Archive: Year: 2007

The Web on the Candidates--Still Chewing on the Yearly Kos * The bigfoots of the press were all in Chicago this past weekend for YearlyKos, and they churned out lots of coverage. So did the littlefoots of the web. Some highlights: --The Veracifier team behind Josh Marshall's TPMtv churned out more than two dozen short video reports from the convention. (How is that humanly possible?) So far their clip of the candidates discussing lobbyist money during the Leadership Forum is showing signs of going viral, with more than 11,000 views as of this morning. I also enjoyed their post-debate interview with the NYTimes' Matt Bai, who served as one of the three moderators, who explains nicely his relationship to the political blogosphere....

The techPresident team left YearlyKos yesterday evening, before Markos Moulitsas's keynote, and we're taking today off to catch our breath and nurse our sore feet (it was not for nothing that some were calling YK the "Blogger Exercise Conference"). Here are a couple of quick thoughts and quick links in case you can't enjoy a Sunday in August without your techPresident hit: * They're renaming YearlyKos "Netroots Nation" for next year, making the separation from the DailyKos blog more formal. But there's also rumblings in the small-n netroots that this year's convention got away from them and into the hands of far too many professional activist shops. On the other hand, people also seem to have enjoyed the cross-fertilization that occurred...

The YearlyKos Presidential Candidates forum has just ended and I want to get a quick post up as I wait for the Obama breakout to begin. Topline impressions: While the crowd was clearly most friendly to Edwards (no surprise given the baseline polling that DailyKos does of its readers), Obama gained the most. In response to Edwards' call on all the candidates to stop taking contributions from Washington lobbyists, Clinton insisted that she couldn't be affected by whoever gave her money and Obama--who seemed to hold back for the first half of the 90 minute event--swung around to chide her, saying that he disagrees with the "notion that lobbyists don't have disproportionate influence. Hillary, you can't tell me they didn't...

Bill O'Reilly may think he's taking on DailyKos with his seemingly daily attacks on the liberal mega-site. But if you look at the numbers, he's doing them a huge favor. According to Jotter, a Kos blogger who has made an art form of digesting and analyzing the site's user data, in the last seven days, the site has gained 1,959 new registered members--483 in just the last day. Compare that to the 6,168 new members that joined the DailyKos community in the three months from April-June, and you've got a whopping boost in DailyKos's popularity. It has a total of 131,738 registered members in all, making it the equivalent of a small city. According to Alexa, traffic to DailyKos has also...

I'm at the panel on the "Evolution and Integration of the Blogosphere" panel, which was originally going to have the word "professionalization" in the title, its moderator Chris Bowers of OpenLeft says. The panelists are Duncan Black (Atrios), Tracy Russo (Edwards campaign blogger), Ali Savino (Center for Independent Media), Amanda Marcotte (Pandagon), Matt Stoller (OpenLeft.com) and Amanda Terkel (Think Progress). As with all liveblogging, don't use these as direct quotes. I've added a few parenthetical comments on my own in italics. Chris Bowers starts out by asking: In terms of traffic, the top 50 national blogs who focus on politics has remained almost identical for the last two years. Instead of starting their own blogs, new people blog at DailyKos or...

Did Hillary Clinton bug out of the YearlyKos presidential candidates' breakout sessions on Saturday, or was she never in? This evening, after DNC chair Howard Dean's keynote, one of the conference organizers made a couple of announcements, including the news that while Clinton would be attending the main candidates' forum, which will be in somewhat of a traditional Q&A format with the other candidates, she was not going to be able to attend the one-on-one breakout that is immediately following, and instead would be represented by her senior advisor Ann Lewis. This announcement was greeted by loud boos from most of the 1500 people in the room. Many of them had picked Clinton as their breakout choice and are now grumbling...

...Overheard and not understood: 60s icon and antiwar activist Tom Hayden looked at the schedule of the dozens of workshops happening here and said to my colleague Andrew Rasiej, "I can't believe that there's nothing about Iraq." Actually, there is a session on public opinion, Iraq and the 2008 campaign, but it does appear there isn't a specifically antiwar session on the agenda. Curious. ...Barack Obama is apparently winning the wristband poll among registered attendees, who have to pick one of the candidates' bands when they sign in, so they can get into the one-on-one sessions that each of the presidentials attending will be doing Saturday afternoon, after the main presidential forum. I'm told that Obama's session is full, in fact,...

Here are my quickly taken notes on the DNC's panel on how the presidential campaigns are innovating online. Note: these are my rough transciption of what was said; not exact quotes. Four campaign are represented here: Obama (Joe Rospars and Josh Orton), Dodd (Tim Tagaris and Matt Browner-Hamlin), the Edwards campaign (Tracy Russo) and the Richardson campaign (Joaquin Guerra and Andrea Johnson): Josh McConaha, Internet director of the DNC introduces the group, noting that he has worked with each of these people at one point or another. Joe Rospars and Josh Orton from Obama go first: Rospars: "In general we are excited that there has been grassroots energy across the country, building a strong foundation for whoever the nominee is. We have seen...

So, this afternoon I got an email reading, "Howard Dean sent you a message on Facebook." (This is after I decided to accept his friend invitation yesterday.) Well, it wasn't really from Dean. What I did get was an email from the person who is paid to "be" Howard Dean on Facebook, or rather, one of the staffers behind his profile, Stephanie Taylor, the managing editor of Democrats.org. I wish I could say I was disappointed to not hear directly from the Governor, but this is what I expected. Let's parse what she wrote: This is Stephanie Taylor, one of the Democratic Party staffers behind Governor Dean's new Facebook profile. You asked yesterday how we expect to use this profile. I'll...

Like most Facebook users, every day I get a few "friend" requests in my email, and most of the time, I accept, though I'm mainly hearing from people I actually know, or from people with whom I share enough real friends that I feel comfortable having a "loose tie" with them. Extended social networks are useful, and I'm under no illusion that all these people are the kind of friends that I'd let sleep on my couch or roam through my refrigerator. But today, I got a friend request from Howard Dean, the DNC chair and former presidential candidate. Normally, I'd just say no to a friend request from a politician, for a couple of reasons. First, as editor of two...