Archive: Year: 2007

It's late on a Saturday and I don't have a lot of time to get into details, but for those people who have been following the Obama MySpace Mess, a quick heads-up is in order. Joe Anthony, the volunteer who started myspace.com/barackobama and built it for two-and-a-half years only to lose control of it last week to the Obama campaign, has posted a detailed critique of the official blog post written by Obama new media director Joe Rospars. You won't want to miss it. In it he clarifies some matters that had been left ambiguous up to this point, and also issues a ringing defense of his right to maintain the site. For people who have wondered why he took away...

The bipartisan coalition to "Free the Debates" has won a major victory, with the decision of CNN to make all its debate coverage "available without restrictions at the conclusion of each live debate." CNN said in a statement that Due to the historical nature of presidential debates and the significance of these forums to the American public, CNN believes strongly that the debates should be accessible to the public. The candidates need to be held accountable for what they say throughout the election process. The presidential debates are an integral part of our system of government, in which the American people have the opportunity to make informed choices about who will serve them. Therefore, CNN debate coverage will be made available...

The dust is starting to settle on Obama's MySpace Mess. For those people who imagined that Joe Anthony might turn to the courts and sue the Obama campaign for taking control of a community space that he spent two-and-a-half years and thousands of hours nurturing, that move is fortunately for all concerned not in the cards. Instead, Anthony is pondering donating the url over to a non-profit group, or trying to continue working with the community gathered around the site to make it into a kind of clearinghouse or forum on the presidential candidates in general. He writes on his blog, "I've decided that this situation, at this point, will not change my personal support for Barack Obama. What happened was just...

One of the underlying issues raised by Obama's MySpace Mess is just what it takes to build a mega-group on a big social networking site, and how to value that work. I want to get into that here. I've seen comments about this controversy suggesting that Joe Anthony's work in creating his myspace.com/barackobama profile page two-and-a-half years ago and building it to the point that he had more than 30,000 friends by the time Obama formally launched his campaign in late January was negligible, little more than stitching together some images and biographical content and then clicking "add" for all the friend requests that flowed in. But from talking with Joe, and even from Joe Rospars defensive post on the Obama site,...

It's been quite a day out here on the internets, with the blogosphere buzzing over our story yesterday of how Obama volunteer Joe Anthony lost control of his MySpace Obama page to the pros at the Obama campaign. And now it looks like we're going to have another day to chew over the story, for the candidate himself and the campaign's internet director have waded into the fray. A little while ago, just before Obama internet director put up a long post explaining his version of the events surrounding Anthony's MySpace adventure, Senator Obama personally called Anthony at home. Anthony blogs about it on his personal MySpace page, and he told me that he took the called with "mixed feelings." "This is...

In November 2004, Joe Anthony, a paralegal living in Los Angeles, started a unofficial fan page for then-newly-elected Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) on MySpace.com. Inspired by Obama's keynote address at that summer's Democratic convention, Anthony had never been politically active before. "I was just blown away," he told me. He put time into the site every day, answering emails from people wanting to "friend" the page, pointing them to voter registration information, and, once Obama threw his hat into the ring, telling them where to find out more detailed positions of the candidate. By the time of Obama's official campaign announcement in late January, Anthony's Obama profile--which had the valuable url of myspace.com/barackobama--already had more than 30,000 friends, well more...

The Web on the Candidates With John McCain formally announcing his candidacy for president yesterday (and making news by duking it out with Jon Stewart AND calling for Alberto Gonzalez to resign), and Rudy Giuliani still making waves with his blunt charge that if a Democrat is elected, more Americans will die from terror attacks on home soil, the trend in the blogosphere has tipped--perhaps for the first time this year--to the Republicans. There were close to 2000 blog posts mentioning McCain or Giuliani in the past day, compared to fewer than 1000 for the three Democratic frontrunners, according to Technorati's tracking tools. A lot of the blog references appear negative, however, like this attack on Giuliani over his references to...

Dave Winer has a provocative post up on the Quicktime videos made by Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui now in the possession of NBC. "Vlogging comes to mass murder," Dave writes. NBC should release all of the videos in Quicktime form as downloads. It's wrong to withhold them. They're sifting through them and deciding what to release and what not to release. It's 2007, and it's a decentralized world. We should all get a chance to see what's on those videos. GIven enough time the focus will go on their process, much better to just let it all out now, with no editorial judgement. I respectfully disagree. There's no obligation to put it all out there, and different news organizations are entitled to their own...

There's nothing like transparency in the campaign finance arena, and with the first quarter reports in for the 2008 presidential candidates, here are some gleanings on who is giving to whom. I personally think it's more important overall to know how much each campaign is depending on maxed-out donors and the super-fundraisers known as "bundlers" vs how much each campaign is raising from small donors, but that data isn't up yet on the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org site (my source for what follows). In the meantime, here are some interesting findings on which way the digerati are leaning in this election: Hillary Clinton has a couple of major high-tech names backing her, including Google's Vint Cerf ($4,200) and Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel...

No one doubts that MoveOn.org is one of the most powerful and versatile e-organizations of the 21st century. But a quick glance at participation rates in the group's first "Virtual Townhall" this week might make you think otherwise, as just 43,000 members voted in the straw poll that followed, not even two percent of the group's 3.2 million e-members. But figuring out what sort of participation rates matter online is a tricky process, and I think you shouldn't be fooled by these seemingly low numbers into thinking that the liberal-progressive base attached to MoveOn isn't paying attention to the primary race. Tuesday night, seven Democratic presidential candidates participated in a live web-video townhall-style meeting, the first of three the group is...