techPresident - blog entry - Comments

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.

MyBO from back in the day

Jack Mitchell — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:49:23 -0400

A few quick pointers:
-MyBO was critical in organizing New England activists to get to NH all through 2007 and up to the primary.
-The MyBO Blog allows newbies to find their "blogging legs", then they can move on to the greater blogscape.
-The MyBO group listserves get the word out.
-The Admins don't "airbrush" the content in the blog comment, except when coments are waay over the line. Criticism and dissent is allowed.

I used MyBO continually from 3/07 to 1/08 for organizational purposes and information. Since the NH primary, I hardly use it, but anticipate that it will come back into play as November approaches.

interesting

Dan Ancona — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:49:15 -0400

I just twittered this -

"@Mlsif These updates are like gold to me. Thanks! Catalist isn't the game changer though: VAN+huge distributed relational field ops is"

And Micah asked me to come here and expand, so here goes as best I can with the four brain cells I've got left on a nice Friday afternoon...

What Catalist is doing is helpful, but it's really a top-down offering that's off to the side of the really game-changing thing that's happening, which is that we're at the beginning of this transition to a much more participatory version of our democracy.

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. 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.

Ideally, you'd have both, and in some states progressives have done just that. (Credit Granholm's win in MI in 06 to a great modeling and cluster analysis program delivered through the VAN) But if you're really interested in long-term transformation, it's the person to person stuff that is going to reshape how our democracy functions. The tools you can use to augment that process are what's really interesting.

Put another way: data is a commodity, but relationships are electoral manna. I haven't seen anything in Catalist's long term vision that makes it clear to me that they get that. (maybe they'd be willing to come here and tell me how wrong I am, I'd be happy to be corrected!)

I don't know why the folks who are working on that problem are never invited to these things - get someone from VAN, or someone from one of the America Votes statewide organizing tables. Maybe it's less glitzy, or something?

Slow and boring

Will Johnston — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:03:26 -0400

Hey Colin,

Good write-up, you're right; the video could use some help. My guess would be that you liked the video better while editing because it's fairly slow. The information is presented at a pace that, at least to my young eyes and ears, begs for me to do something else while I'm watching.

Josh, You're better

EyeblastTV — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:05:25 -0400

Josh,

You're better qualified than me to analyze the numbers. Yes, I was the editor of Tech Daily, but I must admit that I don't have the technical skills for that kind of task. :)))

I only know what Google Analytics tells me, and the 1 million-plus views (and still rising rapidly -- watch for yourself by going to our home page and hitting the refresh button every few minutes) isn't fictitious. We have indeed had that many visits to the video page about Obama.

I don't think the numbers are suspicious, either. I understand where you're coming from in terms of comparison, but Eyeblast launched only a month ago and isn't owned by Google. I'm not sure how sound it is to compare us with YouTube in that sense.

Frankly, I was surprised to see the number for the Obama video so low on YouTube. I wish I knew what was making this video spread like wildfire via Eyeblast instead of YouTube because I'd love to be able to make it happen again rather than just watch it happen on its own.

Danny

Explain the views!

Joshua Levy — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:55:23 -0400

Danny, I simply jabbed at Eyeblast for promoting a negative attack video. There's obviously debate on the site about it, which is great. And it made for great techPres fodder.

But Eyeblast and YouTube are not fruit from the same tree. Despite conservatives' complaints about bias on YouTube, it advertises itself as nonpartisan (its practices are another thing). Eyeblast does not, which is fine. But that means that Eyeblast needs to be viewed, and critiqued, differently than YouTube -- as a online partisan platform -- just as Townhall is a different kind of news entity than CNN, for example.

I'll ask again: explain those discrepancies in Google hits.

Josh, Here's what I wrote in

EyeblastTV — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:44:55 -0400

Josh,

Here's what I wrote in my note to you yesterday:

"It's one of those love-it-or-hate-it videos. The people who love it are determined to spread the word via the social-networking tools on our Web site and elsewhere, and the people who hate it are ranting against it in the comments. I thought you might be interested in the video purely from the Web 2.0 perspective, regardless of what you think of the subject matter and how it is handled in the production."

That paragraph was designed to put this video in some perspective for you even before you watched it and also to make clear that I wasn't promoting the video per se, just the news that Eyeblast had become a forum where a presidential video had gained some traction with part of the electorate -- and angered another part. Again, that seemed like "news" for a site like techPresident.

As for Eyeblast being part of the Media Research Center, that's no secret. You've noted it here before, and it's on our "about" page. Furthermore, while the MRC built Eyeblast for the conservative movement and our goal is to spread the conservative message to the next generation, it is an open forum. Your suggestion to the contrary is ridiculous in light of the fact that I specifically told you about the battle in the comments over the video in question.

Your suggestion that YouTube is "neutral" also is off the mark. Yes, conservatives can post video at YouTube (just as liberals who want to engage in reasoned debate can upload to Eyeblast) ... but conservatives also are the only ones who get content yanked from YouTube for political reasons (sometimes under the guise of copyright law even when "fair use" is at play). Ask Michelle Malkin, the American Life League and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, to name a few. YouTube reserved itself on the recent American Life League controversy invoving its criticism of Planned Parenthood, but the fact remains that those episodes always involve YouTube deleting the content of conservatives.

We built Eyeblast in part because of the liberal bias and favoritism at YouTube -- turning over its entire featured video section to environmentalists on Earth Day, for instance, without featuring any videos that raise questions about the environmental agenda. I don't necessarily think YouTube executives send orders from on high for the staff to promote liberalism, but the liberal slant at the site rears its ugly head fairly regularly.

Danny