Archive: Year: 2008

Ralph Nader is running for president, again. But he has a problem: he doesn't understand the web as well as the web understands him. Message to Ralph: It's not the 1970s any more. It's not even the 1990s any more. In 2000, when Nader made his first serious run for president, he had a substantial base of supporters. (Full disclosure: I was among them.) But that was before the real flowering of the web and the networked public sphere. In 2004, he ran again, but--for obvious reasons--he was far less popular. (You can read some of my criticisms back then here, here and here.) The rationale for his candidacy--that there were no serious differences between John Kerry and George Bush--made...

Does the left have a monopoly on funny satire? Does Final Cut Pro only work on computers owned by progressives? Or is it something in the water? What makes some people "viderate" and others embarrassingly illiterate in what works with online video? I don't know the answer, but this new "No, You Can't -- No, Se Puede" video by the old(!) Billionaires for Bush crowd is the latest "parage" (parody/homage) to hit YouTube in the wake of Will.i.am's hugely popular "Yes, We Can." And it's pretty snarky. Actually, I take it back, clearly owning a Final Cut Pro and possessing an ability to sing does not translate into great political video for some:...

Esther Dyson, a longtime tech industry watcher and pioneer, has an interesting piece up on Huffington Post that I think has relevance for politics online. In "Don't Cry For Me, MicroHoogle," she looks at the current hullaballoo over the Microsoft-Yahoo! potential merger, and argues that "the long-term news is happening closer to home - where users interact among themselves through the Web and through online social networks." On the one hand, she notes how behavioral targeting is getting more precise, as companies ranging from search giant Google to start-ups you've never heard of learn how to work with internet service providers to track users directly (albeit anonymized) and show them highly relevant ads. This approach, she predicts, will get more competitive...

You know when something is spreading online when your friends ask you about it spontaneously. That's how I heard about feminist Robin Morgan's online rallying cry for Hillary Clinton, "Goodbye To All That (#2)," which has been circulating widely since she posted it on the Women's Media Center website on February 2nd. And then Chelsea Clinton started forwarding it around...

The latest news on the Democratic fundraising front is this: * The Clinton campaign announced today that, since Super Tuesday, it had raised $10 million online from more than 100,000 donors. Campaign internet director Peter Daou said in a press release that ""This is a major development in this race. Hillary has always had millions of strong supporters nationwide -- now those supporters are beginning to give online in large numbers." I asked him this afternoon if these were first-time or repeat donors, and he told me, "Virtually all of it is from new donors." * Late yesterday, Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton put out word that "We’ve raised well more than the Clinton campaign this month but more importantly...

The online fundraising war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has turned into a daily battle of the press releases, and it's hard to say for sure what the numbers truly mean. Late yesterday, in response to Obama's $7.6 million haul post Super Tuesday, Clinton internet director Peter Daou put out word that Hillary had raised more than $9 million online since that day. Posting on Daily Kos, he wrote: I wanted to give you an update on the campaign's fundraising over the past 72 hours. The day after Super Tuesday, we set a goal of $3 million in 3 days, but broke through that target in less than 24 hours, raising over $4 million in the first day. We then raised the goal...

The Web on the Candidates * Mike Connery of FutureMajority.com (and a member of the techPresident blogger family) digs into the youth turnout numbers from CIRCLE that I cited here yesterday, and produces two interesting assertions. First, that based on current youth turnout in the primaries, the Democratic advantage among young voters "is huge and growing." He projects the gap will rise from a 54-45% split D-R in 2004 to 65-34% in 2008. He also notes that on the Republican side, Mike Huckabee appears to be winning the largest share of the youth vote. * danah boyd isn't the only California voter who is wondering whether her vote got counted last Tuesday. There are reports that in LA along, 94,000 independent voters...

Josh is away at a conference in Italy, so yours truly is filling in for him. If you miss his sardonic musings about these pearls of pop culture, don't worry, he'll be back next week. And with no further ado, here are our favorite political videos of the week: Number 8: "Corruption" (by the Mike Gravel campaign) He may no longer appear to be campaigning since he's been excluded from the debates, but Mike Gravel is still running, at least in the land of multimedia. Here is his team's latest effort, a slap at the whole money-drenched presidential campaign finance system. Only 200 views so far. Something tells us Gravel is going to keep running, and not as a Democrat, all the...

The Web on the Candidates * As it becomes more likely that the Democratic nomination will be decided by the so-called superdelegates, the folks at Politicalbase are building out a detailed list on their wiki, and their tech team is building a tool that will allow anyone to send an email to all 796 of them, Mark Nickolas, their managing editor, told techPresident. He added, "Of course, getting good e-mails for all 796 is one of our top goals right now, as well." * Declan McCullagh reports that in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama by 54.8% to 39.3% of the vote, nearly double her statewide margin. Writing on CNet, he argues that for all...

I just got back home from a quick business trip to Israel, and literally arrived at JFK at 6am this morning to learn all of the results from the Uber-Tuesday primaries. So forgive me if this post seems like it was written at 35,000 feet. But I think if we take a step back from the state-by-state results and look at the broader picture, I think a bold statement is in order. If it were not for the internet, and all the campaign- and voter-generated activism that it has enabled, Hillary Clinton would already be the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, and Barack Obama or another reform-minded candidate would be trailing badly. (On the Republican side, it's harder to make such a...