Archive: Year: 2012

From the beginning of the 2011-2012 U.S. Presidential election campaign in April 2011, there have nearly 2 billion views of videos tagged about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney on YouTube, Ramya Raghavan of YouTube Politics blogged today. Of those, just about 100 million views are of official videos made by all of the presidential campaigns, including the other Republican primary contenders. That is, just 5% of the total views of videos about the American presidential candidates is official media, as opposed to user-generated content. Back in 2008, the ratio by the end of the election was 10%, or 150 million views out of 1.5 billion, according to data from TubeMogul and Divinity Metrics, that looked solely at videos containing either Barack Obama...

The journo-political industrial complex is headed for the national party conventions this weekend, with more than 15,000 journalists along with thousands more Republican delegates, activists, party operatives and outside protesters and hangers-on expected in Tampa, Florida by Monday. This year, along with the expensive sky-boxes and even more extravagant night-time parties that the chattering class uses to mark its turf (remember, national political conventions are just like high school, only almost everyone has expense accounts and the bad kids are kept out by the Secret Service), some folks will also be showing off their tech bling. It appears, as my colleague Miranda Neubauer reported yesterday, that it isn't enough just to personally have a fancy smartphone or tablet to...

Is Barack Obama getting his online mojo back? Maybe. On Saturday, August 18th, his campaign uploaded a new video to his YouTube channel titled, "We've Come Too Far to Turn Back Now," and began promoting it with a series of emails whose subject lines were far different from the plaintive appeals for donations that have become all too familiar to anyone on his giant list. "This video gave me the chills," read the subject line from Jen O'Malley Dillon, the deputy campaign manager. "This video, right here, explains why I'm working day in and day out to win this election. When the hours are long and the fight is hard, I know that what we're doing will make a real...

The folks at Amazon have just unveiled a seductive piece of eye-candy called the "Election Heat Map of 2012" that categorizes 500 top book titles as either "red" or "blue," and then breaks out current book-buying data state-by-state, offering a near-real-time look at which political books are more popular where. Right now, 56% of the political books being purchased are "red" and 44% are "blue"--and the accompanying map suggests that people in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland and Washington, DC are the only ones swimming against that trend, with Pennsylvania the only state with neutral reading interests. At the same time, Barack Obama's long-selling "The Audacity of Hope" is outselling Mitt Romney's "No Apology: The Case for American...

Soon after launching the Politics and the Internet timeline, we saw a tweet from long-time tech publisher and visionary Tim O'Reilly, retweeting a plug from Rep. Darrell Issa, but adding "Alas, omits @carlmalamud's work RT @DarrellIssa: An interactive history of the Internet & politics...

A "single point of failure" is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. Unfortunately for transparency activists, Julian Assange has become Wikileaks' single point of failure. Assange is back in the news today because, after nearly two months of holding out in Ecuador's London embassy, he has been granted "political asylum" by the Ecuadorian government. The decision has set off a diplomatic stand-off, with the U.K. government threatening to revoke the embassy's diplomatic status, and Ecuador responding with anger. Ever since August 20, 2010, when Swedish authorities issued an international warrant for Julian Assange's arrest for suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion, the transparency site has been in crisis. "We had...

Since yesterday afternoon, when we launched the "Politics and the Internet" timeline here at techPresident, we've been getting emails and tweets suggesting additions and corrections. So, I'm going to start blogging the changes as we make them, starting with this one, and we're going to compile those changes on this page, as the timeline grows. This morning I got an email from Vint Cerf, suggesting that we add the invention of TCP/IP to the timeline. The Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol are core to the architecture of the internet, and enable computers to reliably move bits around the network, using a technique called packet-switching. I wrote him back right away (it's not every day you hear from one of...

The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), an arm of the Pew Research Center directed by Tom Rosenstiel, has a new report out on "How the Presidential Candidates Use the Web and Social Media." Let me save you some time, in case you just don't have the stamina for a 33-page report on the two campaigns' use of their website blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and the level of social media response that usage generated over a two week period in early June: Their use of these tools is highly controlled and generating a relatively weak response. Here's how PEJ puts it: In theory, digital technology allows leaders to engage in a new level of “conversation” with voters, transforming campaigning into something...

We're happy to announce techPresident's "Politics and the Internet" timeline, a living archive tracking how technology has started to change politics, government and civic life in the United States, worldwide and online, from 1968 to present. (U.S.-related events are color-coded blue, international events are in purple, and online developments are in green*). The timeline starts with the first vision of the "networked society," as described by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor, in early 1968, and the release of "Request for Comment-1," the first of many open standards planning documents that created the protocols of the Internet, in early 1969. And then it slowly unfolds, from the invention of email and the rise of the first online communities, to the release...

According to various news accounts, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney secretly met Rep. Paul Ryan on Sunday August 5th in Brookline, Mass., where the two men spent an hour in private conversation going over their relationship. Then Romney offered Ryan the VP slot, which he accepted. On Monday, August 6th, I wrote a short post called "How to Spot Romney's VP Pick in Advance," which noted that in 2008, last-minute edits to Joe Biden and Sarah Palin's Wikipedia pages were a harbinger of their announcements. I observed: None of Wikipedia entries for the current candidates being bandied about by Romney-watchers — Rob Portman, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Kelly Ayotte or Pawlenty — are currently showing anything like...