Archive: Category: TechPresident

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...

Barack Obama's promise to announce his VP pick by text-message -- a smart and obvious ploy to sign up mobile users for future campaign communications -- has been getting a lot of attention this past week, not just from us, but also in a smart op-ed by our friend Garrett Graff in the New York Times, and also today in a (rare for him) catch-up story by the Times' Brian Stelter. What I hadn't noticed in all this coverage was a quiet but probably more important development: The Obama campaign just rolled out its new mobile platform, m.barackobama.com, which is expressly designed to work on most mobile phones that have internet access. Scott Goodstein, the Obama team's mobile guru, has...

"The One," the McCain campaign's YouTube video poking at Oprah Winfrey's reference to Barack Obama's supposed chosenness, recently topped 1 million views (making it McCain's second most viral video). You may think the ad is just needling Obama (and his fans) for some of their more chest-thumping moments (i.e. "we are the ones we have been waiting for), and the general reaction to it from the political pundits was that the ad was amusing, that mocking Obama for being messianic was a bit tough but that mostly this was evidence of the McCain campaign starting to take the gloves off. Next story, please. Well, maybe it's worth another look. The Matthew 25 movement--a group of progressive evangelicals that runs a...

It's been a while since I've checked in on our charts tracking how the campaigns are doing on the web, and even though we're now firmly headed into the August doldrums before the national conventions, some interesting trends are worth noting. * Obama continues to dominate the online social network arena, gaining another 125,000 friends on Facebook in the last month. * In terms of site traffic, it looks like July was McCain's best month ever. Hitwise shows him peaking at nearly 30% of all web traffic (with Obama taking the rest); Compete's data shows a similar boost for the Arizona Senator. Keep in mind that while his share is up, the overall amount of visits presidential campaign sites is way...

This morning, the Commission on Presidential Debates and MySpace are announcing "MyDebates.org,," a "landmark partnership" that they claim "will do for the debates what TV did in 1960 for the Nixon Kennedy election." Their joint press release says this new site "will offer a host of interactive tools for viewers to virally engage in the political process." The release notes that "marks the first time that the CPD has paired with an Internet property to include online functionality into the event series and traditional debate format." Unfortunately, the CPD's landmark is little more than a shack. At best.This morning, the Commission on Presidential Debates and MySpace are announcing "MyDebates.org,," a "landmark partnership" that they claim "will do for the debates...