The Web on the Candidates

• A new poll from CBS, the New York Times, and MTV shows that younger Americans aged 17-29 favor Barack Obama (18%)and Hillary Clinton (17%) for president, and that the majority of them lean left. One-third have been to a candidate's website and 15% have visited a candidate's MySpace or Facebook profile. But will this group actually go out to the real polls? "Nearly three-fourths of 17 to 29-year-olds say they're registered to vote, and most of those who aren’t say they plan to register before the 2008 election."
• Kate Kaye at Clickz reports that Hillary Clinton surpassed Barack Obama in website traffic in May, and Ron Paul has shot from fifth place to first among Republican candidates, according to data from Hitwise. While these numbers are meaningful in that they give a hint at a candidate's general online popularity -- especially since up to one-third of young voters visit their sites, we fear that they're not quite meaningful enough on their own, and should be analyze along with online voters' visits to candidate profiles on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.

The Candidates on the Web

• Tomorrow Chris Dodd will be the next candidate featured by YouTube's Spotlight series. This morning Tim Tagaris of the Dodd internet team told us what to expect. According to Tagaris, the video will depart from the the formula followed by most of the featured candidates, in which they briefly explain their backgrounds and their stance on an issue and ask viewers to respond with their own hopes and dreams and, vaguely, their opinions. Instead, Dodd will critique the way the mainstream news media has beeen covering the election, for example showing a brief clip of Wolf Blitzer talking about Hillary Clinton's "very important question" about her theme song. He'll then explain his amendment to the Defense Authorization bill designed to end the war in Iraq and ask viewers to perform a somewhat involved task: go to their Senators' offices and videotape a conversation with them about the amendment. The idea, says Tagaris, is to have supporters focus on and investigate real issues, rather than simply have them select a theme song (which, we should add, was probably pre-selected anyway). Tagaris says the goal is to use the megaphone of the race to speak about important issues. We're looking forward to seeing the video itself, and seeing what level of participation it inspires.
• Although he isn't a candidate for president, Rep. George Miller from CA has just released a multi-platform project that is a prime example of how the candidates could be leveraging technology. Called MillerTV, the project is what Miller's Deputy Chief-of-Staff Justin Hamilton calls a "distributed, virtual townhall" that utilizes disparate elements of the web to involve voters. "It's not about coming to us, it's about us going to you," Hamilton says. In the introductory video, Miller asks voters to send him their questions about the Iraq war using video, blogs, email, and virtually any other service, and to tag them with the phrase "Ask George" (emailers should put "Ask George" in the subject line). All of this media will be collected by Miller's team and he will then answer the questions in weekly episodes of MillerTV, which will be available on all major online video platforms and as a Facebook application. It sounds so simple, yet no American politican -- candidate or otherwise -- has come up with such a way of utilizing both the myriad online social apps and the open architecture of the web to more closely engage with voters.
• Last Sunday Chris Dodd sat down with "Jerid" from the Buckeye State Blog for a podcasted interview. Jerid writes that they talked about "energy policy, NAFTA and trade policy, habeas corpus, the peace corps, strippers, and a lot more." Kudos to Dodd for deeply engaging with the liberal blogosphere -- with help from his super-savvy team of Tim Tagaris and Matt Browner-Hamlin -- utilizing live video streams, guest blogging on sites like MyLeftNutmeg, and doing interviews like this. That's right, this is my second Dodd post today... I guess that's what happens when the internet folks from a campaign call. You can email us directly at techpres@personaldemocracy.com if you have a tip.
• Mike Huckabee is asking supporters to upload videos to his YouTube channel explaining why "I Like Mike." While it's nice way to open up the campaign to supporters, Huckabee could use the access to engage supporters a bit more on the issues.
Tags: Barack Obama | Chris Dodd | Hillary Clinton | Mike Huckabee | MillerTV
more from Joshua Levy's blog | login or register to post comments | subscribe to the daily digest