Archive: Category: TechPresident

The Republican National Committee just launched a new online game called Scariest Democrat, a Halloween-themed contest attacking the Democratic presidential field that invites visitors to "click on the Scariest Democrat." Complete with creepy sound-effects, the site drew 65,000 visitors by 4pm on its first day, and RNC e-campaign manager Cyrus Krohn told Marc Ambinder that "nearly 9,000 people had spent the time to give the RNC their e-mail address in order to vote." (The winner, by an overwhelming margin, was Hillary Clinton.) But Josh McConaha, the Democratic National Committee's internet director, isn't impressed by these numbers. He compared the RNC's latest push to a recent online letter-writing campaign the DNC did around the S-Chip bill, and his numbers suggest the...

Nine more videos were added to 10Questions Monday, bringing the total to 56. We were flirting with hitting 20,000 votes from nearly 5,000 users, and attention was spread widely across the site, with even the least viewed videos earning at least 25 votes. We had about 3,000 unique visits, with top referrers being Hugh Hewitt, MSNBC, Digg, the New York Times, Huffington Post, Crooks and Liars, Balloon-Juice.com, organic Google search and PoliticsTV. Newer videos are moving up to the front page regularly, with questions touching on how to pay for the Iraq war, how to classify the "war on terrorism," and asking whether "America is unofficially a theocracy" leading the pack. YouTube user kameny's question about warrantless wiretapping has the most...

Our first weekend saw about 7,000 unique visits over Saturday and Sunday, bringing 10Questions.com to a total of nearly 24,000 since launch. Among our co-sponsors, the weekend saw big news portals like MSNBC and the New York Times move up in their impact on traffic compared to more partisan blog sites. The number of video questions submitted rose to 47, and we went past 17,700 votes cast by 4,600 individual participants. That means, roughly speaking, if you count the two days of the weekend like one weekday, we’re still on a pace of seeing about 4,000-5,000 new votes a day and about 1,100 to 1,200 new voters joining in each day. We’ll see if those trends continue this week. One other useful...

As I wrote over the weekend, there is definitely a Dodd boomlet happening among the netroots. The DailyKos October straw poll shows him soundly in second place, rising from 7% to 21% and supplanting Barack Obama. Considering that the September 24 poll of Kossacks showed Dodd in fourth, well behind John Edwards, Obama and Hillary Clinton, this is quite a shift. Not only that, his campaign told me it raised $200,000 in just 36 hours around Dodd's announcement that he would put a hold on the current FISA wiretapping legislation and filibuster it if necessary. They're also saying visits to his site are up tenfold as well as email signups, but our Hitwise data doesn't yet show a traffic bump. Other signs...

We received an email today from Ole Tangen Jr., the English Editor of "The BOBs" telling us that techPresident has been nominated "as one of the best blogs in the world" out of more than 7,000 submitted. Yikes! We're not worthy! Seriously, the Best of the Blogs Awards - The BOBs - is an annual blog competition sponsored by Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster (think Germany's BBC). The BOBs consider sites from 10 different languages and claims to be the biggest international blog competition in the world. Tangen wrote: "Your innovative use of the blog form to track the ongoing presidential election has led our users and jury to nominate you for the Best Weblog category." Go here to cast your votes for your...

There's something brewing on the left side of the web, and it just might mean good news for Chris Dodd's presidential candidacy. Take a look at the bump in his blog mentions on our Technorati chart. The last time he stood out from the second-tier pack anywhere near this much was at the beginning August, when he went on the Bill O'Reilly show and his staff quickly made sure the video circulated at the YearlyKos conference and elsewhere online. Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers are both asking "why not Dodd?" in side-by-side posts on their influential blog OpenLeft, prompted not just by Dodd's promise to filibuster the current FISA bill but also other gutsy (to them) positions he has taken on...

Here are the highlights of our third full day (Friday, October 19). Ten more video questions came in, and we hit a total more than 12,000 votes from just over 3,500 voters. Roughly speaking, that means we’ve been seeing about 4,000 new votes a day and about 1,200 new voters a day. However, Friday’s web traffic was down from earlier in the week, roughly 3,900 unique visits compared to Thursday’s 7,100. The site’s “top videos” page also saw its first shift in leaders, as a question about “warrantless wiretapping” displaced a question about “transparency” as the top question on the site. A number of blogs have been pointing to that question, which no doubt helps explains the shift. The top sources of...

Here are the highlights of our second full day out in the world (October 18): More of our co-sponsors chimed in with posts, and we started getting some solid news stories about 10questions as well. (See below.) Over the course of the day, we had more than 7,100 unique visits, a solid increase over our first day, and average time on the site was nearly 2 minutes, with 2.2 pages/visit. There were 29 videos submitted in all, with a total of nearly 8,500 votes cast from 2,300 voters (up from 4,100 yesterday). In sum, things are going well! News coverage: Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/18/MNDQSRPE1.DTL&type=politics Mark Glaser, PBS Mediashift: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/10/top_5_week_eightytwo.html Steve Johnson, Chicago Tribune: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/technology_internetcritic/2007/10/weve-already-se.html Sarah Lai Stirland, Wired: http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/10/candidate_videos?currentPage=all Linkage from co-sponsors: Blip.tv: http://blog.blip.tv/blog/ BlogHer:...

10Questions.com had a very successful launch yesterday. At least 20 of our co-sponsors posted about the launch, generating nearly 5,500 unique visits in the first 24 hours (more than half coming between the hours of 7pm and 10pm!). The average visit time was 2.5 minutes and visitors averaged about 2.5 pages per visit. So far we’ve logged about 5,200 votes from about 1,700 voters, from every state, and the rate of multiple vote attempts is down at just 3% of that. We also got some strong and positive pick-ups in online media, including Jose Vargas on the WashPost's Trail blog, Ben Smith’s Politico blog and Danny Glover’s Beltway Blogroll. Smith wrote: The smart site TechPresident just launched, in cooperation with the New York...

The Web on the Candidates * The Nobel Prizes are due out this week, with the Peace Prize announcement on Friday, and that means speculation about Al Gore's political future is going to rise. Indeed, a glance at our "undecided" chart for blog mentions of Gore (powered by Technorati) shows a spike already for the former VP, Oscar winner and best-selling author. Grass-roots activists for a Gore candidacy appear to have united in a national coalition at America for Gore, and the Washington Times' Christina Bellantoni reports that "state movements to draft Al Gore for a presidential bid are strengthening." * With Facebook holding a "Political Summit" tomorrow at the Hyatt Regency in DC, aimed at educating the political community "how Facebook...