Archive for December, 2006
Brian Braiker in Newsweek is suggesting that 2007 may be the Year of the Widget, a time in which web users start to customize their online experience to an unprecedented extent. Some marketing folks, most notably Steve Rubel (who gets a nice shout-out in the Newsweek article), have been talking up the potential of widgets for some time as well as looking at the dangers for companies and organizations who ignore them.
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December 28th, 2006
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On December 1st, the New Organizing Institute and the Center for American Progress hosted a discussion among four participants in campaign 2006: Benjamin Rahn from ActBlue, Megan Matson from Mainstreet Moms Organize or Bust (a grassroots group), Tom Matzzie from MoveOn and Jessica Vanden Berg, Jim Webb’s campaign manager. Shortly after the event, I wrote up Jessica Vanden Berg’s take on how the campaign spread the Macaca story, but the participants covered a lot of topics of value to anyone doing online politics. Let’s look at the discussion point-by-point, with my comments in [brackets].
Online Fundraising
As would make sense when you’re dealing with political professionals, much of the talk focused on fundraising. The consensus: online fundraising rates are going up, with the Webb campaign receiving almost half of its funds through the Internet as a good example. Fundraising pros are even switching high-dollar donors online, often walking them through the process over the phone, which both guarantees that the donation will actually be made and also cuts back on the administrative work needed to process checks. Some additional observations:
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December 27th, 2006
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Writing in Personal Democracy Forum last week, Jerome Armstrong discussed a number of lessons he learned from leading the online arm of Mark Warner’s (once and possibly future?) presidential campaign operation. He raised several good points, from the power of organizing local blog networks to the fragmentation of online media into many niches to the need to combine data that has often been hidden in silos.
Reading his article inspired me to go back to my notes from a similar presentation he participated in at RootsCampDC back on December 2nd, along with several other members of Warner’s web team (see the photo in the PDF article to see who took part). The group brought up a bunch of interesting observations, not all of which made it into Jerome’s article.
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December 24th, 2006
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So, e.politics had a sizable bump-up in traffic yesterday, both compared with the day before and with a normal Saturday. Everybody must be trapped somewhere for the holidays, already tired of Uncle Bob’s stories and the squalling of that lovely new cousin. I’m worn out from chasing adorable nieces around the house (apparently, I make an excellent scary monster — perhaps a career change is in order), but I’ll see if I can’t crank out a couple of articles that have been simmering for the last few weeks to do my part to give you an excuse to hog the family computer. My chance to help you have a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, a Joyous Kwanzaa or a Kickass Flying Spaghetti Monster Holiday Pageant.
– cpd
December 24th, 2006
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I’m-trapped-in-East-Texas-for-a-week edition.
– cpd
December 20th, 2006
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Last week, I sent an innocent messsage out to the Progressive Exchange email list, asking folks to send along examples of good advocacy sites to help with a presentation I was finishing. The response was overwhelming, with people suggesting a good three dozen excellent sites and organizations. I’ve pulled the list together as a resource for all y’all, roughly dividing it between organizations that generally “get it” and the specific campaign sites. I’d hoped to write them up individually, but the pre-holiday frenzy has precluded it. The sites are roughly in the order that they were suggested. Thanks to Tim Walker, Susan Finkelpearl, Royelen Lee Boykie, Jed Miller, Farra Trompeter, Brian Sant, Paul Fraley, DJ Francis, Brian Komar, Heather Gardner-Madras, Rochelle Robinson and Liz Butler for passing these along. Want to suggest more? Leave them in the comments below.
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December 19th, 2006
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Slate’s John Dickerson has written up his five best political moments of 2006 and the Internets are involved in three of them. Fickle blogs build up and then undercut Ned Lamont, Foley’s IM’s bring ruin upon his House, and George Allen finds himself in a deep pile of macaca. The two events for which our beloved series of tubes can claim no credit? Cheney’s itchy trigger finger and Rumsfeld’s fall from grace. Next year…
– cpd
December 19th, 2006
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Update: A couple of readers have written in to say that I misunderstood how this one works or at least missed some significant features — wouldn’t be the first time. See below.
The folks behind a dead anti-spam service called Blue Frog have decided to adapt their technology as an advocacy tool, which they’re calling Collactive (get it?). As Ryan Singel reports in Wired News, Blue Frog was based on a model that was similar to a distributed denial-of-service attack — once the system identified a site as a spammer, it coordinated mass hits from Blue Frog subscribers’ machines to the offending company’s server to shut it down. Ultimately, Blue Frog itself fell victim to a Russian spammer’s DDOS attack (at least the retaliation didn’t involve polonium).
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December 18th, 2006
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Extra-long weekend catch-up edition.
- EVERYBODY’S writing about Time’s choice of you (i.e., Web 2.0, participatory media, etc.) as Man of the Year. Thanks for noticing, MSM guys. Welcome to the party.
- Advocacy Tools You Need, Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle. Democracy in Action’s Jason Z. puts the smackdown on a new Capitol Advantage “feature.” Let’s send MORE spam to Congress…
- Oppo Knocks? Did the Webb campaign conduct opposition research on friendly bloggers? Blog P.I tackles the case.
- YouTube Explains the Mystery of Home Page Picks. Get front-page placement, become famous. Easy, right? From Mark Glaser at PBS’s MediaShift blog.
- Moolah is Largely What Separates Citizen’s Media from Mainstream Media. Micropersuasion looks at the continuum of citizen/professional media. My (somewhat related) take: bloggers are journalists with particularly cheap printing presses.
- Two articles to check out in Beltway Blogroll: First, looking at the much-reported prediction of a flattening blogosphere, Danny Glover talks about a 2008 peak for political blogs. Next, our second smackdown of the day: The Blogs vs. John McCain.
- In Personal Democracy Forum, Noel Hidalgo looks at SecondLife Fundraising and Political Activity, including an adopt-a-yak program. But Micah Sifrey pours a little cold water on the Second Life hype.
– cpd
December 18th, 2006
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With the planet apparently on track to have 4 billion wireless subscribers by 2010, let’s take a second to look at the effects of the one piece of electronic equipment that will eventually reach just about everyone on Earth. In the words of Salon’s How The World Works,
Whether it’s farmers or fishers suddenly being able to call around and shop around for the best prices for their crop or catch, or the ability of a rural laborer to avoid walking miles in (often fruitless) searches for available jobs, or the possibility, in some countries, to actually use phones as mobile bank accounts, the devices have proved useful in an astonishing number of ways. They represent a true leapfrog technology that directly enhances the lives of those at the so-called bottom of the pyramid.
Phones change lives — how will they change politics? Just as they allow pricing information to pass from phone to phone among participants in a distributed market, they’ll allow information to spread quickly among participants in a distributed political action. We’re already seeing the beginnings of their use as political organizing tools, and that’s mostly just with voice and text. Wait until a phone that handles images, video and other big fat chunks of data is sitting in the hands of every disaffected slum-dweller in the Third World. Quicker than we think…
Update: When I was writing this post, I forgot about an article on Personal Democracy Forum a few days ago: Rural Women To Report Human Rights Violations Against Them Using Mobile Phones. Just a hint of possibilities to come.
– cpd
December 17th, 2006
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Marketing guy Scott Smigler thinks so, based on what he sees as the poor quality of its user experience (“cheap”). According to him, the Facebook folks in contrast are constantly improving their site’s features and are much better at responding to user needs and complaints. As well as this large-scale direct challenge, MySpace also faces niche competition, since many companies and organizations are setting up their own social networks tied to an area, institution or cause.
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December 14th, 2006
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