Archive for May, 2008
Back to work! Here’s what you’ve missed the past few days:
- Have a Peaceful Memorial Day Week-end, Undeclared Superdelegates! Love, Arianna.
- Keynote presentation: Russell Simmons on how hip-hop fans build brands. Note: we’re going to the wrong conferences.
- China’s leaders’ new media-savviness. Meanwhile, Sudan’s leaders use technology to send a much older message — all they need are a few more heads on pikes (also check out the details of the rebel assault, more spaghetti western than D-Day).
- Obama, Clinton’s record campaign finances overwhelm Excel. But you can still read McCain’s numbers in a spreadsheet.
- McCain campaign seeks supportive blog comments, while TheNextRight.com seeks to rescue the Republican party (via Google Alert/SaveTheGOP.com).
- Ralph Nader and the Komodo Dragon. Bad, bad press work.
- Anti-Israel work on Wikipedia? The latest of several articles on this topic that have dropped in one way or another.
- Reviewing an MP’s site. All online politics is local.
- Senate Race in Minnesota Shows Power of Bloggers. Suggested by Farra Trompeter.
- Obama and the Jews: Voter-Generated Content Adds Context.
- Why banners fail. Not just because of insufficient waving.
- Politico’s John Harris notices that small stories get hyped out of proportion, but Glenn Greenwald isn’t impressed by his overnight conversion. But without endless blather, how would the cable news people pass the time?
- Flash is the new black. Make sure your online ads are In Style.
- Exposed! On the dangers of living an open life online — suggested by Burt Edwards, who is well known for his blatantly public displays of self-revelation (or not).
- Get ready for the World Live Web. Suggested by a loyal reader (thanks Dad).
- Who’s Gushing Now: World Oil Reserves. An oily Google map; c.f. May 26, 1908: Mideast Oil (and plenty of blood) Discovered.
- IsBarackObamaMuslim.com: The Rise of Nanosites. Hey Luigi, get your own ideas! See also this piece, where Mr. Montanez gives a Very Special anatomy lesson.
- For Hybrid Drivers, Every Trip Is a Race for Fuel Efficiency. On the beneficial consequences of displaying information to users; c.f the site Green Interfaces.
- Lanny Davis Goes Off Message. Let’s forward some lies.
- Strange hate for Rachael Ray on a rightie blog.
- Microsoft doesn’t like to give information away. Heard of Google, y’all?
- Google China’s Search Log Displays Moment of Mourning, via HowTheWorldWorks.
- Video versus the written word.
- Did Newsweek leave an anti-Obama piece out of its online promotion on purpose?
- Landing Page Optimization for Online Fundraising.
- Does McCain Have a YouTube Problem? Robert Greenwald’s anti-McCain film has been seen 1.3 million times in a week.
- Others make the case for Obama/Webb. See the e.politics take here and here (the latter including a Very Special personal ad).
- Long-term fallout for Obama from last summer’s YouTube debate.
- Online, It’s Target Clinton.
- Straight Outta Denver: LiveBarr.
- Obama’s Web Ads May Have Driven Big North Carolina Win. Mighty bold claim.
- The future of political dirty tricks and deception online, via Politics Online.
- Fascinating portrait of Moqtada Al Sadr’s attempted redefinition, including this excellent quote: “He is not the kind of man,” Obaidi said, “who plucks the fruit before it is ripe.”
– cpd
May 27th, 2008
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Writing that personal ad for Barack Obama’s VP search on Sunday sure got me thinking seriously about the logic of putting Jim Webb on the Democratic ticket, and I’m clearly not the only one who’s had the Virginia Senator in mind lately. It’s hard to come up with someone who balances Barack Obama better, who fills so many of his gaps as a candidate and as a public persona:
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May 21st, 2008
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Cross-posted on techPresident
At the exact instant I opened this email from him, Jim Webb came on the radio, leaving only one obvious question: is a two-fer good enough for “BINGO” in the veepstakes stature game?
On NPR Friday, the Junior Senator from Virginia deflected talk about the Vice Presidency by shifting discussion to the good he could do on the serious issues of the day if he stays where he is. In the process, he compared his preferred style of public service to that of the late J. Patrick Moynihan. The eerily concurrent email message, the first from the Born Fighting Political Action Committee in almost two months, provides a handy cheat sheet to Senator Webb’s Completely Inadvertent Weekend o’ Media Exposure:
Over the next several days, Senator Jim Webb will appear on a number of TV and radio programs discussing the critical issues facing our nation.
Sunday, May 18: Meet the Press (NBC)
Monday, May 19: CBS Early Morning
Monday, May 19: Fresh Air (NPR)
Monday, May 19: Late Show with David Letterman (CBS)
Tuesday, May 20: Countdown with Keith Olbermann (MSNBC)
Tuesday, May 20: Lou Dobbs (CNN)
Check your local listings for the airtime and station broadcasting each show. We hope you can tune in. Thank you for your continued support of Born Fighting PAC.
Oh no, he’s just a politically and intellectually ambitious border-state politician and author with a military background, a dollop of good-ole-boy cred and a son who’s served in Iraq. Why would he possibly want to draw attention to himself in May of 2008? Update! Wait: Could it be that he’s circled a certain very special personal ad?
“ISO rough-hewn MWM/MWF for ticket-sharing and mutual-career-boosting. You: able to offset my key weakness among Southern white voters while also providing welcome government and/or policy experience. Bipartisan bonus points for past service in a Republican administration. Me: serious, reliable, charismatic Midwestern type with a sparkle in my eye, an excellent sense of timing and a mean jump shot. Reply to #3464 to leave a message for Barry.”
Can’t wait to hear more from these star-crossed lovers!
– cpd
May 18th, 2008
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- Update: News-starved Burmese snap up grim cyclone videos.
- McCain widens dialogue on blogs. Via tPrez. C.f. McCain Campaign Pioneers A First: Courting Lefty Bloggers.
- The Amazing Money Machine: How Silicon Valley made Barack Obama this year’s hottest start-up. Via PoliticalWire.
- The importance of Wikipedia for political candidates.
- The State of the News Media 2008. “Looking closely, a clear case for [media] democratization is harder to make.” Via Mike Allen.
- Secret Data in FBI Wiretapping Audit Revealed with Ctrl-C.
- ObamaGirl sparks Russian rewrite.
- Power plants open to hacker attack.
- On the subtle art of the pitch man.
- And Now a Word From Our Sponsor: The best Web sites and books about advertising.
- Tracking a Trend: Issue Advocacy.
- The overachieving, high-ambition young stars who power the Web these days aren’t irredeemably awful.
- Online fundraising’s role in the Repubs’ current congressional election woes. (see page 2)
- Instant messaging ‘a linguistic renaissance’ for teens.
- NATO to give Estonia cyber defences. New NATO thinktank.
- MoveOn gets punk’d in Obama ad contest. The enduring joys of social media.
- Christmas in May: Roll Call gets a new website. Compare with National Journal for a design showdown.
- Estimate: Online Advertising from Political Campaigns and Advocacy Groups Will Reach $50 Million This Year. Still tiny compared to TV spending, and way below the percentage generally spent by commercial marketing campaigns.
- Facebook’s Glass Jaw. From a loyal reader (thanks, Dad!).
- Obama + Internet Marketing = President?
- Get maximum brand lift from widgets. Some uses for engagement and fundraising — just change “payment” to “donation” as you read.
- Two via PoliticsOnline: MoveOn.org’s Anti-McCain Effort Turns To Facebook and How the internet is challenging Egypt’s government.
- Twitter Helps with Reporting, Filtering the News and Why Twitter matters, from Jennifer Gallardo.
- McCain’s Chances May Have Hit a New Nader.
- The Australian government’s plan to censor the internet. Whoa: check out the site’s tagline…
- How would Obama’s success in online campaigning translate into governing?
- Gamers teach search engines how to see. Improving image search.
- John McCain: Tolstoy in My Inbox.
- Billionaires v. Bloggers and the declining role of 527s. Also note the “existence” of the Larry Craig Center in Second Life.
- Report: Government’s Cyber Security Plan Is Riddled With New Spying Programs.
- How the MySpace mindset can boost medical science: Social networking is empowering patients and enabling some incredible disease research possibilities.
- Thoughts On Video Commenting.
- What Went Wrong with the Clinton Campaign?
- Demographics of Twitter, via TechRepublican.
- Read this Heather Havrilesky article all the way to the end: “If you’re successful enough, if the huddled masses of aspiring whores tell you you’re the greatest for too long, you might just wake up one day and find yourself posing for a Glamour Shot behind the wheel of your car. Look into those eyes, kids, because you’re looking at the spray-tanned face of a man who believes his own press.”
- Quote of the week: “I do think that the quality which makes a man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and is masochistic. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.” (James Jones). Via MediaBistro.
– cpd
May 18th, 2008
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An unusual email drifted over the transom today:
Please help me and my sister grow our site, My name is Madison and my sister is Morgan we are all star cheerleaders and we asked are dad to start us a web site like Myspace but for cheerleaders and dancers. The site is called Wegatta.com we are hoping that we can make this the biggest web site for cheerleaders and dancers, we started the web site in December and it is doing ok so far, we have about 1689 members mostly cheerleaders.
Can you please help us get the word out about are site? And anyone can join. Wegatta.com is very cool and fun my dad put over 750 games on Wegatta.com for everyone to play and it’s all free.
(more…)
May 15th, 2008
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It’s been a busy couple of weeks here in the Lone Star State: besides dancing with armadillos and tossing the occasional grenade, I’ve been wrapping up work on my second Joomla site, We Are Wetlands. It’s a project of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a long-time client whose main site I’m also in the middle of rebuilding (they have a custom CMS circa 2002 that’s flat-out abysmal). The site’s aimed at ginning up an email list of people in favor of wetlands protection.
WeAreWetlands.org itself is tiny, but I still got to use a couple of interesting Joomla features on it anyway. First, the Joomla native Newsflash plugin turned out to be perfect for a rotating “Did You Know” piece on every page — it pulls properly tagged items out of the database and displays a random one on each page (below the nav links). And, a free guestbook extension worked fine for their “Bog Blog,” which is a simple submit-your-content feature.
This was also the first time I’ve worked with a DemocracyInAction account, which turned out to be a joy after years of fiddling with GetActive (sorry, friends at GA). The setup was extremely easy and the site was free of the kinds of stylesheet clashes that have been maddening on other systems. And, their API works (unlike GA’s, which is no longer supported), so it was also easy to port the petition over to the main Wetlands site and have it interact with the DIA database seamlessly. Expensive legacy providers had better watch out — DIA’s gonna be eating into your bidness right quick.
– cpd
May 14th, 2008
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E.politics world headquarters has taken up residence in its hometown of Palestine, Texas for the past week or two, and today got a real treat: playing with baby armadillos. Well, adolescents probably, since they’re big enough to come out of the burrow on their own (they sassed me, too — clearly teenagers). My parents have a big backyard with a creek nearby, and a family of the little South American immigrants has set up shop in the hole left by a decaying tree stump near the driveway. The adults only seem to come out after dark, but the four young ‘uns are risk-takers and braved the post-thunderstorm damp and gloom this morning to look for tasty bugs.
They let me get close enough to hang out for a bit while they dug around in the grass, and a couple even sniffed at my pants leg (no doubt to see if I’m edible). We’ll eventually have to drive them out, since they’re tearing up the yard pretty bad, but in the meantime, they’re damn cute. I’m gonna bring ‘em on payroll as consultants; the rest of the e.politics staff had better step up or they may need to find themselves new jobs.
– cpd
May 14th, 2008
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Hmmm, somebody better check on Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency appointees: they must be frothing at the mouth — or unconscious from shock. Yes, an email just arrived from John McCain’s campaign touting the candidate’s enviro-friendly promo gear:
In our new store section, we’re proud to offer eco-friendly t-shirts and polo shirts made from biodegradable fabric, as well as organic cotton hats and shopping bags. You can also buy travel mugs and notebooks made from recycled materials.
Wonder what Rush will have to say about this one…Operation Chaos is over, Operation Cognitive Dissonance has begun. (Note: the online store address didn’t end up in the PDF, but here it is.) BTW, dig the shampoo-bottle logo:
John McCain, from Hanoi Hilton to New Age fashion mogul…$50 for a polo shirt? THAT’S change we can believe in.
– cpd
May 13th, 2008
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- Update: MoveOn Targets McCain Aides.
- Obama: Smear emails “not just a random sort of viral thing”.
- Racist Secret Service E-Mails. Oof. I mean really, oof. Stupid enough to think, even more stupider to email.
- How to spot Photoshop chicanery.
- Why is this site password protected? Burt Edwards wants to know.
- Can Bob Barr Tap Into Ron Paul’s Movement? C.f. Libertarian Bob Barr Hopes to Scoop Up Ron Paul’s Internet-Driven Support and Ron Paul Supporters, What Are Your Plans?
- MoveOn picks winner of Obama ad contest.
- Does his ad buy prove his critics wrong? Obama is online this week in WV, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania….
- On the Dangers of Hacked Computer Networks and Inadvertant Nuclear War.
- Unjustifiable Carnage, Uneasy Alliances, and Lots of Self-Doubt: What Grand Theft Auto IV gets right about gangland and illegal economies.
- Obama Looks Ahead to Oregon Primary in E-mail Push.
- How the Web Contest Predicted the Real Thing.
- Top Four Essentials of eCampaigning. C.f. The Essentials of Online Advocacy Begin With Email (e.politics sez, you better f*cking believe it).
- Why I like the Google Video Player.
- Quantcast Helps The Media Planner. Improve your advertising plans with free site demographics.
- Clinton Going Down, While the Web Dreams of an Obama Win.
- Another political PowerPoint, this time Clinton’s. See Politico and Wired.
- New Google Service Makes Web Pages Social.
- How Defense Research Is Making Troops More Effective in Wartime.
- Air Force Colonel Wants to Build a Military Botnet. Or not.
- The indie-rock fall and rise of R.E.M..
- OMG! WARNING: Over the top, offensive humor! Note comment: “Godwin’s Law: As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
- Obama’s online organization.
- Volunteers asked to help find dead spacecraft on Mars via online photos. Check out the size of those pictures!
- Republican Slogan Borrowed From Antidepressant. The jokes are too obvious to bother making.
- Concharto: Wikipedia for history/geography nerds. via GeoDog.
- The peak oil culture wars.
- Space porn! Virtual telescope brings the cosmos to your desktop.
– cpd
May 13th, 2008
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Let’s help get a better sense of what tools political professionals are using, both for advocacy and to help elect candidates: take the 2008 E-Voter Institute Survey of Political and Advocacy Communications Leaders today.
Has the Internet come of age for political campaigns? Which voters are best motivated using web tools? Are online social networks effective for getting out the vote? Take the 7th Annual Survey of Political and Advocacy Communications Leaders and help E-Voter Institute better understand how campaign dollars are being spent. Take the survey and provide a wider view of the effectiveness of all media used by candidates and advocates.
E-Voter Institute, along with HCD Research, is also conducting the 3rd Annual Survey of Voter Expectations. All research results will be available in mid-July with an eye to helping you make more informed decisions about general election 2008 clients. Watch for notices about the webinar this summer. Go to http://e-voterinstitute.com to download reports from 2006 and 2007.
Remember, the more of us reply by the time the survey wraps up on May 31, the more likely we are to get good results.
– cpd
May 12th, 2008
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Resistance is futile: e.politics has surrendered to the Twitter Borg. Now you’ll be able to find out what our staff (i.e., the cat and the turtle) have for breakfast every single day! Farewell, productive time…
Seriously, I’m experimenting with Twitter to get general impressions and a better feel for it as a communications channel. At the moment, I’ll mostly be sending out notifications of new e.pol articles via Twitterfeed, but let’s see what the future brings.
– cpd
May 12th, 2008
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Newsweek’s current story on the Obama campaign’s internal dynamics contains this warning (via Mike Allen) for anyone who values civility and honesty in politics:
Another McCain adviser, who asked for anonymity discussing internal campaign strategy, bluntly warned: “It’s going to be Swift Boat times five on both sides — The candidates will both do their best publicly to mute it. But in a close race, I don’t see how to shut that down.”
For all of our sakes, let’s hope that some kind of rationality survives. No doubt much of the smearing will happen online, in websites, videos and the kind of behind-the-scenes emails that have already dogged “Manchurian Muslim” Obama. Bloggers will both help AND hurt, helping by researching and puncturing lies, hurting by spreading them. Ultimately, though, the onus is on mainstream journalists to try to separate truth from fiction. Print and online reporters have a far better record on this front so far this year; cable news has been a hellhole of unrepentant rumormongering and idle speculation. Don’t we deserve better?
– cpd
May 11th, 2008
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