There is an interesting article entitled Clinton Finds Way to Play Along With Drudge. If you have been following along with what we think we know about the Clinton teams courting of Drudge than you can skip page one. If not have a read.
Page two goes into it with a little more detail along with how Mitt Romney may have become the favored Republican candidate of the Drudge Report and how that came at John McCain’s expense. This is the meat of the article and of big interest to those playing along at home.
Overall the main thrust of the article and the idea we should all pay attention to is how and why one man from outside the mainstream of journalism, punditry, television and fancy Web design has become so influential in politics and news and so courted by political operatives.
It is a testament to the power of the Internet and love him or hate him of one man. I also think it is an important lesson. All the fancy Web 2.0 gadgets popping up in political circles still pale in comparison to the viewership of Drudge and its liberal alternative Huffington Post. What do these sites do? They bring you the news in a simple, easy to follow and dare I say it, in a traditional way that seems to work.
Patrick Ruffini is breaking out the digital champagne seeing trouble from e-mail for Republicans as Obama raises 1.8 Million in a new appeal to voters. Ruffini gives three e-mails sent from the campaign credit. Not to be a skeptic, but do we know this was all done with e-mail? It might have but we don’t have enough information to say it definitively.
There is some evidence that e-mail is not solely responsible. Consider the following. This week Obama:
Have a question for the candidates? Pull out the webcam and ask them at 10questions.com a new site produced by the good people of techPresident in associated with the NY Times & MSNBC. You upload, the Web decides and the top 10 get asked to the candidates. So make sure to stop by and participate.
“It’s clearly true,†said Joe Trippi, a senior adviser to former Senator John Edwards, “that blogs and Web sites, and even some of the cool stuff that our team is doing in Iowa, has got less of an impact in Iowa.â€Â
The article notes the older population in Iowa as one of the reasons why new media might not be reaching older voters but to be honest, I believe Iowa is a pretty good reflection of the impact nationally. Overall the article also notes my own general idea of what this “new media” is used for around the country. Basically building up buzz and filtering information into traditional media, not necessarily directly reaching voters.
At the end of the day let’s face facts here. The number of friends a candidate has on MySpace and Facebook will undoubtedly have no relationship to the number of votes they receive. Will it effect fundraising? Of course. Will it help organize efforts? Definitely. Will my parents and grandparents who are the most likely to vote in droves be influenced directly by Internet votes? Nope.
So though its 100% necessary for every campaign to have an online presence I see with Obama & Edward’s the consequence of relying too much on that medium to reach real voters. Both have raised money, both have caused “buzz” but both are trailing in polling and falling behind in MSM influence.
If I had any advice for Edward’s & Obama it would be this. It’s time to stop worrying about Facebook, MySpace, blogs and Adwords and time to start getting into television, radio and courting influence with journalists in Iowa, New Hampshire and nationally.
She invoked a half-dozen past Presidents – from Abraham Lincoln to Dwight Eisenhower – and compared expansion of broadband access to the creation of the transcontinental railroad system and the interstate highways.
And borrowing from Stephen Colbert, the Comedy Central host, Mrs. Clinton repeated her familiar lines of attack on the Bush administration, saying that Mr. Bush has waged a “war on science.â€Â
“To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, that great philosopher, this administration doesn’t make decisions based on facts, it makes facts based on decisions,†she said.
As I mentioned while I was away on a cruise ship the Internet was very expensive to use. It was also VERY slow. Loading a page took forever.
I was happy to see that Election Geek loaded pretty quickly. There are some more design things I can do to speed it up, for instance some of the graphics can be optimized and shrunk but thankfully the only elements that were slow to load were the ads. Luckily the rest of the page would pop-up and then the ads would take their time. Which is fine. I am going to look at different ways of ensuring that the rest of the page always loads first and then the ads load second if at all. The content is what is important for users and if an ad hasn’t loaded in the first four seconds they are just moving on to the next page where the ad won’t load anyway.
I decided while I was online to check out some of the official campaign sites to see if they too loaded fast. It was a pretty broad mix. Read the rest of this entry »
I am glad to see that a post I wrote Candidates’ Blogs: Glorified Public Relations? has received some good discussion in the comments section at techPresident as well as some other blogs. On MYDD user Psericks wrote a critique of my post that is generating even more discussion. So I thought it would be good to follow-up on that critique and further explore the issue.
I find it interesting that there hasn’t been a great deal of opposition to my main argument, that the current state of official paid-by-the-campaign blogging isn’t very interesting. We all seem to agree it isn’t the bloggers themselves, many of whom are very talented, but perhaps the limitations of the environment. If we can generally agree that these blogs are not effective, or at least not as effective as they could be, we have to figure out what the limitations are.
Psericks questions my assertion that the flaw is fundamental. I said “the problem with these blogs isn’t entirely the fault of the bloggers but the premise, which is you take a bunch of people and have them write positively about a campaign.†I stand by that assertion not as a reflection that they can never work but as a reality check of our expectations on the difference between paid-for-blogging and the political blogosphere most of us are used to reading.
I don’t know what has gotten into Bill & Hillary Clinton but yesterday I had an e-mail from her saying ‘Let’s Do Lunch’ and today I have one from him saying ‘Mind if I drop in?’. In the opening line Bill’s message says “I hear you might be having lunch with Hillary — do you mind if I drop in? “.
I am a cynical person and so I see that and want to run away from those e-mails as fast as possible, but maybe they work. Anyone have thoughts? If you have an e-mail from a former president pretending like he is going to have lunch with you and every three or four paragraphs it says CLICK HERE TO CONTRIBUTE, would that make your heart melt?
I think I would rather have something in my inbox that would make me want to contribute to them and had immediacy to it. Like “Social Security Won’t Be in Danger with President Hillary Clinton”. She gave a speech most people probably did not hear the other day where she said she would pay full benefits and not raise the age-limit for SS. It would be a good way of tying her message, a topical and voter driven issue and an action “if you want to elect someone who will secure full benefits for you and your family, contribute” all in one.
From Bill’s all I know is Clinton is smart and wonderful and if I make a contribution I might win a chance to have a lunch with them. I don’t even get dinner! Just lunch and probably with eighteen staffers in the room. I might be willing to spend a dollar on a lottery ticket to win $10,000,000 even though I know the odds. Tossing in $50 for no real odds of winning a fruit salad and sandwich lunch with the Clinton’s, probably not.
If I can raise $2,300 I can just go pay to have dinner with them and Warren Buffet and a bunch of other cool rich people and it isn’t a content.
Again I am sorry, I am cynical, this might be the greatest idea ever. For me though, not so much.
You can read the official Federal Election Commission (FEC) letter here or check out a Associated Press article summarizing the decision here, also quoted below:
DailyKos, an influential political Web site that serves as a virtual bulletin board for liberals, qualifies as a media entity exempt from federal campaign finance regulations, the Federal Election Commission said Tuesday.
The FEC said the Web site, operated by blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, cannot be regulated as a political committee and can freely post blog entries that support candidates.
Conservative blogger John C.A. Bambenek had argued in a complaint last month that the site should comply with campaign finance laws because such entries amounted to “a gift of free advertising and candidate media services.’
So what does this mean? Good things for people like me ultimately. It is yet another step in the direction of regulators, opinion makers and the government looking at bloggers as real ‘media’ and guaranteeing us similar protections. It also ensures we can continue to provide editorial content in a free and relatively unrestricted environment.
From the decision:
In Matter Under Review (MUR) 5928, the Commission determined that Kos Media, L.L.C., which operates the website DailyKos, did not violate the Federal Election Campaign Act. The Commission rejected allegations that the site should be regulated as a political committee because it charges a fee to place advertising on its website and it provides “a gift of free advertising and candidate media services†by posting blog entries that support candidates. The Commission determined that the website falls squarely within the media exemption and is therefore not subject to federal regulation under the Act.
A good sign that things are starting to heat up in the presidential race. Honestly I think most of the campaigns, up until now, have been doing a fairly decent job with keeping e-mails sparse but noticeable. I most often get messages from John McCain and they are usually pretty succinct and to the point (give us money, we are not in shambles, give us money).
I am using e-mail for a much different purpose than most of those who are probably subscribed. I skim the various fundraising messages to see if anything is new, it usually isn’t, then I delete. I rarely follow the links inside because I’ve already heard of whatever topic they are jumping on and I am not interested in giving money. So I am not the best judge of their effect.
With that said I have heard they are a good way to drive traffic to specific places and as action alerts for things happening in community sites I have to believe they are effective. I just personally see them as more junk in my inbox and now that we are getting close to the primaries I am sure I will be seeing plenty!
