Archive: Year: 2008

I ran across this little course-change by Hillary Clinton's campaign in Ben Smith's always-useful blog. In the course of a coffee-stop in Durham, NH, Hillary Clinton said she'd been working all her life "to improve the lives of young people" and pledged "to make sure you have the tools you need to make the most out of your own lives." Smith then notes: Her campaign also just announced that it's going to allow Facebook users to ask her questions directly through Facebook, and that she'll respond in videos to the "Ask Hillary" feature. Indeed, they have a form on their website where you can post a question and get an email letting you know when "you can tune back in for Hillary's...

I've been sick with the flu since last night and barely keeping up with anything. But in one of my (rare) lucid moments today I came across this post by "Lower Manhattanite" on The Group News Blog, a site that continues in the spirit of Steve Gilliard's News Blog. I'm white (and Jewish). Too often we whites assume that everyone else is like us, and I suspect, this unconscious impulse is even more prevalent online, since you usually can't tell a person's race or ethnicity simply from reading a blog post by them. (That's why we did a panel at last year's PdF conference entitled, "Is cyberspace colorblind?") If you're white, I think LM's post, which he titled "Pride and Palpitations,"...

Do younger voters have something to tell the rest of America? The League of Young Voters and MoveOn.org Political Action are betting that they do, and along with a growing coalition of youth-oriented groups, they are launching a "Facebook Primary" application aimed at highlighting the views of voters under the age of 35. In essence, they're launching a virtual presidential primary in every school and college in America today, along with many workplaces and localities. The primary is the most innovative political use of the Facebook Platform that I have seen so far, and if the League of Young Voters' application takes off, the primary could have a galvanizing effect among the millions of young people who spend upwards of...

...the results would be as blurry as any other poll of Democratic primary voters (except for the appearance of Congressman Dennis Kucinich bunched alongside Barack Obama, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton in the top four, each hovering a few points above or below 20%). That's only conclusion possible from today's announcement from MoveOn.org Political Action, which sent out an email to its members in response to queries about whether the group would be making an endorsement in the race. Says the group's Adam Ruben, "Over the past year, we've been asking about 30,000 MoveOn members each week, picked at random, to tell us who you favored in the Democratic presidential primary. It wasn't a binding vote, but it helped us...

We already know that most presidential candidate websites are notoriously bereft of in-depth information about the candidates, other than a few hand-picked issue memos and the usual biographical fluffery. But we didn't know until today just how poorly these sites do in attracting attention from the most active denizens of the political web. This survey on DailyKos of its readers shows that most net-roots activists could care less about campaign websites. About half of the people responding said they NEVER visit candidate websites, and about another third said they rarely do. In the comments thread, you can get a glimpse of the sorts of things that would make candidate websites more useful, like: -their voting records -less spin -fewer video clips (for people dependent...

Social network guru Valdis Krebs has posted a new version of his classic illustration of political polarization in America, as viewed by the book-buying habits of Amazon's customers. Using Amazon's "also bought" data, he shows that the market for political books is clearly divided between "blue" and "red" book-buyers, with only a few titles crossing over to both audiences. Thus, buyers of "The Fall of the House of Bush" by Craig Unger were very likely to buy, say, Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal," while readers of Glenn Beck's "An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems" also liked John Bolton's ""Surrender Is Not an Option." Among the few "purple" crossovers: Lou Dobbs' ""Independents Day." I've included...