberate Buchenwald). The story broke on the conservative blog Ace of Spades HQ and quickly gained traction among conservative blogs, eventually leading to a retraction from Obama. But Obama’s considerable army of online supporters pushed back, and has far as we can tell the story has fizzled.
Writing at Future Majority, blogger alicecheshirecat takes stock of the outdated Franking Rules that limit the outreach Members of Congress can make to their constituents. She suggests that the Hill get hip to wikis, which could help usher in a new wave of government-citizen interaction. When will Congress enter the 21st Century?
Here’s a reminder that if you live in New York it’s your duty to go to the Forum on Participation and Politics Online next Wednesday, June 4, at 6pm, at the NYU Law School. It’s sponsored by the good folks behind OneWebDay and will feature a knockout panel, including techPresident’s Andrew Rasiej and Zephyr Teachout and citizen journalism guru Jay Rosen, and it will be moderated by PdF’s Allison Fine. Go here for more details.
A personal/professional note: today is my last full day as associate editor at techPresident and Personal Democracy Forum. My good friend and colleague Nancy Scola will be taking over the Daily Digest baton for the next few months. I’m confident that this daily roundup of snark, geekiness, and tech/politics obsession will be safe, and even more informative, in her hands. As for me, I’m moving on to Change.org, where I’ll be the managing editor of a social issue blog network that will launch later this summer. It’s an exciting move, but my departure from PdF is bittersweet; I love these guys. Expect to see me poking my head in from time to time.
Kids, please be nice to Nancy and continue to send your tips, suggestions, and love to techpres AT personaldemocracy DOT com or to Nancy at nancy AT personaldemocracy DOT com.
The Candidates on the Web
In Case You Missed It…
We've reposted a first-person account from Bruce Wilson of the making of the viral video of Pastor John Hagee that precipitated Senator John McCain's decision to renounce Hagee's endorsement of his candidacy. Wilson is a co-founder of the E Pluribus Media blogger collective.
In this week’s favorite political videos, the Democratic candidates show their inner Puerto Rican-ness by dancing in the streets, drinking the local beer, and speaking accented Spanish. We’ll see how they fare on Sunday. Also, a curious Memorial Day message from John McCain and a glimpse at Hillary Clinton’s early life in elementary school.
]]>6. Podemos Con Obama
Going after the Puerto Rican vote this Sunday and the Latino vote in the general, music producer Andres Levin produced this “Yes We Can”-style video featuring a slate of Latin music stars. The clip of Jessica Alba is taken from Will.i.am’s “We Are The Ones. Is that cheating? Like “Yes We Can,” this video is featured on Will.i.am’s DipDive site, and has been viewed about 15,000 times on YouTube.
5. Hillary Clinton Dancing in Puerto Rico
When in San Juan… Campaigning in Puerto Rico, Hillary grabs a beer (“It’s good. It’s very good”) and shows off some moves. At about 23 seconds in, she closes her eyes and briefly goes into herself, perhaps dreaming of a time after June 3 when she can catch some shut-eye. About 20,000 views on YouTube.
4. Barack Obama in Puerto Rico
Obama shows that two can play the dancing game, showing off his improvised moves on the streets of Puerto Rico. About 3,600 views on YouTube.
3. PR “Mensaje a Puerto Rico” Ad
Also in time for this Sunday’s Puerto Rico primary, Barack does a TV ad entirely in Spanish, and doesn’t mangle things too badly. About 1,700 views YouTube.
2. Web Ad: Memorial Day
John McCain has a different message for Memorial Day: “Let’s — from time to time — remember that [immigrants] are God’s children.” The video was taken from a Republican debate from last year, and anti-immigration crusader Tom Tancredo looms in one shot. Needless to say, McCain’s “soft” stance on immigration is a hard sell to much of the GOP base. About 3,400 views on YouTube.
1. Meet Young Hillary Clinton
Produced by YouTube video makers 60frames, Young Hillary Clinton picks up on the Hillary-was-always-like-this theme first expressed in Slate’s classic parody of Election from earlier this year. Clearly, politics isn’t high school; it’s elementary school. More than 30,000 views on YouTube, though the video is also featured on Funny Or Die.
]]>If they don’t come to you, go to them. A new site gives Barack Obama supporters the chance to submit suggestions for the campaign, and to vote, Digg-style, on the submissions. Think the campaign should make transparency a core issue? Change the font in its designs? Go to Oh Boy Obama, submit an idea, and get voting. It’s a great idea, and one likely borne out of necessity: the Obama campaign has been criticized for not reaching out enough to online activists, and this adds a missing feedback loop (though my.barackobama.com seems to be working pretty well). (via Ben Smith)
Also from Ben: a video of Young Hillary Clinton (the anal editor in me has to point out that her name is spelled wrong in the title cards). Produced by online video producers 60frames, it picks up on the Hillary-was-always-like-this theme first expressed in Slate’s classic parody of Election from earlier this year.
A user on the new conservative hub The Next Right, echoing the oft-repeated lament that the GOP is lagging behind the Dems online, asks her Republican readers who, exactly, they are. The responses show a diversity of backgrounds — professional thirtysomethings, independent libertarians, baby boomer vets, hyper-educated twentysomethings, etc. — that makes it clear that online conservatives, like any large community, belong to a positively large, and heterogeneous, tent.
Xeroxing the spirit of FreeRice, the online game that seeks to end global hunger via mouse clicks, the Click 4 Obama game coverts clicks into Obama ads. Answer correctly a trivia question like “How long have American forces been fighting in Iraq,” and you’ve donated some prime pro-Obama ad space. With a generous helping of simple trivia questions to keep you clicking, it’s pretty addictive.
Causes, the Facebook app that we’ve covered before, has announced they’ve raised $2.5 million for almost 20,000 non-profits in the last year and have registered 12 million users. Those are impressive stats for an application that, for now, lives solely on Facebook. But the future is uncertain: as Facebook reconfigures its application platform and other services like Google Friend Connect arise, we’re certain to see Causes and other similar companies change their game plan.
The Candidates on the Web
In Case You Missed It…
John McCain’s often aimless email messages are something of a recurring theme here at techPresident, so much so that Michael Whitney is dubbing the topic “McCain Email Watch.” Today’s example: a fundraising message that offered a 3’x6’ personalized banner for the low price of $250.
]]>We’ve heard stories of superdelegates using YouTube to poll their constituents, but fake superdelegates on YouTube? It was bound to happen. Ever on the tech/politics beat, Wired’s Sarah Lai Stirland discovered that thousands of activists were taken in by Tom Ryan, a fictional superdelegate running for Mayor of Scranton (isn’t there a certain fictional office based in Scranton too?) who's featured in videos promoting a new online sitcom. "Ryan" asked viewers to tell him whether he should support Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, and the people obliged. It’s all part of a sinister plot to get folks to watch the sitcom, called The Party. Also, he may have fooled the voters, but he didn't fool the sharp folks at the Superdelegate Transparency Project.
The Washington Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas continues to cover the clickocracy with depth and insight. Following up on Hillary’s hammering over last week’s RFK comments, Vargas plainly writes that Clinton “has had a complicated relationship to the Internet and, in comparison to her chief rival, a consistently losing Web presence.” From the “Vote Different” video to the controversy over her sniper fire comments to last week’s comments, she can’t get a break online. While Obama seems made for the web — savvy about online organizing, breaking fundraising records — Clinton is always on the ropes.
While the questions haven't been exactly rolling into the RNC’s Can We Ask campaign against Barack Obama, one notable entry came from none other than conservative anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, who asks, “Where’s the beef?” (wow, original question!). He wants to know how Obama is different from other Democratic candidates. We’re not so sure Obama will be quick to respond…
Everyone’s getting in on the election action this year: The America Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) invited designers to submit nonpartisan GOTV posters for a design contest. The winners will be chosen by a panel of judges (hey, why not let the design community vote instead?), and winning posters will be distributed nationally. We particular like the submissions from MSLK, including this one which reminds us of Radio Raheem.
We're pleased to announce the following speakers will be joining us at PdF 2008:
Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s Minister of Culture, will be speaking on how social technology can help solve global problems.
Sam Feist, CNN’s political director; Lee Brenner, the director of MySpace Impact Channel; and Dan Gillmor, the director of the Center for Citizen Media, will be speaking on how to build a better debate, with and without television.
Max Hoat, the CEO of Mogulus, will be joining our panel on building and using the world live web.
And last but not least, we will have an all-star panel talking about what worked and what didn’t work, from the inside of the presidential campaign, with:
Peter Daou, Hillary Clinton ‘08
Mindy Finn, Mitt Romney ‘08
Scott Goodstein, Barack Obama ‘08
Justine Lam, Ron Paul ‘08
Joe Rospars, Barack Obama ‘08
Tracy Russo, John Edwards ‘08
Mark Soohoo, John McCain ‘08
The Candidates on the Web
John McCain may not be using technology as well as some would like, but, as the Wall Street Journal’s Amy Schatz writes, he’s been catching up to Barack Obama in appealing to the tech sector and drafting tech policy. Schatz reports that Obama is well-received in Silicon Valley for his stances on issues like Net Neutrality and broadband access, and McCain is starting to push his free-market approach, like tax breaks to companies that offer broadband to underserved communities. For more on the candidates' policies, check out TechCrunch’s interviews with Obama and McCain from last year.
McCain economic adviser and RNC Victory ‘08 Chairman Carly Fiorina recently answered Wired readers’ questions about McCain’s policies, offering tidbits about McCain’s stance on climate change (it exists, and the government should invest in basic research and leave the R&D to companies via tax credits), discretionary spending (bad!), foreign policy (different from Bush), and employment (send workers back to school). Check out the full interview if you want more than my quick and dirty parentheticals (I hope you do).
Hillary Clinton’s camp says they’ve received thousands of entries from creative supporters for their t-shirt contest, and they’ve narrowed the choices down to five designs. What’s your fave? The pantsuit? The Warhol? Or maybe the simpler signature? Go to the site to cast your vote.
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Much of the money Ron Paul raised for his campaign via record-breaking money bombs is going to his family members, reports the Washington Post’s Matthew Mosk. Some nuggets: “Paul’s granddaughter Valori Pyeatt helps organize fundraising receptions and has been paid $17,157. Another granddaughter, Laura Paul ($2,724), handles orders for Ron Paul merchandise. Grandson Matthew Pyeatt ($3,251) manages Paul’s MySpace profile. Daughter Peggy Paul ($2,224) helps with campaign logistics.” Overall, the campaign has spent nearly $170,000 paying family members. “His family is very important to him,” Paul campaign spokesman Jesse Benton told the LA Times. Benton, by the way, is engaged to Paul’s granddaughter.
The Qik revolution is underway! Congressman John Culberson, a Republican from Texas, is the first Congressperson to use the live video-streaming service. His first foray: Qikking the NASA Mars landing. He's also on Twitter.
The Next Right, the conservatives’ new online hope, has launched. The site — a project of former Fred Thompson staffer Jon Henke, strategist and former John McCain staffer Soren Dayton, and techPres’ Patrick Ruffini — reminds us a lot of OpenLeft, though it lacks a similarly unifying philosophy. It’s a bit more on the call-to-action side of things: “As a community-driven grassroots action website for the right, we’ll feature in-depth political analysis, on-the-ground reports, and strategic discussion and debate.” With these three at the helm, we know this will be quality, smart stuff.
Meanwhile, blogger William Beutler has crowned techPres contributor David All’s Slatecard the “Republican ActBlue.” He cites the burst of mainstream political coverage the operation has received, All’s promotion of the project, and the fact that candidates have actually used it to raise more than $300,000 as evidence that Slatecard has moved beyond similar efforts like RightRoots and Big Red Tent. We sense a grudging respect for All’s project from Beutler; he refers to All’s “self-promotion” and titles his post “Let’s Just Admit Slatecard is the Republican ActBlue.” Either way, it’s a great accomplishment for All. The Next Right and Slatecard are baby steps, for sure, but they’re new points of online light for the GOP.
Hillary Clinton had a very bad day last Friday, when her unfortunate comment about RFK’s assassination blazed its way across the web. Whether or not it was taken out of context, the comment provided a new narrative for a press corps hungry for something to chomp on. For MSM reactions and mea culpas, check out the timeline from the New York Time’s Katherine Seelye, who’s been traveling with the Clinton camp, and Politico co-founder John Harris’s piece blaming a “news media more concerned with being interesting and provocative than with being relevant or serious.” That news media, ahem, includes the Politico, whose editors “are relentlessly focused on audience traffic” but “unapologetic in our premium on high velocity,” writes Harris. But he does think the quote was ripped out of context. Too bad! That’s life in the new media fast lane!
Columnist Roger Cohen schooled New York Times readers about something geeks have known for a while: “More than any other factor, it has been Barack Obama’s grasp of the central place of Internet-driven social networking that has propelled his campaign for the Democratic nomination into a seemingly unassailable lead over Hillary Clinton.” Better put: “It’s the networks, stupid.”
You know those TouchTones jukeboxes that have sprung up in bars over the last few years? Apparently they conduct surveys, too, and according to a recent one Barack Obama is the candidate most jukebox users would like to have a beer with, reports MediaPost’s Gavin O’Malley. The TouchTone survey also teamed up with Rock the Vote to give participants the chance to register to vote; 10,000 did. Who knew Obama would lay claim to the jukebox vote?
A conservative blogger is continuing to hound Minnesota Senatorial candidate Al Franken, writes the New York Times’ Monica Davey. Michael B. Brodkorb, who writes the Minnesota Democrats Exposed blog and is a constant thorn in Franken’s side, revealed that Franken owed New York State $25,000 in workers compensation insurance (which he has since paid). This and other stories has been picked up by the traditional media, forcing Franken to respond. This story reminds us a lot of Jan Frel’s seminal piece for us on a stealth campaign by a bunch of rightwing bloggers in South Dakota on behalf of Jon Thune in his race against Tom Daschle. Brodkorb seems more aboveboard than those folks were about their political connections, however.
The Candidates on the Web
Last week TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington conducted a Twitter-assisted interview with Newt Gingrich, in which the former Speaker talked about his American Solutions organization, which just opened an office in Palo Alto. The group is working on constructing a new set of ideas for governance — a second Contract with America — and Gingrich told Arrington that “If you get to the point [that the second contract] is clear enough and powerful enough, and if that point there is a big enough demand whether it is in 2012 or 2016, I will get to the point where I would run.” That should shake things up.
When in Puerto Rico… clips of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama dancing in Puerto Rico are making the rounds. After Hillary remarks on how good the local beer is, she closes her eyes and shimmies for a couple of seconds. It makes us feel uncomfortable. Similarly, as Barack Obama walks through the streets, he mimics an off-camera dancer with some improvised moves that don’t seem to belong to any particular style. Slightly less embarrassing. Neither, however, compares to this slice of weirdness of John McCain. We’ve officially reached the dog days of the campaign.
In Case You Missed It…
Micah Sifry discovers a photo that is crying out for a good caption. Any suggestions? (It’s from Joe Trippi’s annual Memorial Day clambake.)
Bob Barr livestreamed his appearance at the Libertarian convention, and while there were few exciting moments to show, it’s pretty cool that his campaign is into this stuff.
We’ve all seen microsites used in politics, from ImpeachGonzales.org last year to the recently launched CanWeAsk.com, writes Luigi Montanez. But how about sites that are literally just one word? A few years ago the site Is Lost a Repeat? launched. Now, we have Is Barack Obama Muslim?, aimed at knocking down the rumors spread via email chain letters.
Nancy Scola reports that a new article in Yale’s Journal of Law & Technology offers up a somewhat counterintuitive new online plan for the next presidential administration to make government more useful, more accountable, and more transparent — in short, give up.
]]>Potentially more interesting is the bar running across his site showing campaign contributions as they come in.
As you can see, the graphic shows the names and locations of recent donors that are trying to get the campaign $150,000 (softer expectations than the big two parties, huh?) and secure the nomination for Barr.
I also like that Barr's homepage features Flickr photos and featured videos. Those features, and Shana Kluck's liveblogging from the convention, make for a site with a warm, homespun feel, not unlike early versions of Mike Huckabee's site.
]]>Alert: someone has kidnapped New York Times columnist David Brooks and replaced him with a a 25-year geek who refers to things like Twitter, Kottke.org, and Vampire Weekend in his columns, and who now writes phrases like “Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes.” At least it’s entertaining. Maybe the captors will release Brooks after Memorial Day, when he can resume describing the decline of the Republican Party and predicting Barack Obama’s success.
With more and more talk of a Barack Obama-Jim Webb ticket, the voter-generated content makers were bound to start producing. Colin Delany discovered one such project —ObamaWebb08.com. The choice is obviously up to Obama, but he and Webb do look pretty good together…
The Congressional Quarterly VP Madness contest — in which readers voted for who should be John McCain’s running mate — is over, and the winner is somewhat unexpected: Mike Huckabee! But why give up a budding career as a TV pundit, Huck? It definitely pays better!
People often complain that conservative and liberal sites like Townhall or DailyKos are political echo chambers, but a new study from Compete suggests that Huffington Post readers tend to me a pretty diverse group. In February 2008, 34% of visitors also read liberal blogs like Kos and Crooks and Liars, and 27% actually read conservative sites like Townhall and RedState.com. Maybe it’s the Hollwyood gossip that’s pulling them in. Townhall, we’ve discovered your new business strategy.
A new site dedicated to online video journalism has just launched, and so far it looks pretty promising. American News Project is funded by the Schumann Center for Media & Democracy. The site is reaching out to its readers for story ideas, funding, and even talent. Keep an eye on it.
Another cool new project comes from NPR, which has teamed up with the Center for Investigative Reporting to produce the Secret Money Project. NPR is asking listeners to help track down and identify this year’s crop of 527s that, we can be sure, will soon take the airwaves and the tubes by storm. It’s a welcome invitation, and we hope the public takes them up on it.
Social network aggregation site (say that 10 times fast) and potential heir to the Twitter throne FriendFeed just launched a new feature called Rooms, which lets users create public or private spaces to share info and create discussions about various topics. One of the first rooms set up was Obamamania — a place to post links and chat about Obama. The FriendFeed converts will be all over this, but will it gain popularity among the Twittering classes? (via Download Squad)
The Candidates on the Web
The GOP is definitely ramping up their use of YouTube. Case in point: the Republican National Convention has announced a new video contest. Voters are encouraged to submit video profiles of “someone in your neighborhood who goes above and beyond the call of duty to serve what Senator McCain calls ‘a cause greater than their own self-interest.’” The public can then vote for their favorites, and the winner will get a free trip to the convention. A very cool idea. Your move, DNC.
If you’re checking gas prices using GasBuddy.com or GasPriceWatch.com, you may be surprised to see ads run by the DSCC linking Republican leader Mitch McConnell to the oil and gas industry.
In Case You Missed It…
It’s one thing to read about an event in the newspaper; it’s another thing to watch the event in its unexpurgated form as raw, unedited video, writes Micah Sifry. Such is the case with Barack Obama’s appearance yesterday at a Boca Raton synagogue, , where he was making a direct appeal to Florida’s important bloc of Jewish voters to set aside some of their concerns or fears about his candidacy.
Just in time for the Memorial Day holiday, we bring you eight political videos that are guaranteed to stick to your consciousness like ketchup on a burger. You can never escape the tubes!
Obama won big in this month’s North Carolina primary and his online ad strategy in April may have played a role in driving his supporters to the polls, reports Kate Kaye. As the primaries chug along, Senator Barack Obama has steamrolled past fellow Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Clinton and likely Republican nominee John McCain in the Web ad department.
]]>8. Smokey says Yes, We Can!
Thought political videos couldn’t be more removed from actual politics? Think again. More than 75,000 views on YouTube.
7. Hillary Clinton: We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby!
A Hillary Clinton supporter decries the sexist attacks on Clinton’s campaign and alleges that Barack Obama is partly responsible for not denouncing it. The argument would be better served by a better video; we’re asked to read scrolling words while simultaneously listening to a Clinton speech from 1995. It’s difficult to pay attention to either. Almost 30,000 views on YouTube.
6. Flesh Wound
‘Tis but a flesh wound! On to Denver! As Hillary continues to make her case, the voters continue to make their videos. Next up, the Knights Who Say Ni? About 46,000 views on YouTube.
5. McCain Ad - 2013
With almost 85,000 views on YouTube, this one’s pretty popular as McCain videos go. Some people have found the message confusing (in 2013 — five years from now! — things are gonna be better!). We’re soothed by the narrator’s deep Sanka-commercial voice.
4. Barack-Back Mountain
Yes, we know that the homoerotic allusions aren’t appropriate, but watching “Barack Obama” pontificate about missing, and loving, “John Edwards” (and looking at that absurd wig the actor is wearing) made us laugh.
3. Our Largest Rally Yet
The Obama campaign documents their huge rally in Portland with a good ol’ homespun vibe. Not much new here, but more than 360,000 Obama fans have watched it anyway.
2. Barack Obama speaks in Boca Raton, FL
This rough footage of Barack Obama speaking to a crowd in Boca Raton, FL is more of a primary document than an interesting video, but it shows him attempting to reach out to a demographic he’ll need if we faces John McCain in November. Check out the Nigerian email scam argument he makes around 6:30 in.
1. McCain’s YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare
Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films hits John McCain with one of the most popular YouTube videos of the week. It sticks to McCain’s words and those of the TV anchors to whom he’s talking, and the public seems to to like it; the video has been viewed more than 1,100,000 times since it was posted.
]]>Tired of hearing about the lobbyists working for the John McCain campaign? So are the folks at Campaign Money Watch, so much so that they’ve recorded a song asking McCain to fire all of the lobbyists working for his campaign. You can listen to the tune and sign a petition urging “John McCain to fire staff or fundraisers whose lobbying for brutal dictators, unsavory foreign interests, or other repressive regimes offend American values” at the Fire the Lobbyists! site. Meanwhile, some lobbyists — who stood by McCain has his campaign bottomed out last summer — are wondering if this is McCain’s way of saying “thanks.” (Campaign Money Watch is the 527 arm of Public Campaign Action Fund. Full disclosure: From 1997-2005, techPresident’s Micah Sifry was a senior analyst with a sister organization, Public Campaign.)
The DNCC state blog credentialing mess is continuing to kick up dust. We’ve twice written about protests of DNCC’s selection of state blogs to be represented at the Democratic convention. Pam Spaulding, one of the cooler heads among netroots bloggers, broke down the issues at stake, focusing on the DNCC’s failure to include more minority bloggers. Racial tensions — even among members of the “AfroSpear” — are rising, and Pam’s doing a great job of adding clarity to the situation.
The Next Right, the right’s answer to MyDD and OpenLeft, helmed by conservative strategists Soren Dayton, Jon Henke, and Patrick Ruffini, will be launching next Tuesday, May 27th. Keep your eye on it - this just might become the smartest conservative right-roots operation online.
The robo-call haters at StopPoliticalCalls.org have created a wonderful library of robo-calls from the candidates. If you aren’t “lucky” enough to have been called by a robo-citizen, now’s your chance to see what the fuss is all about.
Why are we pushing a Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton “dream ticket” when we can get John McCain in there to form the ultimate nightmare ticket?
This is probably the funnest, most meaningless thing I’ve seen in months.
And this is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever posted, though 50,000 people on YouTube have watched it. If TV is a vast wasteland, then YouTube is a… wait, have you seen this? (Thx, Andrew Golis)
The folks behind One Web Day are celebrating Internet Week NY next month with a forum on Online Political Participation at NYU Law School on June 4 at 6pm. The star-studded panel will feature techPresident’s Andrew Rasiej and Zephyr Teachout, NewAssignment.net’s Jay Rosen, and PdF’s Allison Fine. It’s gonna be fantastic — be there.
The Candidates on the Web
A couple of days ago Barack Obama characterized John McCain’s comment about him meeting with the leaders of “rogue nations” as “”me immediately having Raul Castro over for tea.” The RNC thought it a poignant image, and quickly put up a “Barack Obama/Raul Castro Tea Set” for sale on eBay. If you buy it, “You and your friends could imitate Obama and Castro, sitting down and having tea while discussing world affairs.” Sounds fun! The current bid is at $33; if this kind of thing sounds like… wait for it… your cup of tea, get bidding!
Using HubSpot’s analytic tools, the Bivings Report’s Todd Zeigler compared Barack Obama and John McCain’s SEO chops and came up with a few surprises. McCain’s site came out on top, with a “website grade” of 98.7 to Obama’s 95. Another interesting finding: “According to the tool the Obama website is written on an Advanced/Doctoral reading level while McCain’s is written on an Secondary/High School level.”
Yesterday we mentioned that John McCain’s site had shed its Darth Vader look for something a bit friendlier. Ethan Demme, writing at TechRepublican, performed a thorough inspection and found a bunch of new, shiny features, including new blog badges and Facebook icons. But the infamous McCainSpace still appears to be empty and inactive.
Another politician has pledged to publicly punch his clock. Anchorage Mayor and Alaskan Senatorial candidate Mark Begich has promised to “post his daily Senate office schedule on his website so every Alaskan knows he is working for Alaska families, not special interests,” according to his campaign. The pledge is an echo of the Sunlight Foundation’s Punch Clock Campaign, and Zephyr Teachout, the former National Director of Sunlight Foundation and a techPrez blogger, is mighty pleased. “I am thrilled that Begich—and I hope many others this campaign season—brings some faith to the collective intelligence, over time, of the people he hopes to represent,” she writes at the Nation. (TechPresident’s Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are advisers to the Sunlight Foundation.)
In Case You Missed It…
The John McCain campaign has been pilloried time and time again when it comes to their email strategy. The emails are overly long, unclear, and designed as if they were a piece of direct mail. But, as a public service to all campaigns and organizations looking to execute solid online organzing, Luigi Montanez points out exactly what makes an email successful.
Nancy Scola was at the 18th annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, being held at Yale this week, and writes about a session on “Presidential Technology Policy: Priorities for the Next Executive” that featured representatives from the Obama and McCain campaigns. The Obama camp sent the co-director of MIT’s decentralized information group. The McCain camp sent the former chief patent lawyer for Time Warner. The two seemed almost hand-picked as embodiments of the two very different ways a President Obama and a President McCain would handle tech policy.
]]>We thought we’d been covering the political technology space pretty well over the last year or so, but a new top-secret project somehow alluded us. Convinced that the conservatives’ deficit in online efficacy simply comes from lacking the right tools, The Trustees of the Republican Leadership Trust (yes, that’s the real name) are working on a secret weapon: the Republican All in One™ Political Suite.™ Beware Democrats! Look out progressives! The TRLT is convinced that their new tool will be the “GOP’s answer to MoveOn.org, Act Blue and multiple commercial vendors who provide political technology.” Without giving any details at all about what their Political Suite will look like, the TRLT is asking for pledges of $10 or $25 a month to help take over the world.
Technorati’s Jen McLean writes that “Nowhere have we seen a bigger impact of blogging and social media on the American political landscape than on the 2008 presidential election,” and she points to — of course! — techPresident’s Technorati charts two illustrate her point. As we’ve been seeing, Barack Obama has the most attention in the blogosphere, and John McCain has yet to spark up the ‘sphere in the same way. Maybe bloggers will get excited about McCain has we move into the general… but that’s a big maybe. (Technorati Chairman David Sifry is the younger brother of techPrez’ Micah Sifry.)
“Everything moves so fast in the world of online politics… that introspection is often lacking,” writes the Washington Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas. So true. Vargas takes a closer look at President Bush’s online-only interview with the Politico. While Bush did answer some questions from citizens, Vargas councils us that “interactivity doesn’t necessarily lead” to transparency and accountability, and thus George Bush’s no-more-golf-after-Iraq claim isn’t exactly true. However, writes Vargas, the two young superdelegates who asked YouTube viewers who to endorse were using interactivity toward better ends. It’s a great point, and Vargas continues to be one of our foremost chroniclers of the “clickocracy.”
The DNC’s state blogger credentialing process is on the verge of becoming a fiasco. Marc Ambinder discovered a letter from 21 credentialed state bloggers who are protesting the exclusion of their progressive colleagues from the convention. They allege that some bloggers were chosen for their party loyalty, and not for their progressive bona fides. “The Democratic Party endangers its own long-term viability when it makes fealty a criterion for inclusion,” they write. Matt Stoller calls the credentialing of Cathleen Carrigan, an employee of Michigan Governer Jennifer Granholm “simply absurd… Granholm can get her employees credentials, she doesn’t need to take them from independent progressive activists.” We think it’s about time for some damage control from Howard Dean.
Second Life collides with ye olde meatspace: when disrupting an event in Second Life, griefers’ (as SL attackers are known) prefer the classic flying penis trick. Activists watching a speech by former chess master and current Russian politican Garry Kasparov took a cue from virtual life and launched a real flying penis as Kasparov spoke. It stayed in the air for about fives seconds before an enterprising politico smacked it out of the air, like a Russian Dikembe Mutombo.
Crack-for-geeks site Lifehacker doesn’t delve in politics, but a recent post announcing Google Earth’s new Google News layer uses a cool screenshot of news of Barack Obama’s huge rally in Portland layered onto Google Earth. Clearly, the possibilities are endless, but does anyone actually use Google Earth once they’ve downloaded it?
Check out this new twist on Yes We Can, from tunester Andy Fraser. It’s very, very smooth, kind of like Michael McDonald meets Barry White. One bit of advice, though, Andy: stream the song from your site, don’t make us download it. I guarantee you’ll get more listens, and thus more smoothness for all.
The Candidates on the Web
None more black! Todd Zeigler at the Bivings Report picked up on a design change for John McCain’s homepage, and it’s definitely for the better. The McCain camp revised with their initial Darth Vader look about a year ago, but the result was still a confusing clutter. The new refresh, which does away with the typical GOP web template and installs big readable fonts, is much needed. But Zeigler doesn’t “think slapping a new coat of paint on their existing strategy” — of basically ignoring the conversational web — is going to help.
Too little, very late: As it patiently trots toward the sunset, the Hillary Clinton campaign is stepping up its blogger outreach and use of Twitter, reports the New York Times’ Katherine Seelye. Perhaps taking a cue from the McCain camp, Clinton held her first blogger conference call last week (Obama has yet to do so), and has been firing off tweets to Twitter followers more frequently. The online conversation she wanted to have with America never really surfaced; we think she’d be in a better spot now if it had.
When it comes to governmental use of the web, the Brits are continuing to lap the U.S. The newest example is Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s new initiative, “Ask the PM,” in which the British public can ask him questions via YouTube, and he’ll respond on a regular basis. Seems simple, doesn’t it? In the U.S., we’ll have to first get around those archaic rules barring Congress from even using YouTube. Then we can talk about those conversations.
In Case You Missed It…
We’ll do it live! Check out the video of us editing of this very Daily Digest on Qik.com! (Warning: many bad jokes ahead.)
John McCain’s online team needs to find someone who knows what they’re doing with the campaign’s email list, writes Michael Whitney. Campaign manager Rick Davis sent an email to supporters this afternoon titled “Reckless” - clocking in at 597 words - without including a single link until the 580th word.
Michael Tate offers a quick assessment of Senator McCain’s “Behind the Scenes” videos on YouTube.
As an effective deployment of a modern media strategy, David All shares a recent example engineered by, among others, the Washington State Republican Party putting the hammer to Barack Obama after what All calls a major gaffe while campaigning in Oregon.
We’re still hard at work finalizing the program for this year’s fifth annual Personal Democracy Forum, which is taking place June 23-24 at Rose Hall in New York City, and we’re pleased to be able to share these updates with you on speakers and panels. Don’t wait til the last minute to register, by the way—the early bird rate is going to expire after May 31 and prices are going up. Save $100 by registering now.
]]>While we’ve all been speculating about John McCain and Barack Obama’s VP candidates, it looks like the they’ve been keeping their own notes. Obama’s short list was leaked to humor site 23/6’s Lee Camp, and there are some surprises to be had. Number one on the list: Gary Coleman. Wait a minute, is this for real…? (Thx Ben Smith)
Picking up on our brief review of the DNC’s McCainPedia, Web 2.0 skeptic Craig Stoltz writes that the un-wiki site “exploits public familiarity with a hip new communication form (in this case, wikis, which are used for group content creation and editing) and then aggressively misapplies it.” Others agreed. “This perpetuates that silo approach to communication, and Web 2.0 is about enabling the voice of the people and their opinions,” Central Desktop CEO Isaac Garcia told Wired’s Sarah Lai Stirland (the Obama campaign uses Central Desktop to coordinate field volunteers). However, no one has questioned the efficacy of the site from an oppo point-of-view. Indeed, it will make it easy for Democrats to find all of their oppo in place. Just don’t try contributing anything.
Videoblogger James Kotecki — who ascended from his dorm room to the swanky offices of the Politico earlier this year — teamed up with fellow vlogger David McMillan to ask a fairly taboo question: “Is Barack Obama Too Black?” What follows is some sober analysis of the ways Obama has been constructed as a black candidate by his own campaign, the Clinton campaign, and the media. It’s smart, but we miss the candidates-on-a-stick.
Brave News Films’ new anti-McCain video continues to be one of the most popular videos on YouTube, having racked up more than 770,000 views since it was launched two days ago, and it’s the number one viral video on Viral Video Chart. Impressive.
Bad news for Hillary Clinton: for the first time, she's fallen behind John McCain in blog mentions on Technorati. This confirms that, even though McCain hasn't been doing much with social media, the blogging public is moving on to an Obama vs. McCain general election.
The Candidates on the Web
In Case You Missed It…
Micah Sifry asks if Barack Obama and John McCain are actually using the social media tracking tool FriendFeed to follow tech gurus and tech-politics bloggers. The answer is no; the culprit was hiding in the techPresident shadows all along!
]]>Women’s blog network BlogHer has been keeping tabs on the presidential campaign all year long, and this week they scored a coup: a sit-down interview with Barack Obama (BlogHer has also extended invitations to Hillary Clinton and John McCain). Obama spent more than ten minutes talking to BlogHer’s Erin Kotecki Vest (who authored a letter to Hillary Clinton back in February asking her to step down) about Iraq, education, climate change, and more. Enough with the issues, though. Did I spy a two-day-old-mustache on Obama’s upper lip?
Of all of the anti-Obama smears emails going around, perhaps the most bizarre is one blaming Obama for the electoral problems in Kenya. The New Republic’s Douglas Wolk performs a literary deconstruction of the email, ultimately calling it “an amusing and cleverly constructed work of sci-fi,” though with its resorts to plain racism and bigotry, we’re not sure we’d call the email “clever” or “amusing.”
Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films is hitting John McCain yet again with a new video showing a series of alleged exaggerations from McCain as he’s questioned by media figures. It makes a strong argument by only sticking to McCain’s words and those of the TV anchors he’s talking to. The public seems to agree; the video has been viewed more than 415,000 times since it was posted one day ago, making it one of the most popular videos on YouTube.
Last week we reported that the DNCC had chosen its “State Blogger Corps” for the Democratic National Convention. Now some are taking issue with the lack of minority representation in that list. Francis L. Holland writes that he’s “concerned that virtually all of the state blogs selected by the Democratic National Committee to cover Denver are white.” But Pam Spaulding, while sympathetic to Holland’s claim, points out that “many of the state blogs [selected by the DNC] are community blogs. It’s hard to tell, unless people self-identify, who is a minority.” Given the lack of color-identification in many community blogs, the question of representation was probably bound to come up.
In addition to questions of minority representation, progressives in a few states are upset about which blogs were chosen for credentials. Matt Stoller writes at OpenLeft that bloggers in Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, and Michigan are protesting the choice of blogs with fewer progressive bona fides. Did Howard Dean not remember how outspoken and cantankerous political bloggers can be?
But is he good for the Jews? Last week, as Israel celebrated its 60th anniversary, American Jews continued to debate whether Barack was to be trusted as a friend of Israel. Reacting to one man’s “Jews Against Obama” t-shirt, a pro-Obama site called “Jews for Jews Against ‘Jews for Obama’” is producing anti-“Jews Against Obama” t-shirts. Got that?
The Democratic veepstakes are getting hot, and according to our Technorati charts, most of the online chatter in the last few days shows a jump for Joe Biden and Jim Webb.
The Candidates on the Web
The latest in the DNC’s roll-out of anti-John McCain oppo is McCainPedia. But while it applies the look and feel of Wikipedia to a database of anti-McCain arguments, it isn’t actually a wiki. “Unlike some wikis, McCainpedia is read-only and can’t be edited by the public,” write the authors. Um, ok. This wiki can be edited by its users, who are the DNC’s research operation, but not by the public. So they’re definitely stretching in calling it a wiki. But using the wiki platform is a smart way for the DNC’s oppo team to iterate its research on McCain without having to keep building new sites. If lots of people start linking to it, it will help them win the Google juice wars on a whole range of searches, like “McCain Iraq” or “McCain ethics.” Meanwhile, some Republicans are quick to attack. “This is nothing more than an oppo research dump, dressed up with a cool, tech-friendly sounding name,” a Republican tech strategist told techPresident.
In an effort to call attention to the 33 Senate races coming up in November, the DSCC has launched a new video initiative called The Road to Victory. It’s a video series led by ex-John Edwards staffer Amy Rubin in which she’ll be getting behind the scenes of the Democratic Senate races. See this video for highlights. While it should attract attention to these important yet overshadowed races, it could use less of the it’s-really-really-hip “rock” music soundtrack.
In Case You Missed It…
At the exact instant Colin Delany opened an email from him, Jim Webb came on the radio, leaving only one obvious question: is a two-fer good enough for “BINGO” in the veepstakes stature game?
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