I think this picture says it pretty clearly. In the last two weeks, Barack Obama has gained nearly 400,000 new friends on Facebook, a 20% increase in that short period of time. Wow. I guess the surge is working....
It's been clear for some time that the McCain campaign is way behind the Obama campaign in all kinds of social media metrics. Obama has more that twice as many unique visitors to his website (not a good sign if you assume that a good deal of this traffic is coming from last-minute deciders), four times as many views of his YouTube videos, four times as many friends on MySpace, four times as many friends on Facebook, etc. But maybe all that webby stuff doesn't matter as much as the ability to turn out the troops on the ground. But in that respect, I've also been struck by what seems to be a big imbalance in the two campaigns'...
Courtesy the good folks at Google, we've got a real-time election results map. It has separate layers for Presidential, House and Senate races, showing results down to the county level. The map updates in real time as the AP posts votes, and shows data at the county level if you zoom in, or at the state level if you're zoomed out. For the presidential race, it also be keeping track of the electoral count as states are called for one candidate or the other....
We've been arguing for a while here on techPresident that the candidate who best used the internet to enable his supporters to join in co-creating the campaign would have a big edge come November. Now we're seeing what Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, called the rise of the "long tail of politics": tremendous metrics as the Obama get-out-the-vote operation goes into the final stretch. Some examples: -In just the last three weeks, reports Amy Hamblin, Obama supporters using myBO created 50,000 new campaign events, on top of the 150,000 they had initiated in the previous 18 months. -The campaign now counts 27,000 groups formed on myBO. -More than 13.3 million individual voter contacts so far, according to a conference call last night with...
Valdis Krebs, whose social network maps of the relationships between political book purchasers on Amazon have periodically graced our pixels, has a new post up taking one last look at the shifting patterns that can be discovered by looking at the list of top-selling political books and tracing which other political books are also popular among those book-buyers, and you will be surprised by what he has found. The biggest news, in my personal opinion, is his discovery that buyers of popular conservative titles--books like Obama Nation and Liberal Fascism--are also buying Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky's seminal work on community organizing! (Technically, Krebs data shows that buyers of Alinsky's work are also highly likely to buy the other two titles,...
The election is a week away, but two new online projects were just launched focusing on involving the public in what comes next. BigDialog.org and Whitehouse2.org are complimentary efforts that seek to crowd-source the process of putting pressing questions before the President-elect and identifying the top priorities of the public. We don't know yet if the next President will join in and respond, but if these sites garner a lot of participation, he'd be wise to pay attention. BigDialog's "Ask the President-Elect" is a project of the Massachusetts-based eCitizen Foundation, the MIT eCitizen Architecture Program, Dave Colarusso's CommunityCounts, techPresident.com, the OpenDebate coalition, and a growing list of academics, bloggers, nonprofits and e-communities. The site builds on our experience during the primaries...
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...
