techPresident

Daily Digest: The Dem Convention Inside and/or Out

2008-08-21T12:37:49-04:00

The Web on the Candidates

The Real Democratic Convention: At the same time delegates and other party faithful assemble in Denver's Pepsi Center for next week's Democratic National Convention, hundreds of bloggers and new media-types will gather a few blocks away under the Big Tent, a sort of convention-away-from-the convention sponsored by Daily Kos, the Colorado-based Progress Now, and the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado. The Big Tent, reports PBS MediaShift's Simon Owens, will be a social haven and productive workplace for those coming to Denver without main hall credentials in hand. But with the "official" events inside the convention hall so carefully scripted, we're thinking the sessions, interviews, and informal tête-à-têtes that will happen under the Big Tent might spark as much -- if not more -- real news and compelling commentary. I'll be reporting from both the Pepsi Center and Big Tent next week, so stay tuned. #
Just Who's Responsible for This Party?: In his inaugural VideoNation segment, The Nation's Ari Melber kicks off his DNC coverage with the idea that Barack Obama is shaping up to be the sort of historic presidential candidate who arrives at his nominating convention with more to sell than a sparkling resume. Obama, contends Ari, comes to Denver with a vision for what the American people can aspire to, a la FDR or JFK. That's a theme also recently hashed over by The American Prospect's Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein, who focus on the Obama campaign's efforts to turn the Democratic Party into a powerhouse. Now, Obama's decisions to move DNC operations to Chicago and take the nomination before a stadium filled with 75,000 fans can be read as building the Democratic Party or bolstering the candidacy of one man. But the question is, which reading will come out ahead? We're thinking that how the online left reacts to next week's events will help to shape Obama's reputation as a party builder, so we'll be keeping a close eye on it. (On that point, I'll be serving as techPresident's correspondent on BBC Radio's Five Live program next week, covering the online reaction to the Dem convo. We'll pass along details as they become available.) #

The Candidates on the Web

McCain's Tech Ties: From many on the left, the knock against John McCain's recently released technology policy plan was that it went too far in kowtowing to business interests. (For example, the reaction of high-profile technologist and Obama supporter David Isenberg: "[T]he McCain plan says, "What's good for AT&T and Comcast and Cisco and the RIAA is good for America.") Campaign Money Watch is out with its interpretation: McCain's tech vision is industry's tech vision because of how closely associated his campaign is to the industry. More than three dozen McCain staffers, says the non-partisan watchdog group, have served as lobbyists at firms representing the technology industry inside the Beltway, to the tune of $1 million or more. And McCain, reports Public Campaign, '08 has raised millions from those in the industry who stand to benefit from his policy solutions. #
62262, Is That You?: Virginia politicos were pwned yesterday by a fake text message containing the "news" that Governor Tim Kaine had gotten the Democratic vice presidential nod. We think somebody's been reading Wonkette. We also think that about, hmm, six seconds will elapse between the real VP SMS going out and the pick being worldwide news. So if it seems like you're the only one who knows who's Obama's number two, then there's a very good chance you don't really know who's Obama's number two. #
McCain Blogger's Dwindling Charisma Points: Having spent no more than two or three childhood afternoons playing Dungeons & Dragons with my big brother, I can't really make too much sense of the battle over McCain blogger Michael Goldfarb's slamming of D&D players. But here's what I know: in a post on the McCain Report, Michael unleashed some snark on the role-playing contingent. That prompted a heated reaction amongst D&D players -- who seem to include a fair number of military types and other folks McCain doesn't really want to anger. Hey, when you hire a wiseacre campaign blogger, you roll the dice...#

In Case You Missed It...

Alan Rosenblatt asks why the official websites of the Republican and Democratic parties aren't doing more to promote their respective upcoming conventions.

Promoting Your Own Convention

2008-08-21T11:20:42-04:00

It simply boggles my mind that neither the Republican or Democratic Party websites link to their respective convention websites from their homepages. Nor do they even mention the conventions--no dates, no locations, no nothing!

The Democratic Party convention starts this coming Monday and everyone seems to be talking about it, except the DNC's own website. And while the Republican Party convention isn't until September 1, it is still close enough that it should be promoted on the party's website.

Let's be clear, each party is spending millions of dollars on these huge media spectacles and they aren't promoting it on their own websites, which they could do for free. If I were a citizen looking for information about the conventions online I would do one of two things, search for the conventions on a search engine or go to the official party website to find the link.

Official Score:
Search Engines 1
Party Websites 0

Game over?

Maybe they are just waiting for the right moment.

Daily Digest: In Party Politics, Who Pays for the Party?

2008-08-20T12:28:48-04:00

The Web on the Candidates

The Benefactors Behind the Blue Cheese Dip: At first we thought that the Sunlight Foundation had put together a useful attendee's guide to the hundreds of shindigs, soirees, and mixers that will take place during the upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions in Denver and Minneapolis/St. Paul respectively. But it turns out that Party Time!: Documenting the Political Party Circuit is actually an effort to shine light on the tremendous amounts of corporate and PAC cash that flows through the quadrennial political gatherings. Yep, that makes a bit more sense for a Sunlight project. The conventions will indeed be rife with parties; Change Congress's Japhet Els reports, for example, some 90 fetes a day for the DNC. That said, new ethics rules are prompting the forsaking of forks in favor of chopsticks, so consider the republic saved. (Disclosure: PdF's Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior strategic advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.) #
Big Bluers Voting Blue?: A new survey of nearly 3,000 information technology professionals by ITToolbox finds that this, in the words of the site, "traditionally conservative industry" is leaning towards Barack Obama this cycle. #

The Candidates on the Web

The Team Behind the Curtain: The Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas profiles Barack Obama's new media team led by Dean campaign veteran Joe Rospars. Jose spotlights the campaign's efforts to leapfrog over traditional media to directly touch supporters. As the piece reads, the specialized team members are something like the X-Men: Kate Albright-Hanna -- video! Scott Goodstein -- text messaging! Chris Hughes -- social networking! Sam Graham-Felsen -- blogging! More than a dozen other staffers round out online shop, prompting former Giuliani deputy Internet director Katie Harbath to comment via Twitter: "20+ online staffers on Obama campaign? Damn, we just had 2. Would have killed for 20+." Budding online politicos of all political persuasions should probably cross their fingers that Obama performs well in November, or it might be quite some time before we again see online shops the size of minor league baseball teams. (Thanks to Brett Schenker for checking my comic reference.) #
"We'll Make You a Deal...": The AP catches up on Obama's VP SMS-for-cell-number swap. #
Geeking Out in the Policy Shop: Obama's economics advisor Austan Goolsbee, is, according to a profile by Technology Review's Mark Williams, a premier member of the new class of economists that roots its economic analysis in a firm understanding of the networked world. Goolsbee, says the piece, is in fact one of the first economists who predicted years ago that the Internet would prove a "great equalizer" that would, in time, improve the way markets function. #

TechCongress and Beyond

Election e-Highjinks: Come November, might some Internet hooligans update vote tampering for the digital age? Slate's Christopher Beam details possible tactics, such posting an ad on geography-based social networks that a local polling spot has moved from City Hall to Hall Elementary. Luckily, Beam has clever ideas for combating such nefariousness: "The sickness is also the cure. Social networks thrive on sharing, so if you discover a misleading ad, it's that much easier to tell everyone you know." #

In Case You Missed It...

We know, we know. You've been scouring the country for months looking for a pro-Obama tofu-shaped plush toy. Consider your search over. #

Daily Digest: Google's Blend of Searchin' and Schmoozin'

2008-08-19T12:02:57-04:00

The Web on the Candidates

Got to Get Political, Political GOOG's Got to Get: You can count on one hand the number of years it has been since Google took its first tentative steps into the Beltway, setting up a meagerly staffed lobbying shop in DC. But in '08, Google seems to be coming into its political teenagehood. The company has just released Google Power Readers, a Google Reader-based site that collects tagged RSS items from John McCain and Barack Obama (suuure...) and "political journalists" from Arianna Huffington to Red State's Patrick Ruffini. A new, rather minimalist Google 2008 U.S. Election site features Google election maps, YouTube videos, and Google News reports on the candidates. And Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland reports that Google is hoping to make a big splash at the upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions, hosting, for example, a joint Ben Affleck-attended party with Vanity Fair on the final night of the Dem gathering in Denver. #
America's Golden Boy(s): We've got high-grade Olympic fevah, so we were tickled to find this chart mapping the eerie similarities between swimmer Michael Phelps and Senator Barack Obama. ("Prominent ears? Check.") Fun stuff. But here's hoping the vote in November goes a bit more smoothly that the convoluted judging of women's gymnastics -- where, apparently, two competitors can get the same exact judges' score and only one goes home with the big prize. Boy are we lucky that democracy never gets that messy! #
Mo' Money Mo', Well, Money: Democratic fundraising PAC ActBlue has just hit the $60 million mark, after reaching the $50 million milestone only back in June. To give you a sense of how quickly ActBlue has grown, we remember quite well when, as recently as 2006, former Virginia governor Mark Warner became among the very first major politicians to tap into the power of ActBlue back when he was preparing a possible entry into the '08 presidential contest. (Hmm, on second thought, maybe that points to how truly interminable this race for the White House has been.) In its release, ActBlue helpfully points out that its fairly new counterpart on the right, Slatecard, has raised just over half of what ActBlue did when it was similarly finding its footing. #

The Candidates on the Web

Duty, Honor, Blogging: L'affair John Edwards has exposed a rift in the liberal blogosphere, with blogger Lee Stranahan getting himself banned from Daily Kos for both pursuing the story with vigor and insisting to his fellow Kossacks that the left ignored the extramarital rumblings about the former North Carolina senator at its own peril. Now BlogHer political director Erin Kotecki Vest is defending Stranahan and chiding the netroots for pointedly ignoring the Edwards story. We've entered, says Vest, into "the world of 'obligation' for bloggers and their communities" which requires delving into even unpleasant rumors and news. #
Obama's Secret: Hard Work, Details: MIT Technology Review's David Talbot picks apart MyBarackObama.com in an attempt to divine just how, precisely, the campaign's internal social network has powered its run thus far. (You'll notice a bunch of TechPres folks featured in the article, particularly Personal Democracy Forum co-founder Andrew Rasiej.) Of particular focus in Talbot's piece is how MyBO was harnessed to turn out volunteers and voters in the Texas two-step, the primary/caucus hybrid where Obama turned in a surprisingly strong performance. Some classic Joe Trippi: "This year, it was the network, stupid!" We'll boil down Talbot's take on how the Obamans became the zen masters of social tech for you: they (1) embraced a measured dependence on networked tools and then (2) translated that embrace into making sure they got the little things right. But Talbot's piece is long and rich, and well worth a read. #

TechCongress and Beyond

It Depends on What Your Definition of "Led" Is: McCain's spanking new tech policy proposal asserts that the senator from Arizona took the initiative in creating both the national Do Not Call Registry and the CAN-SPAM Act -- two of the biggest tech directives to come out of Washington in recent years. But former Bill Clinton Chief Counselor for Privacy Peter Swire begs to differ with that account. (Thanks Shaun Dakin) #
Seeking: U.S. CTO, ASAP: Lotus 1-2-3 creator, Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder, chair of the Mozilla Foundation, board chairman for the company behind Second Life, and...hang on, taking a breath...Obama tech advisor Mitch Kapor is making the case that the U.S. desperately needs a Chief Technology Officer to put America on the digital cutting edge. It's a governing model pioneered by states like Virginia, which has a Secretary of Technology charged with maximizing the e-potential of that state. But with technology threading through almost every area of government these days, the challenge is figuring out how to empower a CTO to actually, you know, get stuff done without constantly stepping on the toes of everyone else in the bureaucracy. #

In Case You Missed It...

Micah Sifry picks up on the milestone marked by Obama's TXT MY VP effort -- it makes his the first presidential campaign to have a full-featured mobile platform. #

Obama's New Mobile Platform is More Than TXT MY VP

2008-08-18T14:54:47-04:00

Barack Obama's promise to announce his VP pick by text-message -- a smart and obvious ploy to sign up mobile users for future campaign communications -- has been getting a lot of attention this past week, not just from us, but also in a smart op-ed by our friend Garrett Graff in the New York Times, and also today in a (rare for him) catch-up story by the Times' Brian Stelter.

What I hadn't noticed in all this coverage was a quiet but probably more important development: The Obama campaign just rolled out its new mobile platform, m.barackobama.com, which is expressly designed to work on most mobile phones that have internet access. Scott Goodstein, the Obama team's mobile guru, has an understated announcement here. There is no John McCain mobile website.

iLoop Mobile, the company that built the Obama campaign's mobile site, is understandably pretty excited about its work, as you can see from their press release. The platform has a number of cool features, including downloadable wallpaper and ringtones, news content fed dynamically from the main Obama website, the ability to download various white papers, and a goofy "Share the Hope" viral animation to send to friends. Other than the annoyingly cloying "powered by hope" mantra, the site makes sense.

I asked Katrin Verclas of MobileActive, one of the world's experts on all things mobile and political, for her take, and she wrote:

I have checked out the Obama site on a bunch of mobiles and it was ok but this is much, much better. Clean design, nice viral features (share the hope) that allows the campaign to collect additional phone numbers through text-a friend features. Clearly, there is a push in the campaign to collect as many numbers as possible -- presumably for get-out-the vote efforts and conversion to email and donations.

With growing mobile web usage, campaigns need to start paying attention to mobile users who search for and check out content about candidates on their phones. Web growth rates, as evidenced by mobile ad (source: Admob) traffic from the network’s publishers has grown by 104% over the last year, significantly spurred by iPhones, of course (which do not require a WAP [Wireless Application Protocol] site, however).

Candidates who adopt to the mobile web are smart even though they might not see immediate ROI. Obama is clearly on the vanguard, pushing the envelope in both SMS campaign outreach and now with a slick WAP site hoping to generate buy-in with the hip, young crowd.

Interestingly, though, when searching on a mobile for Obama -- search being one of the main areas of growth in mobile web traffic -- the main site still shows up, and there is no redirect to the mobile site from either a blackberry nor a Nokia N95 (which ideally should automatically render m.barackobama.com, reading that I access the site from a mobile...) I'll be curious to see whether that gets fixed.

Daily Digest: Bursting Bayh's Balloon

2008-08-18T12:16:22-04:00

(I'm back from vacation and am happy to report that northern Maine is one wild and wonderful part of the country. Thanks so much to Josh Sherman for doing a stellar job with the digest. -- Nancy)

The Web on the Candidates

Summer's Over; Get Back in School: Democracy for America, the organizing PAC that grew out of Howard Dean's '04 presidential run, will play host to online politics guru Zack Exley this Wednesday as part of its on-going Night School Series. The series is free with DFA membership, which in turns costs nadda. Zack, who spent some time on the Kerry presidential team and now runs a compelling blog on the American evangelical movement called Revolution in Jesusland, is consistently one of the cleverest and most innovative folks working in online politics. This might be worth Tivoing the Olympics track and field finals for. The session can be joined via conference call or online through Blog Talk Radio, and DVDs will be available for purchase after the event. With this and its other organizing programs, DFA continues as one of the best political programs out there -- some four years after the rather sudden end to the campaign that inspired it. #
What Women Want: As something of an antidote to the fact that, as a Pew Research Center report found, under a third of of news coverage in the U.S. included even one female source, the Center for New Words has launched a new site called This is What Women Want. (CNW is perhaps best known for its highly regarded Women, Action & Media conference held each spring.) The site is centered around "speakouts," moderated expressions of values or opinions that are in turn rated by users. An offline component of the project will be the What Women Want Tour -- in-person speakouts that will take place in every city where a presidential debate will be held, on the eve of the debate. #

The Candidates on the Web

Bye Bye Bayh?: The online movement to quash any potential nomination of Indiana Senator Evan Bayh as Obama's vice presidential pick has, reports Ari Melber, picked up some serious steam. Making use of both Twitter and Facebook (where the anti-Bayh group currently boasts 3,700 members), the opposition to Bayh has garnered its fair share of news coverage. The veep picking process often involves the floating of trial balloons, and while there's no real telling of how influential the anti-Bayh energy has been inside Obama's inner circle, there's no arguing that Bayh's balloon has certainly taken a few shots. The Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman also reports that the online animus directed towards Bayh might have taken the sheen off of his potential nomination. On a related note, Open Left's Paul Rosenberg has some choice words for folks who think marshalling opposition to the Hoosier is, in a word, "lame." #
McCain's Digital Divide: Technologists' reactions to John McCain's business-minded tech policy continue to pour in, and if this was Rotten Tomatoes instead of techPresident, we'd have to rate Mac's plan as decidedly rotten. One Web Day's Susan Crawford: "This isn’t vision. It’s more like a wistful memoir about times gone by." David Isenberg: "[T]he McCain plan says, 'What's good for AT&T and Comcast and Cisco and the RIAA is good for America.'" Media Access Project's Harold Feld: "It reads like some crotchety technophobe knocked over the bumper sticker wrack [sic] at an Ayn Rand Reading Revival and tried to rearrange them so it made a policy." The Berkman Center's David Weinberger: "In sum, our Internet policy should be [according to McCain] the same as our energy policy: Hand a key resource off to big corporations whose interests are fundamentally out of alignment with ours as citizens." All four, it should be noted, are Obama supporters. And of course, some techie types like the e-view from McCainland just fine. Responding to criticism of the plan from the Wharton School's Kevin Werbach, McCain tech surrogate and former FCC chairman Michael Powell attempts a re-framing: "McCain understands that the President does not invent anything, patent anything, craft and fund a business model, or hire the skilled workforce necessary to bring inventive ideas to market." #

TechCongress and Beyond

The Point and Purpose of Political Party Platforms: We've showered some amount of praise on how members of the left's netroots are using a nifty tool called MixedInk to craft a "netroots platform" in advance of the Democratic convention in Denver next week, but Open Left's Chris Bowers hates the very notion that political consensus should be distilled and packaged into a platform. MyDD's Natasha Chart defends the project as a tool for alliance building and fellow DDer Jerome Armstrong argues that the netroots platform is a necessary bridge between winning elections and developing an governing ideology. #
The FEC Will Let You Be: The Federal Election Commission has ruled that whether or not a pro-Barack Obama blog coordinated its activities with the Chicago-based campaign is irrelevant -- blogs and other online media are free to booster for a candidate without triggering campaign finance restrictions. The ruling offers a little clarity to what has long (well, at least in Internet years) been a fuzzy area of election law. #

In Case You Missed It...

PoliticsTV's Dan Manatt celebrates the two year anniversary of the dawn of YouTube politics. Somehow we don't think that former Senator George Allen is celebrating the day with balloons and a cake.

HAPPY MACACA DAY!!!! Just Two Years Ago, YouTube Politics' Breakout Moment

2008-08-18T10:03:44-04:00

Just two years ago, the modern age of YouTube/Web Video Politics began:

On 8.11.06, Sen. George Allen, a shoo-in for reelection and early favorite for the GOP 08 pres nomination, called Web Campaign video tracker S.R. Sidarth "Macaca".

On 8.14.08, the Webb campaign, unable to get TV stations to take the video and run with the story, posted it on the new video service, YouTube, which as of then was not on anyone's political radar.

The rest is history.

True, there were pioneers in this space before, most notably the "Vlogfather", John Amato of Crooks and Liars. I myself had been working in the Web Video vineyards since 99.

But S.R., the Webb Campaign, and the DSCC's Mike Liddell - and, of course, George Allen himself - created the perfect storm that created the first "Macaca Moment", forever changing politics.

And so, with a tip of the hat and slight bow, I say:

Happy Anniversary!

LINKS:

WEBB CAMPAIGN: Macaca Moment/Allen's Listening Tour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G7gq7GQ71c

TOP 10 POLITICAL WEB VIDEOS OF ALL TIME: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcszvVWJTUg

TOP 10 POLITICAL WEB VIDEOS OF THE 08 PRIMARIES: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9grHLZ8S27w

WEB VIDEO ODYSSEY 08
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gnYagYoJFY&feature=iv
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPdtAGiv9cM

Daily Digest: You Never Forget Your First (2 Million)

2008-08-15T12:51:08-04:00

The Candidates on the Web

MyBO NOOO! Part 2: Yesterday, we accidentally jumped the gun on Jonathan Tilove's story on controversial changes in Barack Obama's social networking system, and for that we apologize. Tilove writes an excellent article that captures the frustration MyBO users are having with the switch from a points system for taking various actions on behalf of the Obama campaign that allowed some of them to really stand out to a more generic "activity tracker” that significantly flattens the standing among activists. MyBO user Lisa Holmes puts it this way: "People say it's not about you, it's about Barack. But it's not. This is our campaign. We put him where he is. We invested in him." #
You Never Forget Your First 2 Million: The Obama campaign is reporting that it has reached another milestone this week as it passed the 2 million donor mark. The Obama campaign has raised a total of $340 million through the end of June while the McCain campaign has raised $145 million. The Boston Globe’s Foon Rhee explains that Obama will need to keep up the pace because he isn't taking public funding while McCain, who is taking public funds, is also being helped tremendously by the RNC. #
Channel Surfing: Interesting enough, though the McCain’s YouTube channel has dominated Obama’s this month (5 million to 2.5 million), Obama has crushed McCain this week (433,000 to 73,000). How is this possible? An Obama ad released yesterday “Three Bedroom Ranch” has somehow already gotten 74,000 views while “We’re In It Together” barn-painting campaign has gotten over 45,000. Still, those are peanuts compared to McCain’s hits before the Olympics. #

The Web on the Candidates

le Presidente technologique: techPresident has been nominated by PoliticsOnline for The Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics. We are honored to be held in the same esteem as groups like mySociety and The Sunlight Foundation. The top 10 nominees who receive the most votes will be invited as honored guests to the world eDemocracy Forum in Paris. Allez, viens! We hope you'll vote for us (blue poll on the right)! #
The Reviews Are Starting To Come In On McCain's Technology Plan: Communications law expert Harold Feld has a posted a critical review of McCain’s tech policy. Feld is an Obama supporter, and he zeroes in on what he sees as incongruities in McCain's policy. Most of McCain's tech "policy,” according to Feld, is merely “just variations on McCain's standard “I hate taxes” theme.” #
Barely Interesting: BarelyPolitical.com is the third most viewed YouTube channel this week and has already posted ten videos this month. If you haven’t watched a BarelyPolitical video yet, they are usually most successful when the computer effects work. If you have ever been disappointed with the lack of bikini-clad girls in the political process, you will likely have a field day. #
MoveOn Special Election Briefing: MoveOn.org has posted a professional video narrated by Director Eli Pariser warning MoveOn members not to get complacenct during the last 100 days of this election. The video outlines 5 reasons why Obama supporters must keep on their toes. Looks like the doldrums of summer are starting to end... #
Baracky II: Meanwhile, here is a great little spoof of Rocky II featuring McCain and Obama, a sequel to the original Baracky. This one is well done, so well done that we wonder who is actually behind it. Here's hoping we'll get to see a Rocky IV spoof, featuring former Russian former-President Vladimir Putin as Ivan Drago. #

TechCongress and Beyond

Those Wretched High School Freshmen!! Republican Representative Virgil Goode lashes out at the Obamajority, an ActBlue fundraising page started by a 14 year old blogger. The blogger, Populista, has on DailyKos.com has set a goal of getting 50 donors for Democratic challenger Tom Perriello. Well, mission accomplished: according to the ActBlue page, 53 donors have contributed and have doubled the amount raised since the time of posting. #

In Case You Missed It...

The Colbert Report’s Stephen Colbert covers McCain’s “wiki-policy” (that is, supposedly lifting facts from Wikipedia). Colbert says McCain is “now using the people’s voice, or at least, lip-synching to it.” #

Following Mark Penn's e-mails that leaked last week, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg and Jennie Rothenberg Gritz have found some e-mails from the Obama campaign that show a campaign in crisis as well. #

The Economist on Technology in Politics: The Economist has a great article that provides a pretty complete overview of the importance of technology in elections since Howard Dean’s presidential run. The article features techPresident Founder & President Andrew Rasiej. #

Daily Digest: "Drill Here, Drill Now" Will Literally Give You Gas

2008-08-14T12:01:39-04:00

The Candidates on the Web

MyBO NOOO!: MyBO (my.barackobama.com) has eliminated the system of awarding “points” in favor of a new “activity tracker,” a relative scale that tracks activism from 1-10. According to Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and one of Barack Obama's coordinators of online organizing, the "activity tracker" uses a new formula to gauge activity and is now visible to everyone on MyBO. #
McCain's Technology Plan: Yesterday we reported on Sen. John McCain’s lack of tech policy. Today, the Wall Street Journal's Elizabeth Holmes and Amy Schatz reports that McCain will unveil a technology agenda that “bundles previously announced pro-business proposals with continued support for a hands-off approach to regulation.” The plan, Holmes and Schatz report, will "reiterate Sen. McCain's opposition to Internet taxes and new laws guaranteeing net neutrality, the idea that Internet providers must treat all legal Internet traffic equally." It also says that McCain maintains, "Congress shouldn't get involved in writing rules for the Internet. Any net-neutrality problems should be left to federal regulators like the FCC to deal with." #

The Web on the Candidates

Charts and Crafts: New voter-generated video has Andrew Sullivan’s approval and it is pretty effective. Entitled “Approval Ratings: The Public v. McCain,” the video attempts Al Gore’s mastery of fear-inducing charts. The horror! #
Newmark's 2.0 Cents: At ValleyZen.com Craig Newmark talks about technology and the Obama and McCain's online strategies. On Obama "using [technology] to tell people hey let's work together to get stuff done." On McCain: "McCain's site is kind of like my own joke about myself which basically says 'you kids get off my lawn.'" #

TechCongress and Beyond

"Drill Here, Drill Now" Wants to Give You Gas: American Solutions has announced a video contest on why America “must adopt a ‘Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” approach.” The winner will receive free gas for a year. American Solutions will choose the Top 3 videos based on their substance and creativity and present them on the contest page where users will be able to vote on their favorite. Oh and Newt Gingrich is involved, if you haven't figured that out yet. Gingrich wants the creative American to help shape the message because "you know, YouTube is a great thing. And it's a lot of fun." #

In Case You Need It...

If you’ve ever thought to yourself “Hey! I would love to see 47 seconds of video that would quickly go through President Bush’s past four years but without any context,” well today is your lucky day! If you need a little more, I can only really describe it as a psychotropic-time-travel-nightmare. This type of work is not new for creator Jeremy Tubbs who in the past has made similar videos for Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama. We're not sure what the message is but this video probably accurately portrays the adrenaline a candidate must feel. Also, it looks 3D, if you blur your eyes. #

Daily Digest: The Digg Olympics

2008-08-13T11:58:05-04:00

The Web on the Candidates

Anti-McCain Video Gets a Digg Gold Medal: Top video on Digg in the past 24 hours, "Republicans and military men on John McCain" is an anti-McCain voter-generated video that so far has just over 200,000 views. Getting a boost from Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall doesn't hurt either. The "spine chilling" video is set to that terrifying song from "Requiem for a Dream" but the power of the song pales in comparison to Scott Ritter’s warning on Iran. Note: the video contains graphic images. #
Keeping Up With VP 2.0: The competition for Vice President is, unlike the presidential campaign, one of the most opaque and ill-understood phenomena in politics, and the public doesn't tend to get much involved until after the pick is announced. Proof of that--if you go on Facebook and search for groups with the word "VP" in them, they're mostly about student government elections. But we're keeping our eye on a new group just launched by Huffington Post’s Max Bernstein, called “100,000 Strong Against Evan Bayh for VP.” The anti-Bayh drumbeat has been picked up by sites like The Washington Note and The Washington Independent, and it looks like the netroots is trying to send Obama a signal. The Clark for VP Facebook group has 5,527 supporters, and the Romney for VP group, which has been around all summer long, has a measly 238. #
C-SPAN. C-SPAN RUN. C-SPAN is partnering with New Media Strategies to create a Convention Hub for both conventions which will allow searchable, linkable, and embeddable access to C-SPAN video coverage. There are some other cool features, like real-time tracking of credentialed state and national political bloggers that will be aggregated to enable users to get the
latest online convention news and analysis, and yes, they will also be tracking what’s happening on Twitter. #
And the Winner is... The Next Right’s Katherine Miller compares the websites for the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. While she acknowledges the advantage the Left has online, Miller calls this “something of a rare win for the home team.” You can’t argue with her, the RNC website is the clear winner. #

The Candidates on the Web

The Importance of Being Texted: The Op-Ed section of the New York Times features a fine piece today by Garrett Graff on the importance of Obama's text-messaging campaign. The effectiveness of text messages, Graff says, is that they mobilize people to act, unlike e-mail, blogs, YouTube, and Facebook. He believes the Obama campaign’s decision to reveal his VP via text is less about “proclaiming the selection and everything to do with getting out the vote on Election Day in November.” #
Must Read on McCain's (ahem) "Tech Policy": Center for American Progress's Amanda Terkel has written a piece for Salon on Sen. John McCain’s tech policy (or lack thereof). Terkel argues that since McCain has not revealed any plan for the country’s technology infrastructure, he is ill equipped to lead. With issues that will need to be addressed in the near future, such as national broadband and net neutrality, Terkel writes that McCain will likely talk about “getting advanced telecommunications services to all Americans” will likely “allow the industry to determine what all this means.”#

TechCongress and Beyond

Organizing Tips For Organizers: Open Left’s Matt Stoller has a few more words for the #dontGo movement. The movement issued a press release which reads “#dontGo Movement founder Eric Odom today called upon Americans nationwide to leave their homes for Washington, D.C. to protest high gasoline prices.” Stoller offers a quick lesson in organizing: “Real protest organizers tend to distinguish between themselves and 'Americans nationwide'. Paid staffers from conservative interest groups don't.” #

Daily Digest: 'Tube Pong

2008-08-12T10:53:24-04:00

The Candidates on the Web

The Clash Continues: The McCain campaign hits Obama with another video called “Fan Club” which rehashes the same themes as “Celebrity,” “The One,” and “Family.” Released a day after Obama’s response “Embrace,” the new McCain spot is already doing 30,000 views better on YouTube (“Embrace" was not released on YouTube for BarackObama.com). Meanwhile the Obama campaign has also released a video specifically for Ohio called "We're In It Together." It’s two minutes long and appears to be made specifically for the web. The video is part of a call-to-action to have Obama supporters in rural America paint their barns with the Obama logo, just as the people in this video did for Obama back in July 2008. So while it has not had many views yet (just over 8,000 as of this post), it looks like it has no intention of going viral (but then again, who doesn't want to go viral?). #
Wiki-policy?? CQ Politics’s Taegan Goddard reports on similarities between a speech made by Sen. John McCain yesterday and a Wikipedia article on the country Georgia. Look at it this way, if it is discovered that McCain lifted the material himself, at least we would know he’s using the internet! #

The Web on the Candidates

Paris? Pink? Perfect! (Porridge, too!) TechRepublican’s David All is impressed by McCain’s online advertising campaign featuring Paris and Britney. He is struck not only by the celebrities but the “pink and purple.” Always a riot, he deems the ad worthy of a helping of porridge to Team McCain. #
Digg. Bury. Repeat if necessary. The Los Angeles Times's Web Scout reports that "in the last 30 days, at least 28 stories critical of GOP Sen. John McCain have been mysteriously "buried" — meaning enough Digg users have voted against a story that the submission may no longer appear on the site's high-traffic front page." While on Digg this story is flagged as possibly inaccurate, this comes on the heels of McCain's Points-for-Comments story published in the Washington Post last week. According to the LA Times, Digg CEO Jay Adelson said his team had checked the stories in question and was not concerned by any organized burying trends. We will make sure to keep you updated on this story. #

TechCongress and Beyond

Moneybombs make Strangebedfellows: ActBlue reports that Accountability Now PAC has done well straight out of the gate. Led by Jane Hamsher of firedoglake and Trevor Lyman of Ron Paul’s moneybomb campaigns, the organization is a left-right coalition that is an outgrowth of the FISA fight. On August 8th Accountability Now organized a “Strangebedfellows” moneybomb and raised more than $150,000 in 24 hours. Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com, a supporter of the PAC, writes about the campaign here. We’ll be sure to follow how they intend to use to money to “hold Washington accountable.”#
Don't Leave... but #dontGo: The Next Right’s Soren Dayton reports on the three things that make him think the #dontGo campaign may be on to something. Dayton is pleased to see that not only is the campaign raising money for the GOP but it is also “changing Democratic minds,” such as a top Democratic House candidate calling for a special session of Congress to convene. #

In Case You Haven't Noticed...

McCain is spending more on search engine advertising and Google creates an "elections and issue advocacy" team. #

Daily Digest: OMG BRK OBMA TXTS 4 VP

2008-08-11T12:33:35-04:00

The Candidates on the Web

TXT 4 VP LOL: The Washington Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas reports that the Obama campaign will announce his vice presidential nominee via a cell phone text message sometime before the Democratic National Convention. The Obama campaign sent out an invitation last night via e-mail and text message to its supporters to participate in this revolutionary form of announcement. Vargas notes three things: “the casual reference to the candidate ("Barack"); the call to "forward" the text (to friends, relatives, etc.); the perceived personal appeal of being "the first to know"; and the timing -- the text was sent two weeks before the Democratic National Convention kicks off. That gives plenty of time for the text to be passed around.” Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) of the New York Times asked on Twitter if it was smart or silly and the response has been mixed. Jeff Jarvis thinks it’s silly while Adam Mordecai of Advomatic, Todd Ziegler of Bivings ,and techPresident editor Micah Sifry think it’s smart. #

Epic Pwnage? The Obama Campaign’s “Fact Check” division released a response to McCain’s “Family “ attack ad. The video is over three minutes long, has horrible sound quality (I had to use my earphones), and has not amassed many views (just over 65,000). The video, however, strangely benefits from the lack of quality – it really feels like you are sitting down with Brian Deese, Obama’s deputy economic policy director. Though the story has done well on Digg, but I don’t know if I would call this “EPIC PWNAGE.” #

The Celebrity Game: The Obama campaign released “Embrace,” their ad response to “Celebrity,” McCain’s biggest YouTube hit so far. The ad accuses McCain of being “Washington’s biggest celebrity”, therefore not only hitting right back on the celebrity charge but connecting McCain with Washington (old politics, broken system, etc.). The ad starts with John McCain walking on to the Late Show with David Letterman, appearing on The View, then hugging George W. Bush. Though the ad acknowledges the sting that must have been felt by the Obama campaign, the ad is effective and uses a much different tone from McCain’s ad. We'll be keeping an eye on "Embrace"'s viewership, to see if it can top McCain's Celebrity views. #

The Web on the Candidates

Cybergenic? Maybe Not: The Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik responds to Paul Saffo's recent column on ABCNews.com about "Obama's 'cybergenic' edge." Zurawik asks “Is Obama the first ‘cybergenic’ candidate?” Zurawik challenges the idea that Obama is to new media what FDR and JFK were to radio and t.v., respectively. While Zurawik acknowledges Obama’s extensive use of new media, he says “follow the money.” The record spending on Olympics advertising suggests that T.V. is still king. #

How Will McCain Announce His VP 2.0? The Next Right’s Patrick Ruffini offers a strategy for John McCain’s VP announcement to compete with the Obama campaign’s VP text plan. Ruffini writes the McCain campaign should email 100 supporters selected at random an hour before the official announcement. This not only would enable the campaign to make a strong push to collect e-mail addresses, the 100 people selected would get to feel like “real insiders.” The question is, does McCain want to get baited into a battle of new media? #

So Long, Mr. Haircut: The blogs have been chatting away on John Edwards (check our charts). Ruby Sinreich writes a nice little piece that reflects the betrayal his supporters feel and the relief that he is not a presidential candidate. She believes that his decision to play both sides after he stepped out of the race reflects an ego-driven politician’s purely self-serving attitude. #

Barack Roll: Oh, and Barack gets Rick Rolled (or did Rick Astley get Barack Rolled?) Thanks to the inimitable Hugh Atkin. #

In Case You Haven't Noticed...

President Bush has been busy at the Beijing Olympics, and YouTubers have noticed. He apparently had time to visit with the women's beach volleyball team. Here it is, your moment of Zen. #

Daily Digest: Bring Your Spam to the "Astroturf" Picnic

2008-08-08T11:40:44-04:00

The Web on the Candidates

New vs. Traditional Media. Which is More Delicious? The Next Right’s Brian Donahue responds to Patrick Ruffini’s post on “new media” vs. “traditional media” and posits they are not mutually exclusive and offers a new approach. Ruffini asked the other day “Why do TV ad suck so much compared to web video?” According to Donahue, the two are "apples and oranges" and each has benefits. The successful campaign must combine them and create a comprehensive advertising strategy.#

Cybersecurity and the next President: Wired writer Bruce Schneier has a memo for the next President on how to get Cybersecurity right. While Obama has a cybersecurity plan and McCain is supposedly “working on the issues,” Schneier offers three pieces of policy advice for whoever is elected. He says the devil is in the details, but he outlines a convincing strategy.#

"Democracts Praising McCain" vs. "Maverick No More": The DNC has released its response video to McCain’s “Democrats Praising McCain” ad released yesterday. The video, called “Maverick No More,” features the same crew from the McCain ad, only this time the participants criticize McCain, most notably by arguing that he has changed and that he is a continuation of Bush. Instead of Ms. Clinton capping it off as she did in the "Democrats Praising McCain" ad, however, the DNC decided to give the honor to Bush, who says, "It's been my honor to welcome my friend John McCain as the nominee of the Republican Party, I wish you all the best. I'm proud to be your friend.”#

The Candidates on the Web

Astroturf Story #1: The Washington Post's Paul Farhi covers the McCain campaign asking its supporters to spam blogs with McCain talking points in exchange for prizes, a story that's been bouncing around for weeks. The website asks visitors to “Spread the Word” and gives clear instructions on what to write and where to write it. Zack Exley notes this strategy won't matter: "People in politics aren't motivated by points. That's not what gets people to act. They're motivated by genuinely caring about the issues." A phony grassroots movement like this, known as “Astroturf” campaigning, is not new to Presidential elections but the Washington Post notes the reward system pushes it “one step further.” Prizes include books autographed by McCain, preferred seating at campaign events, a ride with the candidate on the Straight Talk Express: no word yet on moustache combs. #

YouTube Dominance: The Washington Times's Stephen Dinan reports that the McCain campaign for the first time has taken a lead over Obama in YouTube hits. This is a major reversal for the presidential YouTube campaign, which, until just recently, had seen Obama quadruple McCain’s view count. Obama still trumps McCain in total views and according to techPresident's YouTube watch, that lead is not going anywhere anytime soon. Still, McCain has had a strong run of viral videos in the last few weeks while Obama has been flat. McCain’s top three hits are all attack ads on Obama, so it will be interesting to see if the YouTube campaign will be won by the message or the view count. #

TechCongress and Beyond

Astroturf Story #2: Open Left’s Matt Stoller goes on a lengthy diatribe over the Drill Here, Drill Now #dontgo campaign. He had posted just days before on how the campaign is hardly grassroots because it was launched by Newt Gingrich (another “Astroturf” campaign!) and today is responding to blogger and “grassroots activist” Eric Odom who was disturbed by this claim. Odom extols the campaigns 10,000 e-mail list, Stoller is unimpressed.#

Daily Digest: Do Sockpuppets Belong in Politics?

2008-08-07T11:55:52-04:00

The Web on the Candidates

Stop the citizen-presses! Decision ‘08, a competition launched earlier this year by MySpace, NBC News, and msnbc.com to find two citizen journalists to cover the national conventions has selected its winners. Matt Britten and Sara Pat Badgley were chosen by over 50,000 users with their video submissions that answered “How will you stand out in the crowd and get the scoop no one else can?” Matt Britten, who pulls an Eddie Murphy and plays every role in his video, tells us “I’m Matt Britten and I want Decision ’08 to send me to the convention so that I can ask the real questions that real Americans want answered and I’ll stand out in a crowd because as you can see I’ll be everywhere at once.” #

More Contests! Ten finalists have been selected by the Democratic and Republican National Convention Committees for the “Why are you a Democrat/Republican in 2008?” and the winners will attend their party’s upcoming Convention. People have submitted their videos and users can vote until August 13th. Finalists from the Republican contest range from a 13 year old to a Jedi Master and the Democrats range from a man from a community hit by home foreclosures to a war veteran. Make sure to vote! #

Pollworkers of the 21st Century: Pollworkers for Democracy, powered by CREDO Mobile, is an effort to recruit, train, and network 5,000 citizen pollworkers for the upcoming election (and beyond) in order to run a fair and accountable election. We here at techPresident are very impressed: how should we rethink and improve pollworkers of the 21st Century? So far they have recruited almost 2500 pollworkers and the site is a custom implementation of MoveOn.org’s event tools. #

Cyber-Threat at the DNC: According to the Colorado Independent, security experts fear that the Democratic National Convention could face a cyber-attack this summer. With fifty thousand expected in attendance of the Convention, many will be on laptops that are not secure and face threats such as hackers “accessing delegates' credit card information to cutting off cell phone service in the convention sites, sending out fake news releases and planting porn in an unsuspecting politician's laptop.” “Rogue“ networks could be planted that could trick users into signing in and perhaps even voluntarily give away personal information. Ah, the lure of free wifi is mighty yet the wiser must turn from the Siren seductress. Nancy will be techPresident’s correspondent at the Convention, we wish her a safe cybertrip!#

The Candidates on the Web

New McCain Ad Somehow About McCain: John McCain releases yet another ad today called "Democrats Praising McCain" which features, you guessed it, Democrats praising McCain. Featuring Tom Daschle, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Russ Feingold, even Barack Obama, it is the first ad in a while from the McCain campaign that is primarily about McCain. That is, of course, Hillary gets the last word: "I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House, and Senator Obama has a speech that he gave in 2002." That quote is from March of this year, which if you can remember that far back, was one of the ugliest months of the Democratic primary.#

TechCongress and Beyond

Twitter-Puppets: Any other day, a story about a man pretending he is Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t make news. But what if this man was pretending over Twitter? Blogger William Beutler raises suspicions over a tweet made by David All regarding the #dontgo protest and a nearly identical tweet posted only minutes earlier by a clearly fake or very confused “speakerpelosi.” This Twitterganger has erupted into Twitter scandal. To fill you in, the term that is catching on is “sockpuppetry,” but I think it’s unfair. If anything, All’s masquerading is definitely deserving of “sock-artiste” #

In Case You Missed It...

Micah Sifry writes about the hidden agenda of John McCain's "The One" video. Though it is defended as just being silly, Micah delves deeper and suggests that the ad is actually full of coded messages meant to convince evangelical voters that Obama is actually "literally, the anti-Christ." #

McCain's "The One" Attack Video: Does it Have a Deeper Message?

2008-08-07T10:56:56-04:00

"The One," the McCain campaign's YouTube video poking at Oprah Winfrey's reference to Barack Obama's supposed chosenness, recently topped 1 million views (making it McCain's second most viral video). You may think the ad is just needling Obama (and his fans) for some of their more chest-thumping moments (i.e. "we are the ones we have been waiting for), and the general reaction to it from the political pundits was that the ad was amusing, that mocking Obama for being messianic was a bit tough but that mostly this was evidence of the McCain campaign starting to take the gloves off. Next story, please.

Well, maybe it's worth another look. The Matthew 25 movement--a group of progressive evangelicals that runs a PAC and has endorsed Obama--is charging that the ad is actually full of coded messages meant to convince evangelical voters that Obama is actually, literally, the anti-Christ.

Posting on the One Million Strong blog, Grant of Matthew 25 writes:

...this ad was not done by some campaign volunteer with a bit of editing experience for (as McCain suggests) his supporters amusement. This was a professionally cut, edited, and produced ad full of sinister dog-whistles for evangelical ears.

At best it is suggesting supporters of Obama are idol-worshipers. At its worst it is suggesting that Sen. Obama is some kind of anti-Christ.

The McCain campaign is unquestionably targeting the 44 million+ Americans who have read the Left Behind series. The makers of the ad chose all of Obama’s quotes very carefully and filled it with image after image equating Senator Obama to the anti-Christ, and especially to Nicolae Carpathia, the anti-Christ in the popular end times novels....

The anti-Christ, in the Left Behind series, Nicolae Carpathia set up a religion called THE ONE World Religion. Carpathia started his career as a young charismatic junior Senator. He made his rise, with Satan's support, by spreading a message of unity, hope, and peace, in an anomic world in the wake of the rapture....

The title or the ad is set up to immediately remind anyone familiar with the Left Behind series of the name of the false church set up by the anti-Christ - "THE ONE World Religion."

The text and voice over are exact copies of previews for Christian Specific end-times movies.

The images and quotes the McCain camp employed all allude to symbols of the anti-Christ. If the McCain campaign were simply cutting an ad about Obama being an idol that would be offensive enough; however, there are just too many parts of this ad which make no sense, for a professional production, unless they were trying to suggest Obama is the anti-Christ.

I'm not really fit to judge Grant's charges, but they certainly seem plausible. I know religion in America is a charged subject, but there's plenty of survey data showing that a substantial portion of Americans believe in the coming of the end-times; certainly the popularity of the Left Behind books leaves little doubt that there's a huge market here.

Also, you have to wonder about the context for this particular ad, if it is indeed aimed at reaching conservative evangelicals at some deeper level. Spend a little time over on GodTube ("Broadcast Him" is its slogan), the religious alternative to YouTube, looking for videos mentioning Obama, and the top results include (which strongly suggests that he is not) and "Barack Obama Christian Atheist Radical Christian Persecution".

So, is McCain playing with fire?