From the Nevada debate: “In the internet age, there are going to be lies that are spread all over the place. I have been victimized by these lies. Fortunately, the American people are, I think, smarter than folks give them credit for.”
More on dirty politicking and internet rumors on Wednesday.
– cpd
Add comment January 16th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Sarah Lai Stirland continues her excellent coverage on the online component of the 2008 election with a profile of homeschooled evangelical twins who are key to Mike Huckabee’s online support — and its conversion into offline action. We’ve already heard about Huckabee’s powerful email list; in this article, Stirland paints a detailed portrait of more of the candidate’s online grassroots mobilization, which may be critical to the success of his underfunded campaign. Extensive excerpts are below, but I recommend checking out the entire article.
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In the spirit of not wanting to kick a dog when he’s sad and ailing, I have avoided saying anything unpleasant about Unity ’08 in quite a while. But an email today from its founders endorsing Michael Bloomberg has forced me to reconsider that silence and lean back into a fighting stance, prepared for some Chuck Norris-style ass-whoopin’.
3 comments January 15th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
If there’s any piece of the primary season frenzy that seems designed to drive voters insane, it’s the unsolicited phone calls. The ones from real people are bad enough, but robocalls were clearly invented by someone with a deep hatred of the human race. With that in mind, I’m pleased to present a couple of recent examples of robocalls working against campaigns in New Hampshire. First, Romney loses a vote:
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2 comments January 15th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Garance Franke-Ruta wrote up a genius new bit of citizen activism in The Trail last night: a self-described “dude you’ve never heard of” named Andy Cobb has posted a video on YouTube laying out the case for Democrats crossing over and voting for Mitt Romney in the Michigan Republican primary. Noting that “There is no greater voice against Republican candidates than this Republican candidate,” the filmmaker argues that a carefully considered vote for Romney can “keep this circular firing squad of jerkos alive.” It’s damn clever and at least as well-written and well-edited as any online video produced by the campaigns themselves:
For all the talk of using the web to bring citizens into the presidential debates and such, this is one of the REAL ways average people are getting heard — they’re creating something compelling and/or funny and putting it out there for the world to see. Get some blog pickup and a mainstream media mention or two, and all of a sudden you might just have thousands of people paying attention to what you say.
– cpd
Add comment January 15th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
At last week’s tech project management workshop, a software developer from Community IT Innovators talked about a worldwide collaboration that’s plenty nerd-cool but also gives political communicators something to chew on. Late last year, a group of 30 or 40 software developers scattered around the world gathered for a live debugging session. They were working together to fix final problems in the next version of the open source content management system Joomla, and they used five key (and either cheap or free) technologies to work together:
Obviously, this was a group of power-users rather than newbies, but the tech tools they used are available to anyone in the world with a decent internet connection (and IRC and Google Docs will work over dial-up). Besides the political implications of their project — many advocacy campaigns are using Joomla and similar CMSs to build websites and maintain them easily — political communicators shouldn’t ignore the potential of distant collaboration that this example illustrates. From environmental work to democracy-building to media relations, the ‘net provides tools that make it infinitely easier than ever before to organize and communicate across borders — or across the building. Most political users will obviously lag behind the tech elite in adopting them, but these applications are so useful (and cheap) that even the tech-averse can’t ignore them forever.
– cpd
Add comment January 15th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
– cpd
Add comment January 14th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Hi y’all, I’m in NYC for that nonprofit technology conference for the next couple of days, so e.politics will be on an irregular publishing schedule for a bit.
– cpd
Add comment January 10th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Thank you, New Hampshire, for making up your own minds rather than listening to political “analysis” and hype. You confounded the people who insisted on jabbering at us about “what Iowa meant” for the last few days, and you also showed up in record numbers and demonstrated that participatory democracy is not quite dead in this country.
The last thing we need this year is a runaway victory on either side. Hillary Clinton won, but it was close. John McCain won, but not by an overwhelming margin. After the combination of Iowa and New Hampshire, voters in the remaining primary states can take their own measure of the candidates, with no one yet in an overwhelming position of strength. America needs an election, not a coronation. Though I personally have a soft spot for Obama, I found the talk of party leaders “encouraging” Clinton to drop out after Iowa offensive. Might we voters be allowed to make up our own minds?
Thank you, New Hampshire, for not being stampeded, and for reminding us that nothing is certain until the votes are cast.
– cpd
1 comment January 9th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
That little orange button on the right isn’t a lie — it’s been a long time coming, but e.politics is now a full-time consulting business. As of January 1, I left my day job at the National Environmental Trust to devote my time to helping a diverse array of advocacy groups, companies and campaigns use the ‘net to help spread their messages and achieve their political and communications goals.
My plan is to help clients choose the most effective options available to them in the ever-expanding world of online communications, and then implement those technologies efficiently and with the highest chance of success. When outside vendors are developing the tools, I’ll work with clients as needed to understand the process and make sure that the project goes as smoothly as possible — effective planning and oversight can save a lot of time and money down the road. I’ll also help develop strategies for the best use of specific tools including social media, social networking, email lists, databases and blogs and blogger relations.
For more details, please see the new consulting services page.
– cpd
Add comment January 8th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Longtime friendly-rival-of-e.politics Jason Z passes on a story that has been picked up with some glee by several lefty blogs as well: RedState.com got stuck with website technology that doesn’t quite work as planned and would like its readers to help. Jason notes:
It’s hard to tell, but it sounds like a consultant sold them a custom-built do-dad as the solution to the dearth of technical resource that makes it hard for them to run the existing software platforms. It’s easier to see how that’s going to help the consultant than RedState, but that’s their business and we wish them well of it.
Now, of course this happens to companies and organizations across the political spectrum, and some of us have made a living at times helping to clean up the resulting nasty mess. But what’s particularly funny is the partisan angle the RedState folks manage to find:
3 comments January 7th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Cross-posted on techPresident
John Hlinko with Grassroots Enterprises sent over this excellent find today: besides dominating Google and YouTube since the Iowa caucuses, Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are now winning the all-important CafePress primary.
As noted in these pages a couple of weeks ago, CafePress, an online retailer that sells consumer-created t-shirts and other items, has has been pushing itself as a political promotion tool this season. They’ve also launched an Election Meter that displays sales by candidate, and it shows that sales for shirts for Huckabee and Obama have shot up dramatically in the last week. John notes in Daily Kos that t-shirt sales for the candidates may be an effective leading indicator for their popularity, since as supporters are getting excited, they may want to show it to the world. Conversely, as supporters waver, they may be less likely to take concrete actions on behalf of the candidate, in this case spending money for gear. Other interesting finds from the Election Meter: Ron Paul’s still relatively high but dropping, and Romney, Thompson and Rudy are waaaaay down in Biden-Richardson-Kucinich territory.
Genius! Let the CafePress primary take its place along the other metrics that online politics geeks use as a crystal ball.
– cpd
3 comments January 7th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
A couple of good presidential campaign site reviews have popped up today: first, Todd Zeigler at the Bivings Report looks at Obama’s somewhat ghostly new site and finds that the redesign is a big improvement. In a very nice touch that shows the advantage of looking at these things over time, he displays screen shots of the candidate’s site at different stages of its evolution over the past year. I’ll agree with him in particular about the file-size question — feature-heavy sites look cool and meet a lot of needs, but not everybody’s on broadband all the time, and keeping a dial-up connection in the office for testing wouldn’t hurt. Even if you’re only cutting out 20% of possible supporters by making them wait too long for a page too load (or on database-heavy sites, for a page to be useful at all), they might just be a 20% you need.
Next, living up to the promise of her last name, Zephyr Teachout grades the Republican candidates’ sites from the point of view of undecided voters. Huckabee and Paul get top marks, with sites that work hard to persuade the the uncommitted, while McCain lags a bit behind but still gets a passing grade. Romney and Guiliani clearly need remedial classes, with cluttered, over-busy sites that seem determined to get your support but don’t quite tell you why. My questions? First, why doesn’t Rudy Giuliani own his own name? Second, why is Mitt Romney running from his supporters? The collage from the bottom right of his site’s splash screen looks more like a promo for a zombie film than a campaign image. Slow zombies or fast? You be the judge.
– cpd
Add comment January 7th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Two recent stories by The Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas illuminate the vital connection between online and offline organizing. The first, written last week with Peter Slevin, focuses on voter turnout operations in Iowa and opens with this nugget about the Obama campaign:
In Sen. Barack Obama’s Iowa headquarters, young staff members sit at computers, analyzing online voter data and targeting potential backers. They zip one e-mail to an undecided voter and zap a different message to a firm supporter.
Depending on the voter, they follow with Facebook reminders, telephone calls, text messages and, most important, house visits.
Add comment January 7th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
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