techPresident - Comments

The Edwards news unfolded as follows:

Thu, 15 May 2008 23:17:48 -0400

At 5:04pm Political Rader on abcnews.com confirmed the endorsement.

At 5:13pm MSNBC displayed a breaking news banner "AP: Edwards Endorses Obama".

At 5:16pm the full details were discussed and aired on MSNBC and CNN.

By 5:17pm the details were up on CNN.com -- the time it was tweeted.

Lobby delegates

Ruby Sinreich — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:28:32 -0400

There's also http://www.lobbydelegates.com (and http://super.del.egates.us which is deferring to the former) where supporters can find undeclared super delegates and lobby them for their candidate.

"Meanwhile, Edwards' homepage is stuck on January 30, 2008."

bhschenker — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:46:17 -0400

The reason the homepage is stuck on Jan 30th is that there are very specific rules by the FEC of what you may and may not do with your website post election. Debt retirement is about it, I'm sure endorsements wouldn't fly.

Brett Schenker
5B Consulting

nader

paulcanning — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:47:33 -0400

Ralph Nader is an ignoramus - that's a technical term.

He's never heard of Jody Williams [http://tinyurl.com/4we3ns]

www.paulcanning.me.uk
web stuff and other ramblings
~~~~~~~~~~~

Actually Hillary has sent emails asking people to travel...

plange — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:52:25 -0400

"Obama for America is going one step further. The Senator's campaign is asking diehards via e-mail to trek to Oregon and knock on doors."

Actually Hillary has also done this, so Obama is not unique in doing this. Here is an email I got on 5/1 entitled "Help Hillary in North Carolina" sent by "Ace Smith, Hillary Clinton for President"

Dear Angela,

Hillary's victory in Pennsylvania provided big momentum for our campaign, and we're seeing the results on the ground here in North Carolina. There is a lot of excitement, a lot of support, and a lot of people working hard for Hillary.

But with just a few days left before North Carolina voters go to the polls on May 6, we need your help getting every last vote out for Hillary. Would you consider traveling to North Carolina sometime in the next few days to help our campaign?

Hillary needs your help, and there's no better way to do it than to come and help us make sure we get the vote out! If you'd like to help here in North Carolina, please contact our travel coordinator Naz Durakoglu at (919) 758-4368 or ndurakoglu@hillaryclinton.com.

Thank you so much for everything you are doing for Hillary. I hope to see you on the campaign trail!

Sincerely,

Ace Smith
State Director
Hillary Clinton for President

I also remember a big push before Texas to get folks to travel there and I've heard they're getting Californians to travel to Oregon.

Google hits vs. viral e-mail

EyeblastTV — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:14:42 -0400

Josh: I've been on vacation for a few days, but it occurred to me that your conspiritorial thinking about Eyeblast stats is based on the flawed assumption that Google links are the only true gauge of viral video traffic. You couldn't be more wrong.

I made clear early on that the first viral video at Eyeblast is the result of the social-networking tools built into our site -- specifically the ability to e-mail links for videos to friends. Most of the traffic for "A Video Portrait Of Barack Hussein Obama" is coming from e-mail links, according to (oh, the irony) Google Analytics. I also mentioned the Facebook groups dedicated to this video, the discussions on bulletin boards, etc.

In other words, this is a truly viral video -- one that gained a viewership primarily by links forwarded via e-mail and, to a lesser extent, posted on bulletin boards, etc. That explains the discrepancy in Google links that, for whatever reason, led you to envision and unprofessionally spread rumors of an imagined conspiracy without any evidence to support your fantasy.

Danny Glover, Executive Producer
Eyeblast TV

He may not win the nomination

jchristophm — Tue, 13 May 2008 09:47:54 -0400

"... and as the only candidate for his party’s nomination who has actually won a significant election, will likely be the Libertarian candidate this fall."

First, Mike Gravel is also seeking the LP nomination. It may have been like a billion years ago, but he did win a couple of Senate races.

Second, you obviously don't hang around with many Libertarians. Win/loss records, ability to raise funds, and national prominence have historically been only VERY small factors in LP nominating races. Trust me, the LP is worse than the Democrats with respect to factional in-fighting. Like academics, third-party politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

great example of web politics in action

newsobama — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:56:58 -0400

It is great to see the Washington State delegates taking advantage of easy to use online tools to make bigger and better contributions to the Obama campaign. For people like me that aren't so good at flyer drops and cold-calling the web offers a whole new set of (much more interesting) options for political involvement.
~~~
doug
http://newsobama.org

David Mamet-like subtitles.

Read Scott Martin — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:44:05 -0400

Second prize is a set of steak knives.

Read Scott Martin

Email issue

Luigi Montanez — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:30:01 -0400

This issue has now been clarified for me by Terra Eclipse, and the correction is posted above.

Email came from Barr campaign's service

Luigi Montanez — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:51:29 -0400

The email didn't come from a simple tell-a-friend form -- it came from a pay-to-send email marketing service. As you'll see in the Reply-To and Mailed By fields, the email originated from cmpgnr.com, which is the domain the email marketing service Campaigner.com uses. All other Bob Barr emails have also come from this service. This makes sense, as the Ron Paul campaign used the more premium, high volume service (CampaignerPro), and both campaigns have the same technology consultants.

So it may be a case of someone messing up and putting an @ronpaul2008.com email address in a Bob Barr blast. But, (and this is a big but), if it were a regular Bob Barr email blast, why the need to put "A Message from former Congressman Bob Barr" in the subject line? Presumably if I'm on Barr's list (which I was at the time), I know who the guy is. Repeating the sender's name in the subject line is standard practice when sending an email to an audience that will be unfamiliar with the sender.

The Ron Paul e-mail

Tom Readmond — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:36:05 -0400

The e-mail on behalf of Barr may not be legit. I had this happen on a campaign earlier this year, when an e-mail from ron@ronpaul2008.com went out claiming to endorse our candidate. Finding this hard to believe, I contacted a friend in the Paul campaign, and after some digging with the IT folks, it turned out someone had used the campaign website's Tell A Friend function to send an e-mail, and had entered the Ron Paul address as their own. In the end, it didn't have much effect. Paul's supporters aren't dumb.

Godwin's Law

rattle — Mon, 12 May 2008 10:36:34 -0400

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

Apparently Usenet and Democratic politics have a few things in common.

- nick

Mother May I?

brooklynkevin — Sun, 11 May 2008 22:10:40 -0400

I did the opposite - while watching I turned the sound off. As I was watching, the pictures of Barack Obama did not strike me as negative. In addition, the questions looked so reasonable, however, it looked as though they could be rhetorical, and that Barack Oboma would obviously have a good answer for each. What really struck me was the passive tone: "can we". Mother may I kept ringing in my ears. Imagine if Hillary Clinton approached the primaries that way. Imagine if John McCain approached the general election that way. This is simply not effective. I give it a week to a month until it is another defunct site.

interesting points

vijay — Sat, 10 May 2008 21:07:52 -0400

First, thanks Micah for the play by play.

And thanks Dan for getting your thoughts out there!

> Person to person conversations are generally going to be a lot more valuable than knowing what
> magazines someone subscribes to or what kind of car they drive.

I think you want both. You'd like to know more about who are you talking to, so those person to person conversations are more effective, and more importantly the results of the conversation really need to be captured for future uses -- whether it be to help with vote goals, recruiting new volunteers, etc. You seem to see this as either/or, and I see it as enable and prosper.

> It's a better investment to put decent data in the hands of lots and lots of activists,
> along with a tool they can use to improve it,
> than it is to try to collect as much expensive commercial data as possible and building targeting
> models off that.

Maybe, but I would argue that we should be able to have both. This actually speaks to the point I made about at a technical level leveraging Web Services to allow creativity and innovation to occur with the data outside of what one company can foster. And how building a business model that allows for wide dispersal of data is beneficial to everyone. Ultimately, the organizations that use Catalist will make program decisions of whether to use activists, direct mail, TV, etc. If anything, being able to quantifiably capture the effect of programs will be the best way to get decision makers to let go of out-dated techniques (whatever those are), and data is critical to basing that off of.

We see our long term vision at a lower infrastructural level than the application level space of whether one method of electoral contact is superior to another. Whatever is used, there is a clear need for progressive organizations to have: 1) a low cost source to fulfill their data needs, 2) an easy to use data warehouse to match, store, organize, and integrate their person level data 3) a platform that allows for many flexible ways to access their data in conjunction with other basic and sometimes not-so basic information.

Given the cost and complexity for progressive organizations to shoulder this on their own or through a multitude of vendors, I think this is a big advance. I will let others decide if that constitutes game changing or not. But I do know that when I see MoveOn do an application like VotePoke, which would have been prohibitively complex for the ROI without Catalist and its Web Services interface, I think we're on the right track. When I see organizations for the first time be able to know which of their donors are also volunteers and also attended an event, I see real progress. And when I see organizations for the first time have a unique person identifier that they can reliable carry across internal systems provided by Catalist, I get really excited about where this can go. Some of these concepts are not very marketable, but they are super important in the long term.

Please do check out the NDN video of my presentation, and maybe we can get into a deeper discussion sometime soon.

PS. I totally agree that America Votes and VAN deserve more pub -- they're both great organizations and valued partners of ours.