Hi folks, e.politics has listened to Horace Greeley and headed West for a bit. A journalism symposium at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC is the excuse, but it’s really a chance to bounce around San Francisco and LA for a few short days (note: Southwest will get you from one to the other for under $100 roundtrip). The California Way of Life is a continent away from DC, not just in distance, and this trip is a hell of a good change of pace. But politics is a harsh mistress who shall not be denied, so let’s see what kind of articles we can come up with in a week in the sun, far from the customary seclusion of the e.politics bunker.
Ouch, we got nailed — the version of WordPress used on e.politics was out of date and apparently left the joint vulnerable to a nasty hack that inserted invisible links to spam sites in some articles, apparently to gain the evildoers up some search engine cred. I’ve fixed the bug and am in the process of repairing the few dozen articles that got hit, so if you see anything that looks squirrelly, pass it on. Thanks to reader Chris Muenzer for tipping me off to the problem and how to fix it — if you’re using WordPress, better upgrade. Weirdly enough, besides the spam links, the hack seems to delete the HTML paragraph tags in the posts — don’t ask me why.
Hey Mom, better plug in those computer speakers: the audio of our South by Southwest Interactive panel on Politics 2.0 has finally been loosed upon an unsuspecting world. Listen now, before the SXSW servers melt down from what will surely be an unprecedented and truly frightening level of public demand. Want color to go with the sweet sound of our late-morning voices? Here are pics and related resources, but beware — seriously bright polyester awaits. Thanks to Patrick Ruffini for the tip.
Combine (1) this rule of Digital Omnipresence with (2) the rules of Off-the-Record/On the Record (i.e. — nothing is ever truly, reliably, off-the-record), then you’ve got Bittergate.
What’s the upshot? Campaign managers should consider, on a daily basis, reminding candidates of their Digital Miranda rights — call it the “Macaca Warning”:
“You have the right to be recorded — and should expect you are being videotaped and recorded 24/7. Anything you say can and will be used against you by your opponents. Beware that something that sounds OK in one setting may be a gaffe in another setting…”
Excellent idea! e.politics has been fascinated by the effects of portable video and audio recording on politics from the beginnings of the site in the Antediluvian days of 2006, and I’m damn jealous that Dan thought of that one before I did. Soon, only robots will be clean enough to run for office, and our fate as a species will at long last be sealed.
These tips are for an Advocates for Youth/Choice USA online organizing training session on April 16, 2008, and you kids can look at them in greater depth in the relevant Online Politics 101 articles, particularly the ones covering marketing and promotion, websites, blogger relations and search engine optimization. They’re aimed at organizations and campaigns that are on the resource-poor side, since those won’t be able to do much paid promotion, but the basic ideas apply to most sites regardless of scale. See also that enduring classic from November of 2006, How to Build Traffic to a Blog: Ten Tips.
First fruits of RootsCampDC: time to experiment with a couple of site promotional tools. Look to the right, below the search box, and you’ll see a new content widget which you can use to put e.politics headlines on your site, blog, Facebook page or computer desktop. It takes this site’s RSS feed and packages it into widget form for use across the web; run by SpringWidgets, it’s one of the standard promotional tools provided by Feedburner. Just below that, I’ve also added a Feedburner-provided email signup form. E.politics has had an email subscription option since the beginning, but it was only on the Feedburner subscription page and not obvious at all (only two people have signed up for email, vs 600-odd RSS subscribers). The usual expectation is that having a signup form visible directly on your pages encourages signups; time for a little test.
Thanks to Michael Whitney for the suggestions — he ran a great RootsCamp session on getting the most out of RSS.
It’s always fun when dueling campaign emails arrive in the e.politics inbox only minutes apart, particularly when they’re so gently massaging the same issues-of-the-moment. Today’s edition: Obama vs. McCain. The weapons: “bitter” vs. “out of touch.” The immediate stakes: the contents of thousands of wallets. The long-term stakes: the public perception of each man, and ultimately his electoral fate. Today, Barack hit first, fast and jujitsu-style, seeking to define his San Francisco comments as a hymn of love to the great America heartland and his rivals as shady opportunists for trying to take advantage of them:
But our opponents have been spinning the media and peddling fake outrage around the clock. John McCain’s campaign, which will continue the George Bush economic policies that have devastated the middle class, called Barack out of touch and elitist. And Hillary Clinton, who is the candidate who said lobbyists represent real people, didn’t just echo the Republican candidate’s talking points: she actually used the very same words to pile on with more attacks.
Bonus points for the McCain-Clinton combo strike! Four head-spinning minutes later, John McCain went to DefCon One and dropped the E-bomb — the dreaded charge of Democratic Elitism:
If Barack Obama is the Democrat nominee in the general election, the American people will have a clear choice between two different visions – Senator Obama’s liberal, elitist philosophy and John McCain’s faith in the small town values that continue to make America great. John McCain will not forget them or write them off. Neither should Barack Obama.
Who will win this contest of wills, this battle of generational champions, this struggle for the Very Soul of Middle America? Don’t touch that dial…
Hey kids, ready to party for your right to fight? The New Organizing Institute, which trains campaign and nonprofit workers in the dark arts of online politics, is having a throwdown and fundraiser after Saturday’s RootsCampDC. The venue: MCCXXIII (1223 for the roman numeral-impaired), down south of Dupont at 18th and Connecticut (a little eurotrashy but what the hell). 6:30-8:30, $12 at the door, reasonably priced booze and a crowd composed of some of the finest drinking minds in the world of progressive online politics. C’mon down, ya hear? Patrick, David and Matt, you guys can show but remember that your money’s going to the forces of anarchy, sin and degradation that are working so hard to bring down our nation even as we speak.
Jake Tapper’s smoke detector goes off at ABC News. “That fact simply highlights a growing narcissistic disease within the campaign press corps in which members increasingly see themselves as central players in the unfolding political production. Specifically, with regard to the Democratic primary, the press clearly views itself as the third candidate on the stage.”
A Pulitzer ain’t half-bad, my friend: online politics reporter Jose Antonio Vargas joined a distinguished list of Post reporters hit with Pulitzer prizes this week. He’s one of several reporters cited for work on last year’s Virginia Tech shootings, and he owes his part of the prize in part to Facebook: as he said yesterday,
I wrote two of the nine articles in the breaking news entry; the first was an eyewitness account (penned with another reporter) that ran on the front page, the second was a feature on how students used the Web to console each other. And it was all because of luck — and Facebook. On the day of the shooting, less than three hours after the rampage, I landed a phone interview with Trey Perkins, who sat in the back of Room 207 when shooter Seung Hui Cho barged in. I found Trey on Facebook, friended him, chatted with him on AIM and convinced him to talk to me on the phone. It ended up being the key interview of the day.
A little luck, and a lot of initiative. Congratulations!
How The World Works noticed an interesting little eddy in the endless flow of globalization today: popular Chinese search engine Baidu is featuring a cartoon Barack Obama and donkey combo fishing for voters(?) on its front page this month:
HTWW’s Andrew Leonard notes that Obama joins a short parade of HomePage Heros on Baidu, though it’s a mystery why:
How the World Works is unclear about how the Obama campaign managed to convince a Chinese search engine to join the Barack bandwagon, but if you want to read all about Obama, in Chinese, you can click on the drawing and immerse yourself. My own very rough translation of the headline on that page reads: “The black son/child” Obama — he can do anything!”
E.politics also notes the computer mouse attached to the fishing net — metaphor alert. For more, see the HTWW piece on Salon. BTW, does this make Obama an actual Manchurian candidate now?
This just in from Bergen County, New Jersey: online politics has hit town and the locals are taking to it with gusto, like a guido to gold chains. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and blogs all make an appearance as North Jersey Record reporter Matthew Van Dusen interviews area politicos attempting to use the internet to influence policy or elect a candidate. It’s up to e.politics to put it all in context:
Some viral campaigns have proved effective at the national level, said Colin Delaney [sic], the founder of e.politics, a Washington, D.C.-based Web site about online political advocacy. For instance, Republican Sen. George Allen of Virginia lost his seat in 2006 after a video surfaced of him calling a man “macaca.”
Delaney believes that candidates at the local level, however, will still be able to win races through traditional campaigning for years to come.
“I don’t think it’s going to be something that every local candidate will do,” Delaney said of the viral techniques.
Some may disagree, but I have truly found the best YouTube video ever — it’s funny, it’s clever, it’s cute, it has a good song, it’s well edited, it’s short, and it anesthetizes or distracts small children (specifically, my two sets of toddler nieces when they’re on the verge of exploding). Finally, a real use for YouTube! If you have not seen it before, and even if you have, allow me to ask you to consider the artistic validity of the following, the legendary Kitty Cat Dance:
Seriously, it’s been seen millions of times now, CONTINUES to pick up views and notice more than two years after its release, and it has to be among the most successful YouTube clips so far. Listen to the song: it’s tight, develops well, is a little twisted in parts, and the punkish chorus is genius, since it helps keep the whole piece from becoming too repetitive or too cutesy. And the use of stills works great, since it lets you edit super-tightly to the music while also creating that immediate sense of unreality. You can learn a lot about what works on the web from watching this one. Again and again and again and…
Hi y’all, I gave a social media marketing training in New York on Monday, and I developed something for it that you might be able to use. The training was for the web staff of the local chapters of a large national nonprofit, and we covered the basics of using tools like blogs, online video, social networking sites and email lists and discussion groups to promote their activities and help with membership and fundraising. As a takeaway (a trick I learned from Michael Bassik — if you can, leave a little something behind for the crowd), I created a cheap sheet that looks at the basic social media marketing tools, their pros and cons, and the essential considerations involved in a social media campaign. Here’s a link to the PDF; details are below.
