Archive for August, 2007
Just got through putting together an interesting doohickey that you kids might enjoy — the communications folks at my day job shot some video clips last week for use on TV, and we decided to package them along with text into a little persuasive presentation online. The result: what our video vendor described as a “YouTube storyboard” when he saw it.
Rather than put up a long (boring) video news release, we broke out the interesting clips (soundbites and graphics) and embedded them in a page interspersed with text that leads people through the issue (automobile fuel economy standards). We basically leveraged the strengths of text (in-depth information, search-engine friendliness, easy skimming for readers) AND the strengths of video (strong visuals, emotional impact). The result is almost a web version of a TV news story, but with user interaction, since people can choose easily which parts to watch or read and which to skip. We’re also trying to get the most out of YouTube hosting by including a carefully worded title and description for each clip, by varying keywords and by including a link back to the main site. Of course, we wouldn’t mind a bit if anyone chose to embed the clips on their own sites.
This presentation isn’t anything particularly revolutionary, but it does pack a lot of information into a small space using video that’s in digestible chunks and that can be spread across the web. Check it out and see what you think.
– cpd
August 31st, 2007
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Well, they’re not actually competing directly for anything other than our attention, but both Mitt Romney and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have launched campaigns lately to leverage the creative power of their supporters. Romney’s is the most recent — reader Jake Davison just passed along a message from the campaign touting a new create-a-video-ad contest using Yahoo’s Jumpcut service. Romney’s folks provide stills and clips a la the Chevy Tahoe campaign for director-wannabes to use in their own creations, and future ad geniuses can also create their own audio/video clips as long as they don’t break copyright. The chosen ad will be used on the television machine. The choice of Yahoo’s platform is particularly interesting considering that the RNC has recently snagged the former director of that company’s election strategy. My submission will involve lots of robots — the only way to do this particular candidate justice. [Note: also picked up by Jose Antonio Vargas and tPrez today.]
A few days ago, the DSCC also joined the social media wars with a create-a-bumper-sticker contest called “Bump Up Our Majority” (get it?). Voting ends tonight, so you kids better jump right on that. Looking at the four initial examples they provide, let’s hope some better suggestions come in from the unwashed masses. Actually, these contests do provide an excellent example of a good reason to turn to your supporters for creative content — they may not always do better than the professionals, but it’s hard for ALL of them to do worse.
– cpd
August 29th, 2007
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Writing in Salon, Glenn Greenwald hits on an aspect of the Larry Craig story that ought to raise questions about the intellectual honesty of certain segments of the right-wing blogworld — the vast disparity between many authors’ comments 10 months ago and today. Shortly before last Fall’s mid-term elections, the first stories of Craigs’ (then-) alleged men’s room encounters surfaced on Mike Roger’s site, and many on the right jumped on the rumors as a clear example of left-wing perfidy, with some even claiming that a backlash would swing the election their way. Many questioned the very idea of bringing up a candidate’s sexuality: as Greenwald puts it, “the same political movement that impeached Bill Clinton and which has made a living exploiting issues of private morality for political gain insisted that Rogers had reached a new and despicable low in politics even by reporting this.”
Now that the election’s safely behind us? They can’t run away from Craig’s “despicable” behavior fast enough. Greenwald collects a damning array of then-and-now quotes from a number of stars of the conservative blogosphere, which sure as hell ought to raise questions among these sites’ readers about basic trustworthiness. Talk radio hosts and TV pundits too often blather on in a self-contradictory frenzy, but they can usually get away with it because catching them requires someone to go to lengths to gather and post the audio or video files or the transcripts (thank you, Media Matters). Bloggers’ words, though, are painfully easy to track down via Google or a site’s own search feature, and there’s no hiding from what you’ve written.
Now, being wrong is normal and honorable — it’s a natural consequence of having opinions and being willing to state them in public, and as long as you own up to your errors, your audience will generally understand. Senator Craig’s journey from paragon to villain in many bloggers’ eyes seems like a different story entirely: from here, it looks flat-out dishonest.
– cpd
August 28th, 2007
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Wow, here’s a wild one to end the week with:
The California National Guard has placed on leave the personal assistant to its top general and started an investigation after questions were raised about a Web site he maintains that advocates mass violence.
“I, honestly, would like nothing more than to assist in the wholesale slaughter of every idiot on the face of the planet,” Senior Airman Travis Gruber, of Sacramento, Calif., writes on the site, HowToKillPeople.com. In other postings and in a related blog, Gruber denigrates African Americans, Jews, Asians, women, gays and people with physical disabilities.
Oof! I’m a free speech purist, believing that the best form of censorship is your own good judgment. This guy clearly lacks the slightest shred — a National Guard general is a government official, and our blogger here is in essentially the same position as a political staffer. I’d obviously rather not have someone in any position of influence or authority having thoughts like these in his head, but you can’t court-martial a man for thinking. It’s ten times crazier to actually print this in public:
Gruber blogged that when ordered to drive “the big guy” to Oakland this year, he loaded a shotgun with extra shells and filled a pistol “to the brim with hollow-point” bullets because he feared entering the city unarmed.
In a separate posting, he wrote of a woman who once approached him with a question as he waited for Wade at the state Capitol and that he later regretted not “crushing her windpipe” and slamming his car door into her legs for bothering him.
How can you write this stuff online and not expect it to be traced back to you eventually? Here’s the site; all the content except for a brief statement has been removed. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, though, we can read Gruber’s bio and sample some of his collected wit and wisdom. Note to prospective writers who want to keep their jobs, reputations and body parts intact: you probably don’t want to adopt this guy as a role model. Thanks to Burt Edwards for passing the article along.
– cpd
August 24th, 2007
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Cross-posted on techPresident
I hate to agree with Jonah Goldberg on anything, but…
Okay, it’d be an exaggeration to say that I side with his recent LA Times op-ed about online politics, but I agree that the rise of the political Internet ought to inspire anything but complacency among progressives and liberals.
Ever since the explosion of progressive political blogs and the rise of the Dean (and later Kerry) fundraising machines, some on the Left have been patting themselves on the back. It’s the people versus the powerful! We’re crashing the gates! The populist Left has a natural advantage online! Josh Levy may call this argument a straw man, but I’ve been hearing variants of it from quite a few people over the last four or five years, and it’s always made me nervous. When you’re ahead, the other guy’s probably right at your back — and sharpening a knife.
(more…)
August 23rd, 2007
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Okay, this one’s weird even for me — scandal has gripped the Fishbowl D.C.’s Third Annual Hottest Media Types competition, with widespread vote fraud proven to have tipped the results. A vicious swarm of vote-bots, created and distributed by supporters of several candidates (supposedly without their knowledge), spread insidiously across the web, voting both early and often (oh baby). Farhad Manjoo of Salon’s Machinist blog, not afraid to face the grim facts, covers this travesty against the purity of online polling (ahem) extensively:
The bots were distributed on Unfogged, a humorously wonky blog and discussion site popular with D.C. types, within a day of the poll’s opening. If you downloaded and ran the software, your machine began tallying up votes for Capps and Andrews faster than a Diebold rigged for George W. Bush.
Just as in academic politics, when the stakes are low, the tactics are nasty. Some will draw conclusions about the get-ahead-at-any-costs mentality of much of D.C. professional culture; I’m too busy wondering where a few of the other competitors hang out.
August 23rd, 2007
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- Users’ Online Time Spent Mostly on Content – Not Communications, Commerce. Content is king!
- Tech Savvy Protesters take on China, but when is it appropriate to spam the Great Firewall?
- Social networks not just for kids, as Boomer site pitches own political tent. See what all those Cialis ads have led to?
- Building a Successful Internet Presence.
- Sidestepping the ‘macaca’ moments. Politicians’ desperate desire to be boring.
- Democratic Advisers Take Posts in Group Opposing Wal-Mart.
- Cost of Saving the Climate Meets Real-World Hurdles. On problems with the selling of carbon offsets online.
- As Billboards, Public Phones Always Work. Does advertising assure the survival of pay phones?
- Army Reports Brass, Not Bloggers, Breach Security. “It’s clear that official Army websites are the real security problem, not blogs,”
- More military threats: Russia Orders Long-Range Bomber Patrols. Backfire bombers, coming soon to a backyard near you.
- How Google Works. Nice visual overview, suggested by my NET colleague Erica Peth.
- Which Presidential Candidates Have Mastered Google?
- Mobile Advertising is Irritating. Shocking news from the world of marketing.
- More fallout from Wikipedia edit tracking: Vote On the Most Shameful Wikipedia Spin Jobs, and find out about The Feds Who Edit Wikipedia. Lamest Wiki story, as noted by tPrez and about 10,000 NY Times commenters: Messing With Iowa.
- 13 Winning Ways to Make Enemies in the Press. Never too early in the week for self-sabotage.
- Rule #1 In E-Politics: Don’t Attack The Bloggers. But what if they’re annooooooying?
- Three Strategies for Thriving on the Decentralized Web.
- The continued usefulness of direct mail in the Internet era.
- A Simple Yahoo Pipes RSS Filtering Example.
- Investing In Netroots Innovation.
- Cheap media, cheap ads. Seth Godin takes on a common mistake.
- Facebook Opens Email Up A Little; I Want More. C.f. Newsweek’s take on Facebook, via David All, and Facebook rules for the rest of us (when is a poke not a good idea?).
- EmergencyCheese: A Citizen Journalist gets a taste of MSM.
- Beware the Dark Side of PR 2.0. Spoilsport.
- The Untold Story of the Cheney ‘Quagmire’ Video. The making of an Internet hit.
- Why the YouTube Election Should Evolve into the Gaming Election. Because we have 14 months to go and desperately need a distraction?
- Late addition! Google Maps are now embeddable, via Rochelle Robinson.
- A final sad note: the geek community loses a founder, as Joe Engressia, Expert ‘Phone Phreak,’ Dies. The first guy to manipulate the phone system by whistling in perfect pitch, he was an original hacker — you gotta love someone who picks a city to live in because he likes the quirks in its phone circuitry.
– cpd
August 21st, 2007
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Cross-posted on techPresident
Remember Mark Foley, the congressmember with the bad habit of indulging in salacious IM sessions with underage House pages? Lane Hudson, the guy who helped bring Foley’s political career to an end last Fall by anonymously posting transcripts of some of those conversations and who’s now writing online at News for the Left, has filed a complaint with the FEC against likely Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson.
The charge? That the TV prosecutor and one-time senator is “ignoring the letter and spirit” of campaign law by masking an active election bid as an “exploratory” effort and thereby dodging federal reporting requirements. Time to toss a grenade into the works! Or, at the very least, get coverage in the Washington Post. Thompson has 15 days to respond; in the meantime, Hudson should get a big dose of attention online and in the mainstream media. Remind me to add “file complaint against presidential candidate” to the list of tips for building blog traffic.
– cpd
August 21st, 2007
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My NET colleague Kymberly Escobar showed me a neat toy today — a video camera that’s designed for easy Internet connection, is about the size of a video Ipod and that costs about $100. She’s been using one to shoot videos of her kid, but she immediately saw the usefulness for online advocacy, particularly for field organizers or campaign volunteers.
The Flip Video camera shoots either 30 or 60 minutes of 640×480 video, depending on the size of the flash drive, and also contains editing software that you can launch when you hook the little critter up to a computer via USB. When connected, it’s designed to upload videos directly to YouTube — a great feature for newbies, and a clever time-saver for a lot of applications. From what I’ve seen, the image quality is quite good, considering the obvious resolution limits, and the camera includes a 2x (digital) zoom and the ability to capture stills. A nice extra: it’s small enough to escape notice much of the time, and if you (or someone else) should happen to step on it? While not quite disposable, it’s close enough.
Imagine the campaign uses: at a field event (protest, press conference, media stunt, punking opportunity), organizers or volunteers armed with these cameras and a laptop with wireless connection could very quickly shoot video and select and edit clips. They could then either post them to YouTube for the world to see (tag them with a common and unique keyword for easy searching and/or distribution via RSS) or email them to the campaign communications shop. Want a collective record of an event, to use for good or evil? Have several people armed with these machines in the crowd, supplemented as necessary by cameras that hold more footage or that shoot at higher quality, and wait for the Macaca moments to roll in.
– cpd
August 20th, 2007
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As part of an excellent Tech Daily series that National Journal opened to non-subscribers today, one article looks at differences in the ways lower- and higher-tier presidential candidates use the web. You often hear that candidates can take more risks when they’re behind in the polls — in fact, they have to — and this cycle’s presidential campaigns follow the customary pattern, with Mike Gravel blogging on Huffington Post and Ron Paul benefiting from an upwelling of online support. One extra observation from IPDI’s Julie Barko Germany jumped out at me: “Though candidates with higher name recognition like Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. and John McCain, R-Ariz., use the Internet as a significant part of their outreach, their use of the technology appeals more to core supporters than undecided voters.”
Excellent distinction: site features such as MyMcCain (dreamed up when McCain was a leading candidate) and MyObama are designed to build relationships with existing supporters rather than to draw new ones, where Gravel’s blogging, Tancredo’s aggressive video outreach and Richardson’s TV ads touting his website are intended to connect with new supporters. Though let’s not go too far with this: keep in mind that some top-tier candidates HAVE invested in search and display ads online, for example.
More from the Tech Daily series, including a detailed look at the different candidates’ technology-related platforms.
– cpd
August 20th, 2007
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A front page story in today’s Post looks at the symptoms of a new malady afflicting the body politic: next year’s race for control of Congress is already running at a fever-pitch, at least in some areas, and we’re still more that 14 months away from the general election. The only arm of the electronic politics arsenal mentioned in the Post piece is everyone’s “favorite” — robocalls — but when television ads are already flying, you can expect websites and online ads to follow close behind. The never-ending campaign moves from presidential politics to the next step down the ladder, with more leaps surely ahead: are hope-filled dreamers of dogcatching glory already preparing YouTube attack ads in every community in America?
– cpd
August 20th, 2007
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