techPresident - Iowa - Comments

Obama Spike...

JMalone TN — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 23:58:00 -0500

... on YouTube is an illusion. Since the day before Iowa, and since then, YouTube has been playing with the view counts of certain candidates. Didn't matter how many times you watched a video all the way to the end the count didn't change for Ron Paul views. Want proof. Here you go.

This video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiFsxp5qOpM

For two days this video stayed at 133,302
views although everyone in the comments kept
asking why the view count wasn't changing.
It had 6071 comments and 18 honors. Was ranked
#1 in many of YouTubes catagories including
#1 most viewed for the day. The poster took it
down and reposted it so that the view counter
would reflect new views. It then stayed at 16
although it had 108 comments. This is how Obama
is taking over YouTube. Not more traffic, just
holding back the counts for the real YouTube King
- Dr Ron Paul

Agreed

Chuckumentary — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:02:29 -0500

I think we do need to be more critical of citizen journalism, so I'm glad you point that out. I think we're in this early stage where it still feels new, we tend to pat ourselves on the back for doing it at all, and be sensitive to criticism because it's a lot of work for little/no pay. :-)

That said, we need to get beyond that stage and focus on how can we actually make citizen journalism better? We have to look critically at the content and process and basically grow up a little bit.

Until that happens, I will continue to remove my shirt while mocking Brit Hume.

Absolutely

Joshua Levy — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:09:00 -0500

Chuck, I totally agree and didn't mean to give you guys, or any CJs out there, short shrift. I'm obviously (I hope it's obvious!) a huge supporter of citizen journalism. But to my mind projects like Assignment Zero have focused a bit too much on how it gets done rather than on the fruits of its labor.

That said, you guys, the New Assignment team, and others are definitely creating actual sausage, and it's been great.

Sausage

Chuckumentary — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:00:48 -0500

Hey Joshua, thanks to linking to what we're doing at The UpTake.
I agree, CJs talk a little too much about themselves (i'm particularly guilty of that - look I'm doing it again!)

At the same time, we like to show how the sausage is made, or even better to not make sausage at all. I think it's okay to put ourselves in the story and have some fun with it. More serious stories, I prefer to have nothing between the story and the viewer.

Does All P local = All P Social?

richardbelldc — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:44:12 -0500

How much difference is there between saying "all politics are local" and "all politics are social"?

Tip O'Neill, former Speaker of the House, is credited with "all politics are local." And in the Cambridge neighborhoods where O'Neill learned politics, local meant social. In a sense, what "machine politics" or "big city boss politics" was all about was the building and maintenance of political machines that were embedded in neighborhood-based social networks.

Political reformers have always attacked urban political machines for the types of corruption that almost inevitably accompanies such political arrangements. But there's no question that these machines were a very powerful form of locally-based social networks, anchored in families and long personal associations.

The disappearance of classical machine politics partially reflects the atomization and alienation of the country as a whole. In the absence of machine politics, the reliance on polls and phone banks makes perfect sense, even though it is, as Valdis so aptly puts it, a "brute force" method.

The Republican dominance of national politics from Reagan onward was founded on the religious right voting block, which represented a social network which progressives were unable to penetrate. And at the same time, Republicans were systematically destroying the social network of labor unions, the networks that had been so important to the Democratic Party.

I agree with Valdis that Huckabee's surge involved tapping into existing networks. When you don't have to pay for the cost of creating the network in the first place, then you can run very low cost political campaigns that have a shot at winning.

And as Ron Paul has shown, you can use the net to mobilize a virtual social network to raise very large amounts of money in a very short time. Unlike Huckabee however, Paul's supporters, while fervent, appear to be thinly spread geographically, making the task of converting their online support into boots on the ground a daunting one.

This is a great and

Zephyr Teachout — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:38:12 -0500

This is a great and important blog post.

I'd add to it just a little; Huckabee not only tapped into those social networks, but actively pursued existing social networks in the blogosphere, and thanked the hundreds of bloggers who have been working with him on the night before Iowa. His networked approach, then, was not limited to the traditional networks, but applied more broadly.

Obama also used the internet to strengthen and create offline communities, by enabling thousands (not hundreds, thousands) of offline social events in the months before the caucuses, with just a few people at each one.

In other words, both of them relied heavily on the internet, but not qua internet.

Inkling of opportunity?

gibson_stevens — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:22:49 -0500

This is going to be interesting. Assuming these trends continue, and actually show real success (i.e. Obama gets the nomination, Huckabee sticks around longer, etc.), the politicos may actually realize the value of web strategy, and that it goes well beyond a nice website.

Given that we are still 10 months away from election day, hundreds of statewide, Congressional and local campaigns across the country are going to realize this need and seek talent. Might this be the time for the web strategist to rise to the level of the media strategist?

More of my musings...

Or is location more important?

Freedomfighter — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:11:28 -0500

Social networks always play strong in a caucus which results in skewed outcomes. Young voters were overrepresented as was anyone connected to a church, union or other association. Rudy, who is socially liberal and Mitt who flipped flopped on social issues, gave challengers a wide opening. With Huckabee adding the fair tax issue, the resistance to him gave away. However, all the results may still boil down to region. Obama finished first in the Democratic race, but his home state of Illinois is next door. All competitors were further away. Huckabee of Arkansas finished first in the Republican race because his state is closer than the rest of the Republicans. If you want to find differences, try to figure out how Thompson beat out McCain and how Ron Paul got 10 percent of the vote.

Maps good at prediction ?

Guilhem — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:32:39 -0500

We just published sort of predictions for the iowa caucus, it gives share of voice of each candidate on the political US blogosphere, you can find it here : http://presidentialwatch08.com/index.php/2008/01/03/iowa-caucus-huckabee...

Traffic

gibson_stevens — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:07:09 -0500

Interesting attempt, but why are they not publicizing this? No one except the <1,000 that checked the app could know about this, and yet it is a great tool for those outside Iowa to get involved. Its an easy, low bar action and yet they are doing nothing to drive traffic.

More of my musings...

Ron Paul and Environmental Stewardship

johnfkosanke — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 08:02:39 -0500

It seems that Ron Paul is being neglected again - this time by The Environmental Law and Policy Center. Paul's approach to environmental stewardship needs more attention simply because it is the correct one. It begins with the realization that polluters are aggressors, and need to be treated as such. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) licenses pollutors by giving them tradable emissions credits. High courts override class action suits against heavy industries that pollute the air and water - in the name of the "common good". Whether or not global warming is the threat that it is made out to be, the blame for pollution in general lies squarely on the shoulders of the collectivist state - which has predictably become a convenient ally for such aggressors. Protection of property, on the other hand, provides the best and most natural tool for careful stewardship of the earth.

The real power of this experiment

mistermind — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 21:56:20 -0500

It seems to me that the real power of this experiment is not so much to get the caucus results sooner - but to get better, fuller results. Aside from being ridiculously complex, the Iowa Democratic caucuses are also maddeningly opaque. Unbelievable as it may seem, the raw vote totals are never released to the public, only the calculated delegate totals. (See: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/opinion/18cranberg.html.) Your experiment, if it succeeds, will shed more light on this process than ever before.

Great idea....

shimanepdf — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 15:56:37 -0500

I'll add to my twitter following group.

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Shaun Dakin – CEO & Founder
The National Political Do Not Contact Registry
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Not just faster

Patrick Ruffini — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:46:32 -0500

I'd be willing to bet this is as good as the media entrance polling. Nothing is as good as final results naturally, but I'd like to see how close something like this could get.

And in the case of the Democratic Caucus, we've never had a real sense of how support actually broke down pre-viability (raw votes are not reported), so this has the chance to surface new information, and tell the story of what actually happened inside the caucuses.

Faster != better

Fred Stutzman — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:18:13 -0500

While this is an interesting concept, I don't think it will prove that the internet is necessarily better. Faster, but not necessarily better. Of course, we've known the internet is faster than the press for over a decade now, so that's not surprising.