Archive: Year: 2008

Michael Brown, the man who made "Dear Mr. Obama," the viral video that is currently exploding on YouTube among supporters of John McCain and the Iraq War, is a professional film-maker with about a dozen years of experience under his belt running a company called Testimony Pictures. He's made one full-length feature, and lots of shorter videos, mostly for the Christian market. (You can find some samples of his work here and here.) But, he says, "I've never done anything like this before," and he is completely overwhelmed by the reaction to the video. Over the course of a half hour phone call, he told me that he is independent of any political operation. "I don't know anybody in the McCain...

If you are one of the 41% of Americans who think the US invasion of Iraq was not a mistake, it looks like this video, showing a wounded veteran, Army Specialist Joe Cook, speaking in support of John McCain, could be your viral video of election 2008. As of this morning, "Dear Mr. Obama" has garnered more than 4.8 million views since being posted on August 27. Cook's heartfelt and straightforward attack on Obama for calling the Iraq war a mistake is clearly striking a chord, and my guess is this video will soon be hitting the cable channels and the mainstream media. Which raises the question: Who made it? Was this made by someone with ties to the McCain...

They're also having a national election in Canada, in case you haven't noticed, and in honor of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's dropping of the writ (that's what they call the dissolution of Parliament and the calling of new elections, I'm told), we're dropping our own writ, adding two new charts to track how the Canadian candidates are doing online. For starters, we've got a Facebook chart tracking the daily count of how many "friends" each of the candidates are garnering, and a Technorati chart showing how often their names are being mentioned on blogs. What do these numbers mean? The web is both a great barometer of interest in politics as well as an organizing and communications tool. Friending someone on...

Online fundraising seems to work best when underlying receptivity to a message combines with a sense of urgency. Thus, last week, immediately after John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his VP pick, his campaign received a huge wave of donations -- $4.5 million in the first 24 hours, reportedly. That was the Republican base waking up. Now, I suspect we are going to see an even bigger haul for Barack Obama today and tomorrow. If the Palin pick woke up the conservative evangelical community that, until now, was lukewarm on McCain, the hard-edged speeches from last night's Republican convention, which were watched widely (compared to Tuesday night, when GOP ratings slumped) by voters of all stripes, are not just firing up...

While network TV has cut back its coverage of the national political conventions to an hour a night, and within that hour we often get more of the network "stars" bloviating than straightforward speechifying from the convention floor, the internet is, as my colleague Andrew Rasiej likes to say, "the Tivo of our times." A glance back at the speeches and media moments in Denver and their YouTube views suggests a couple of episodes must have strong word-of-mouth, since people are going to watch the stuff they heard about but missed. These include: John Kerry's speech, which was widely praised as one of the best of his career: More than 55,000 views on BarackObama's YouTube channel and nearly 45,000 views on...

The Web on the Candidates * There was a ton of live blogging, twittering and videoblogging last night, and we're not going to attempt to summarize it all here. Personally, I found glancing at Twitscoop, which shows the hottest terms on Twitter at any given moment, to be a wonderful way to take the pulse of the watch-erati as we all waited for Obama's acceptance speech. There were lots of obvious winners, like Crow (for Sheryl Crow) and Legend (for John Legend), but who knew that displaced manufacturing worker, average guy speaker and lifelong Republican Barney Smith would be such a hit? Obviously his line "We need a president who puts Barney Smith before Smith Barney," hit the populist chord of...

Here are two words that have yet to be uttered from the stage of the Democratic National Convention: BarackObama.com or Democrats.org. I've slogged through the posted transcripts of the first three days speeches in Denver, and using the "find" tool on Firefox could not find one occurrence of either phrase. Considering that the Democratic convention is drawing a healthy nightly TV audience of perhaps 25 million prime-time viewers, you've got to count this as more than just a minor slip by Team Obama. As I wrote last week, the party conventions are still very much conceived as "made for television" events, and the past three days have certainly succeeded at delivering a number of telegenic and well-timed TV moments, from...

Will bloggers armed with cheap, high-tech tools change the news, or will the age-old rule that the closer you get to the powerful, the harder it is for you to criticize them, hold? That question is on my mind as I watch, from afar, as Denver plays host not just to 15,000 credentialed traditional journalists, but also several hundred bloggers (many with credentials, some without). In many ways, the political blogosphere arose as many people reacted angrily and critically to a traditional press that they saw as too close to their subjects, or too intimidated by the powerful to report on them critically. Now that many bloggers are getting access too (and status), will they fall to the same dynamic? I've been...

My friend Jay Rosen noticed a tweet from me earlier where I said I wasn't going to the conventions this year, and instead planned to "watch the web watch the conventions." He wrote back asking how I planned "to add value to and interact with the convention?" Here's an extended version of what I wrote back to him in response. I'm not sure how or if I can add any value to, or interact with the convention. Frankly, I don't think the official convention is much interested in interaction with its audience, unfortunately, as I noted in a post a few days ago. And having been to party conventions going back to 1984, I don't particularly have a need to witness...

When will the political conventions enter the Connected Age? That question has been bouncing around my mind recently as we at techPresident keep fielding phone calls from reporters doing stories on Barack Obama's decision to announce his VP choice first by text message. Don't get me wrong: It's a great attention-grabbing gimmick, and it's helping his campaign build a powerful new way to reach people (primarily the young), but it's hardly a revolution in politics.When will the political conventions enter the Connected Age? That question has been bouncing around my mind recently as we at techPresident keep fielding phone calls from reporters doing stories on Barack Obama's decision to announce his VP choice first by text message. Don't get me...