Posts filed under 'Political Databases'
If you want to keep up with the county-by-county numbers from the Pennsylvania primary, the Times has you covered — they’re updating their online map as information comes in. It’s a nice Flash application that pops up the percentages as you mouse over each county, and is a terrific example of the way the ‘net can really add to political coverage. I’ll take solid data like this over talking-head blather any day of the week. Update: Pennsylvania Election Results, Mapped Alongside Voters’ Race, Age and Religion.
– cpd
April 22nd, 2008
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NetSquared has been holding a little contest of late to promote the use of data mashups as tools for the betterment of life and society, and the 21 finalists might give you a few ideas about how an advocacy or communications campaign can use mashups to make information accessible to people who aren’t total data nerds.
Many of the finalists use mapping layers, such as a project devoted to the preservation of linguistic diversity and another that tracks threatened houses in New Orleans, while others involve social networking tools, video or rss feeds. Bonus: Cisco’s a sponsor, and the 21 projects will share a $100,000 grant. Pretty cool stuff all around — for those of us who aren’t numbers or software people, it can be hard to envision exactly HOW data can tell a story, so being able to see concrete examples is a help.
– cpd
March 30th, 2008
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Greetings from New Orleans and the Nonprofit Technology Conference, where e.politics is bearing up nobly under the strain of going to fantastic cities and hanging out with bright and interesting people. Rough life, I know
As a takeaway for the participants in our online advocacy panel on Friday, below are a ton of articles on various aspects of the question of spreading a message and working to change politics and policy online.
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March 20th, 2008
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Yay, Super Tuesday, the most wonderful time of the year. The following Hits will be updated throughout the day. See also yesterday’s list.
- Update: Just got a Drudge Siren email alert, and apparently Obama is “large” in the exit polls. It’s gonna be an interesting night; I’m off to the parties.
- Update: The Inside Story of Obama’s Online Music Video.
- Update: In an Internet First, Americans Abroad Cast E-Votes in Democratic Primary.
- Update: Barack Obama’s Web Site Overwhelmed During (Last Night’s) Clinton Appearance.
- Update: US Voters Using Google to Find Polling Places.
- Update: The Rationality Gap: Campaigns Way Behind the Online Advertising Curve. Alan Rosenblatt: “For 10% of their ad budgets they could dominate the web.”
- A brief distraction: Venn diagram of the British Islands. Thanks to Chris Cosart for a helpful find.
- Update: A Clinton campaign conference call is a study in spin. Check out the ending — a Fox debate?
- Update: I Hope It’s a Hoax. The (politically) provocative e-mail that “Chelsea Clinton” is sending around.
- Update: Obama Leads in Online Buzz, Favorite Sites by Visitors’ Party Affiliation Issued. Which candidates are dominating the online discussion?
- Update: Does web traffic tell us that Obama and Huckabee will win big today? Josh is skeptical, and for good reason. More from the tPrez Daily Digest, including lots of nonrepresentative online polls and a look at Barack Obama’s hockey stick.
- Update: AZ Robocall Hits Obama On Social Security.
- Update: Primary Jam. Excellent WSJ interactive guide to this year’s primary election pile-up, and a good demonstration of how to present information with technology.
- Update: The E-War: Dems: All Hillary Wire, All the Time. Hillary’s election-day email blitz. More on the expectations battle from Slate.
- Update: McCain Tops the Democrats in Media Coverage.
- The Early Word: Super Fat Tuesday. Good overview of what’s ahead.
- The Opposite of Interactivity. Zephyr Teachout’s not so impressed with Hillary’s online/offline national town hall, but PoliticsTV’s Dan Manatt likes it better. C.f. Checking in With the Politically-Active Social Networking Generation and Clinton On Message, and On Television. Update: Also, Creating Those Hallmark Moments.
- Romney Internet-Only Ad Ties McCain to Clinton. See also McCain, Romney Unveil New Attack Ads.
- New HRC Mailer Hits Obama On Economy. Direct mail = probably the oldest form of database-driven politics.
- Push Polling, Robo Calls and Other Telephonic Shenanigans.
- Obama’s $28M Online. Patrick Ruffini on the death of offline fundraising. Update: That $32 million total for January turns out to be more than twice that of the Clinton campaign.
- Students On How Social Networking Is Transforming Politics.
- Web Graphics and Social Media Bring A Bird’s Eye View of Celebrity Presidential Endorsements.
- The Web and the Race For the White House. Overview of online support.
- Ron Paul’s candidacy shows the potential (and limits) of online politics. A short email interview with the candidate.
- In Election of Change, TV Gives Voice to Insiders. No insurgency on the airwaves.
- On The Road Again, And Again, And Again. Life of an embedded political journalist.
- Shifting Loyalties: Obama Winning Big Edwards Backers.
- Bill Clinton on Hillary Clinton’s Web 2.0 presidency.
- Facebook Used to Mobilize Against FARC. “In Colombia, a Facebook page dedicated to protesting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, that country’s largest rebel group, is helping organize thousands of people in cities around the world for demonstrations.”
- Lots of Super Tuesday cell phone sounds at RingTones08.
- Super Tuesday Gladiators. “Billy, do you like movies about gladiators and Hillary Clinton?”
– cpd
February 5th, 2008
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Wired’s picked up on a new application called Glassbooth that helps match you with the presidential candidate whose positions are closest to yours. In clever fashion, it starts by asking which issues are most important to you and only then goes into specific questions about those issues. The quiz was easy to take, and the questions seemed reasonable, i.e., they generally seemed like neutral ways to state the issues. The site creators base their matches on the candidates’ officially stated positions, which as Wired reporter James Lee notes is no small feat considering most politicians’ reluctance to take definitive stands.
The problem I have with the application is that while it’s fun, this isn’t the way people pick candidates: despite their frequent protestations to the contrary, most people make snap decisions about politicians based on gut feelings rather than reasoned analysis (how many of the people who say they want to know more about where the candidates stand actually go to their websites to find out?). In my case, I turn out to agree with 1) Dennis Kucinich, 2) Mike Gravel and 3) Bill Richardson, who must have strong positions on environmental and civil liberties issues, both of which I listed high. Thing is, I’d never actually support these guys, because they lack other qualities that I rank more highly than their stand on these issues. For better or worse, we pick professional politicians in pretty much the same way we pick friends from elementary school on — whether we think we “click” with them or not.
– cpd
January 3rd, 2008
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Two new sites popped up today that take very different yet effective approaches to advocacy. First, the serious side: the new CARMA.org site (Carbon Monitoring for Action) defaults to showing you the worst power plants in the world from a global warming perspective, but it’ll also let you find your own power provider and take a look at their plants’ emissions. Because the folks behind the site (the Center for Global Development) used a Google Maps interface, you can easily drill down to each plant and pop up data about how much power and pollution it puts out. Start adding those numbers up and it gets frightening fast.
Next up: satire, the highest art form, as the folks behind the Predatory Lending Association have figured out. Want to know the advantages of predatory lending over indentured servitude? Find out here! Need racial profiling tools? Try these! Quite clever — note the Military Loan Finder map application on the site front page that hooks you up with payday loan establishments clustered near military bases. The nice thing from an advocacy point of view is that both the hard-data and humor/satire approach can work if they’re done right. In these two cases, I think they were.
Update: After I finished this article, my NET intern Alicia LaPorte bombarded me with emails about the End Mountaintop Removal site, which also has great map features, video and a Willie Nelson song (can’t hardly beat that). It’s now her most favoritest advocacy site of all time.
– cpd
November 14th, 2007
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Guest article! Troy Schneider makes the point that new tools let advocacy groups create sophisticated online information presentations, the kind of data- and graphics-rich applications that news organizations have employed to really make a point jump out at a reader. Troy should know of what he speaks: he’s been around the online political world since the halcyon days of PoliticsNow (ah, the mid-90s…) before jumping over to National Journal, where he served as Editor at NationalJournal.com and as Managing Director for Electronic Publishing at the parent Atlantic Media Company. Nowadays, he’s New Media Editor at the New America Foundation, where he’s putting these ideas into practice. Pull you up a chair and hear what he has to say:
Why Think Tanks and Nonprofits Should Be Thinking Like (New Media) Newsrooms
Troy K. Schneider
Cross-posted at TroySchneider.com
Earlier this year, the topic of media outlets bringing programmers into the newsroom generated some interesting discussion (from Tim O’Reilly, Mark Glaser, and others). As O’Reilly put it, “the various jobs of journalism — gathering news, exercising editorial judgment, and presenting the story — can all be augmented by programming. In the new world of network-enabled information gathering and dissemination, programming is as critical a skill as writing and photography.”
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July 2nd, 2007
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Some email discussion over the past few days about the Edwards fundraising text/voice campaign and about last Friday’s desktop widget has really brought home to me the importance of going where your supporters are. A few years ago, online activists had only a handful of ways to reach people — to supplement traditional phone-banking, direct mail and television, the Internet really offered only two channels, email and relatively static websites. Since ‘04 cycle, which brought both the perfection of email/online fundraising and the rise of blogs, we’ve seen an explosion of new channels, including an array of social networking sites and other online communities. These days, electoral and advocacy campaigns confront so many possible ways to reach potential supporters that it’s dizzying. How do we allocate resources?
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July 2nd, 2007
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Last night, Patrick Ruffini published an article on his own site and on techPresident that everybody writing about online politics should consider — though much in the online political world that gets public attention is shiny and pretty, it’s generally not what’s winning elections. Online video? Drudge-like aggregator sites? Good for some press coverage and bringing some site visitors by, but the real work of online political campaigning is in building lists of donors and volunteers and in coordinating their activities. For instance, Patrick compares glowing press coverage of Mitt Romney’s online video outreach (a work-a-day site feature but nothing particularly innovative) with the total LACK of attention given to a list-building operation of his that added 30,000 supporters in a day. Patrick ends his piece with this observation:
When it comes to covering the online campaigns, reporters tend to home in on stuff that’s actually pretty easy by comparison. Throwing up a YouTube video or a MySpace page. Cleverly repackaged press content. Anything goofy. It’s easy for campaigns to get thrown off by this, and keep going after press hit after press hit. But some of the most important technology work that campaigns do is a lot less sexy — voter databases, activism tools, Web-based interfaces for high-dollar fundraisers. How about some coverage of that?
As anyone who’s read e.politics since its beginning knows, I’m much more focused on the nuts and bolts of winning elections than on flash and zing, and I’ll argue until I turn blue that email is still king of keeping and motivating donors and supporters. Patrick’s article should be read right along with Alan Rosenblatt’s recent piece on the media’s over-attention to political blogging — they both offer a good corrective for the “gee whiz” media coverage we’ve seen so much of over the past few months.
June 29th, 2007
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- 11 Web Technologies Political Campaigns Should Consider. Virtual napalm not on list, tragically.
- More Blog Woes For John Edwards. Great idea! Let’s attack those bloggers. You know, the guys with free printing presses and unlimited ink.
- Are the Netroots Stalling Out? A serious discussion of the limits of the blogosphere. My question: is Patrick Ruffini secretly controlling the Edwards campaign? Via TechPrez.
- (Audio) Spotlight: Jerome Armstrong. A PoliticsOnline interview.
- As a Campaign Tool, Web Has Its Uses and Limits. Wow, there’s an illuminating headline. Upcoming article: “Weather sometimes good, other times not so much.”
- ‘08 Web Gurus Chase Money, Support Online. A bit more substantive of an overview article.
- GOP Presidential Candidates Gaining Viewers on YouTube, though not always for reasons they’d prefer.
- Does Flickr = Censr? Content limits suck.
- New FEC campaign contributions data presentation. Zoomable! Clickable! Via The Hotline.
- Vlinks: The Web’s Best Video Sharing, Vlogging, and Resources. Excellent collection of video resources.
- Excerpts from the Republican Senatorial Campaign Internet Guide [PDF]. Nice job, Politico! (words not often seen on e.politics). Via PoliticalWire.
- McCain: Let’s Put the Hurt on Mitt. Online video as (virtual) assassination tool. Via WSJ Washington Wire.
- Edwards Goes Low $$$. More on the virtues of small donors.
- Is The Politico Throwing Spaghetti on the Wall? Comprehensive strategy vs. random online lunging: which is more fun?
- 2008 Presidential Candidates Do Use Pay-Per-Click Search A Lot, despite slanderous rumours to the contrary.
- National Journal, NBC Embedding Reporters with Campaigns. No word on whether they’ll be forced to subsist on MREs. More details from Tech Daily Dose.
- HeyCosmo: Webcams Meet Group Collaboration. Useful tool for online organizing?
- Telling Your Story With Words and Images. Grunts and rude gestures no longer sufficient.
- Let’s Play the Redistricting Game. Nice use of an online game to explore a complicated political truth — redistricting is where the REAL political power lives. Details from The Caucus and the IPDI blog.
- We Didn’t Start The Grassfire: Conservatives Use The Internets Too.
- One Hit Too Many: The new cosmetic surgery craze is “man boobs” reduction. Look just below the entry on the evolution of women’s erotic dreams. Coincidence? We report, you decide.
- Two Hits Too Many: Gay and Lesbian Gangs Terrorize Metro Station. Online tie-in: MySpace was central to their capture. Suggested by a loyal reader (thanks Dad!), who’s still scratching his head over this one.
– cpd
June 15th, 2007
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Internet/politics legend Mike Cornfield, who’s also here in LA for the Knight New Media Center seminar on Covering Politics in Cyberspace, just shot me a link to a groovy new application from OpenSecrets.org — it’s a browsable, graphical representation of who’s giving money to which presidential candidates. In a classic network-analysis format, it represents candidates and donors with circles and connections as lines. It’s also a Flash application with lots of nifty interaction: for instance, click on a candidate, then click on a big donor or on a category of donor, and up jumps the web of THE DONOR’S political links, along with the amounts they’ve contributed to each candidate (hmmmmm, Goldman Sachs LOVES Obama and Romney — a winning cross-party ticket if I ever heard of one — but doesn’t have quite as much juice for Hillary, Edwards and Dodd). Here’s a snapshot of a sample page; go dig around and see what you can find.
– cpd
April 19th, 2007
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Three very cool online tools have come across my desk in the past few days, each of which illuminates some part of the potential of the ‘net to open the political process up in ways that we only dream of a few years ago. Democracy won’t work if voters don’t have enough information to make good choices; here are three new ways they can get it.
First, new friend-of-e.politics Carly Dobbins-Bucklad (who joins Ha-Hoa Dang in the “when are they going to put an article together” category) writes in to show off a video voter guide for Pittsburg that she and other folks at the League of Young Voters put together. To create it, they asked candidates two questions and recorded the responses on digital video, then combined the clips on a site with more traditional voter background material. As they wrote supporters:
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March 23rd, 2007
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Listen to your mom: wash your hands before dinner, and don’t forget to clean your data before sending out direct mail.
Mark Harris of Students for Saving Social Security, who spoke at last week’s Politics Online panel on campaigning on a limited budget and who himself was a candidate for state representative in Pennsylvania in ‘06, talked at length about what was worth spending money on and what wasn’t. His take? For starters, good design is worth the money, since having professional graphics both in print and online can help a campaign stand out. I’ll second that — amateur design can be endearing if you’re running for class president, but less so if you’re trying to get elected to public office. Cutting corners on design can cost you much more in credibility than you save in pennies.
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March 20th, 2007
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The random byproducts of three very busy days online. Not all entirely on topic, but easily digestible nonetheless.
- Time reporter credits blogosphere for keeping Federal prosecutor story alive in the face of mainstream media indifference. “And we’d have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!” Via Glenn Greenwald. Another role of our beloved Internets in this rising scandal: follow the emails.
- Unruly bloggers strike again, with RealClimate and Grist ably deconstructing and debunking a New York Times article about supposed skepticism in the scientific community towards Al Gore’s stageshow. Via How The World Works.
- Those damn bloggers just won’t quit: did they also kill the Fox-sponsored Nevada debate?
- John Dickerson looks at a “clever” (disingenuous?) edit in a John Edwards campaign video (sorry to pick on your guy again, mom). In other Edwards news, he now has a presence on Twitter, a site I haven’t quite figured out yet (maybe I should ask Josh Levy). And, his hair is coming back to haunt him.
- More video fun: Giuliani 2007, meet Giuliani 1989 — “There must be public funding for abortion for poor women.”
- Two takes on last week’s NOI training, with Matisse Bustos pointing out the over-abundance of white men in the room (but I’ve been losing weight!) and Jason Z revealing the deepest secrets about this reporter’s writing methods (he shall feel the sting of my wrath in due time).
- Campaign Design Review: McCain for President Let us spend a moment “staring at the grim, unblinking visage of John McCain.”
- User Generated Animation Site MyToons Launches. Another place to post those advocacy animations? Unfortunately, no NC-17 allowed.
- Apple unveils new product-unveiling product, finally realizing its true skill as a company.
- P&G Gives Tampax a Social Spin. Social media tampons = fun with cheerleaders.
- From Junk Mail to Junk World. A not-so-happy look at consumer microtargeting.
- Hydrocarbon glaciers and seas may dot Titan’s poles. Perhaps Halliburton should consider relocating there instead of the Persian Gulf. In other news from Saturn, the subprime mortgage market is planning to stage a comeback by financing waterfront property inside Enceladus.
- One Hit Too Many: the most bizarre image I have seen all week.
– cpd
March 14th, 2007
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My-head-is-still-on-the-slopes catch-up edition.
- Drudge, global warming shut down Senate site. Website fall down, go boom.
- A new online Capitol Hill news site launches, and Wonkette sneers sneeringly.
- Your PCs forecast climate future. Distributed computing for advocacy purposes — SETI Project, you are not @home alone.
- Marketers Get Weak Signal from Users on Cell-Phone Ads. Apparently, people aren’t too excited about phone-spam. Shocker, that.
- How to Improve Email Deliverability: 3 Steps Tested by Real-Life Mailer. From MarketingSherpa.
- Micropayments, Political Giving and Microsoft. Can tiny amounts of money add up? What about FEC reporting requirements?
- Two articles from Democracy in Action: A Website By Post, Or, How They Communicated Before the Internet (you’ll never look at direct mail the same way again) and a bit of Convio/GetActive Merger Scuttlebutt.
- Two YouTube articles on ReelPopBlog: YouTube rolls out some site improvements and Google integration with YouTube bumps YouTube market share 18%.
- Attack ads go online and underground. Online political videos gone wild!
- Speaker Pelosi’s Blog Outreach. Apparently, they’ve lost my number, though — the phone is tragically silent…
- 23 Ideas for Finding New Readers for Your Blog. More good tips from ProBlogger.
- Counterculture-joy link of the day: Kucinich to oversee Office of National Drug Control Policy!
– cpd
January 30th, 2007
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