Archive: Year: 2008

Quote of the day, from the NYTimes story on Obama making Florida competitive: “I’ve gotten seven calls from live Obama volunteers — and the reason I’m getting calls is because I signed up on their Web site to get notifications from their campaign,” said Sally Bradshaw, a Republican who was a senior political adviser to Jeb Bush, the former governor. Ms. Bradshaw, who supported Mitt Romney in the primary, had signed up for the list to keep informed about a rival. “I haven’t received any McCain calls,” she said. For a glimpse at the innards of the Obama calling operation, check out this page: If you drill down, you will discover all kinds of targeted groups, such as "Italian to Italian Peer to Peer...

How much is YouTube worth to a presidential campaign? To start to answer this question, I asked the folks at TubeMogul, whose charts have been powering our YouTube charts for the last 18 months, if they would run a simple calculation for us. If you take each one of Barack Obama's more than 1,650 videos on YouTube, and multiply its individual number of views with its length, how much time would that be in total? Same for McCain. David Burch of TubeMogul ran the numbers, and here's what he came up with: The total in absolute time (views * video length): Obama 14,548,809.05 hours; McCain 488,093.01 hours That's a lot of free video! Even if people don't watch all of a video (and...

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, who just endorsed Barack Obama, tells Arianna Huffington, another Obama supporter, that "We are witnessing the end of Rovian politics," thanks to the internet and tools like YouTube. And Huffington amplifies his point, writing today: Thanks to YouTube -- and blogging and instant fact-checking and viral emails -- it is getting harder and harder to get away with repeating brazen lies without paying a price, or to run under-the-radar smear campaigns without being exposed. Leaving aside the fact that both Schmidt and Huffington are both rooting for Obama to win, and therefore are inclined to color every McCain attack in the darkest terms possible, I think they have a point. Something significant has changed in just the...

From a very memorable good-bye letter written by hedge fund manager Andrew Lahde, who made an 870 percent gain last year and is now quitting Wall Street and the whole merry-go-round: (h/t to Andrew Sullivan) May meritocracy be part of a new form of government, which needs to be established. On the issue of the U.S. Government, I would like to make a modest proposal. First, I point out the obvious flaws, whereby legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress over the past eight years, which would have reigned in the predatory lending practices of now mostly defunct institutions. These institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislation designed to protect...

Al Giordano, blogging at The Field, puts his finger on the two most interesting elements of the Obama campaign's September fundraising success. First, buried in campaign manager David Plouffe's video announcement of a record-breaking $150 million haul is this significant bit of math: With an average contribution of $86 that means that more than 1.7 million people donated last month. Plouffe reports that September brought 632,000 new donors. The interesting number to me is the remainder: more than one million people out of almost 2.5 million that had given earlier in the year gave again in September. I agree with Al: the more than one million people re-upping on their support for Obama is a mighty affirmation of the campaign's small donor...

A few days ago, I started looking at the ground game of both presidential campaigns, sifting through the available data about all the events in the field that volunteers were creating using the campaigns' online tools. The differences between Obama and McCain were stark. Now comes more evidence of a lopsided battle in their voter contact operations. Right now, both the Obama and McCain campaigns are hard at work mobilizing their supporters to get out and talk to voters, either by knocking on doors or making phone calls. And both campaigns have built online tools designed to make it easy for volunteers to generate call lists or walk lists. Obama's is called "Neighbor to Neighbor"; McCain's is called "Voter to...

Here's a big Friday afternoon trans-Atlantic cheer for my partner Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and co-founder and publisher of this blog. He just won an "eDemocracy 2008" award from the World eDemocracy Forum at its ninth annual meeting in Paris. The forum's organizers cited his work founding MOUSE in New York City, which trains thousands of students to be school system administrators; his service on a city task force addressing the broadband needs and the digital divide (humorously translated as the "numeric gap!"); his longstanding efforts to advise US politicians on tech issues; and his founding of PdF and techPresident. Kudos, Andrew!...

With the election 20 days away, both major presidential campaigns are focusing more of their energies on the "ground game" of galvanizing their volunteer base and getting out the vote. Both campaigns' websites make it easy for supporters to search for upcoming events near them (Obama's Events page is here; McCain's is both on his home page and here), but the other night while playing around with both sites' tools, I discovered that Obama's campaign will also allow you to export the resulting list as a structured data file, which for the geeks in the audience is like manna from heaven. In particular, you can get a KML file, which is short for "Keyhole Markup Language"--which means you can easily...

You can look up the hard numbers of "friends" each campaign has on Facebook or MySpace here on techPresident, and you can track the ups and downs of the candidates on the blogs, or see how their web traffic is doing. But here are some of the more esoteric and intriguing nuggets of meta-data I've found lying around the web in the last few days: -# of upcoming McCain events happening within a 25 mile radius of Orlando, Florida: 8 -# of upcoming Obama events happening within a 25-mile radius of Orlando: 84 -# of upcoming McCain events within a 25-mile radius of Dayton, Ohio: 8 -# of upcoming Obama events within a 25-mile radius of Dayton: 57 -# of photos posted to Flickr...

Is it possible to build a successful web portal and community hub around issues and activism? So far, no one has succeeded in this quest, though there a lot of people trying and one could argue that sites as diverse as DailyKos.com, Townhall.com, and Idealist.org each play this kind of role for tens of thousands of reader/members, and projects like the Facebook Causes platform built by Project Agape, Razoo, Changing the Present, Donors Choose and Kiva.org each have somewhat similar aspirations. One of the longer-distance runners in this search for the holy grail of social change organizing online is Ben Rattray of Change.org, who Josh Levy and I wrote up back in December 2007. Back then, Change.org was going through its...