Archive: Category: TechPresident

It's been about a week since Mitt Romney's campaign launched the most interactive experiment of any we've seen come from the Republican side of the presidential field, calling on their supporters to submit 30- or 60-second TV ads, mashing up a rich array of clips, audio and photos provided by the campaign. It's a smart way for the campaign to engage grass-roots supporters, and to also erase any memories people may have of Romney's reluctance to participate in the Republican YouTube debate. And, as a number of observers predicted, it's also a bit of a double-edged sword. So far, nearly 600 people have jumped in, using Yahoo's Jumpcut video editing platform to create and/or comment on some 76 submissions. The experiment also...

In the wake of Senator Larry Craig's sudden departure from Congress, don't miss Jose Antonio Vargas's lengthy profile of Mike Rogers, the blogger who has made it his crusade to out closeted politicians who are anti-gay. It's fascinating to learn about how Rogers got going: The way Rogers tells it, his online activism began when the Republican-controlled Senate scheduled a vote against same-sex marriage in June 2004. The birth of the Internet has been a boon for gay socializing and organizing, and one of the first things Rogers did was post a profile on Gay.com, a popular site among gays. The profile read: "If you're against the Federal Marriage Amendment and know someone who's closeted, send that information to me." And while...

Want to dress up your website with political data? Just add a widget or badge to your site. Here are a couple of fun options you can play with: Just out from the good folks at Maplight.org: Presidential fundraising widgets that you can customize by color, size and which candidates you want to display. Maplight has also started publishing an API for web developers who want to display or share up-to-date campaign contribution info from the FEC. Both services are free and open source. The free widgets are funded by MAPLight.org's $25,000 first prize win at the NetSquared Innovation awards, a contest for the best nonprofit technology project worldwide, and by the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington, DC-based foundation dedicated to government transparency....

I happened to catch William Gibson on NPR this morning, being interviewed about his new book "Spook Country", which I'm enjoying reading. The interviewer asked him if he thought we were heading toward a world where technology makes it possible for Big Brother to watch our every move, and Gibson's answer stuck with me. Technology is not only giving Big Brother the power to watch us, we can also watch Big Brother, he said. And Gibson added, this is going to make it harder for politicians to hide secrets and get away with lies, an argument he first made here, on the 100th anniversary of George Orwell's birth four years ago. He wrote: In the age of the leak and the...

Todd Ziegler of the Bivings Group, who I greatly respect, recently dinged us (gently) with a post called "The Danger of Using YouTube Views as a Metric." He argued that our daily tracking of how many times each candidate's videos are viewed on YouTube was "deceptive" due to the "vastly different ways candidates are using YouTube." And he has a point. John Edwards' numbers are somewhat higher than the other leading Democratic candidates because his campaign is using YouTube as the player for videos on his own site, while Obama uses Brightcove and Clinton uses an in-house tool. But we've never said anywhere that counting views on YouTube is somehow equal to counting every video view a candidate receives on every...

Just in time for tonight's Democratic forum on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues in Los Angeles: A group calling itself "Gays for Giuliani" released its first ad this week, and as far as I know it's completely factual. It's also deeply subversive, and with the amount of attention blogs and MSM are giving it (Andrew Sullivan, Wonkette, Firedoglake, Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic, Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine are just some of the bigger write-ups, and supposedly CNN is covering it), it just might get past the five-digit "below the radar" threshold of viewership that most political videos seem to attain without much trouble and into the six-digit "making an impact" level. Right now it's at about 15,000 views...

The Web on the Candidates * Ed Cone's tour-de-horizon of the Internet campaign has been making waves online, mainly around the Elizabeth Edwards quote we highlighted yesterday. Cone explains more of the background on his blog, and describes the mini-frenzy the quote generated once it was picked up by the blog that rhymes with fudge, and the "tizzy" it put the Edwards campaign in. He also gets in a sharp zinger on ABC News Raelyn Johnson, who posted her own report on the Edwards quote implying that Cone wasn't a real reporter and making a big deal of her own "confirming" the quote with the Edwards campaign. The confusion probably resulted from the campaign's press operation not knowing that Elizabeth had...

This just out: techPresident has been named one of 10 finalists in this year's Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism! How cool is that? The awards "spotlight the creative use of new information ideas and technologies to involve citizens in public issues." This year's judges wrote that we were "Current, clean, efficient and effective. TechPresident.com uses web technology to report on how web technology is being used by the candidates in the 2008 presidential election." We're rubbing shoulders with some amazing projects, including Reuters' Second Life Virtual News Bureau, the Council on Foreign Relations interactive Crisis Guides, the Washington Post's onBeing video portrait series, and NewAssignment.net's Assignment Zero project. (The full list of ten finalists and honorable mentions is here.) We'll be in...

The Web on the Candidates * The open-sourcing of politics is one of the constant underlying trends of 2008, as power bleeds from the center to the edges and technology-driven transparency and connectivity makes many more people fuller participants in the process. Not only are ordinary folks now privy to nearly all the inside data that campaigns once controlled so fiercely (such as polling and contact information for their supporters), regular voters have also shown that they can instantly and powerfully factcheck what the candidates say, make campaign messages that reach millions, grow their own candidate-support or opposition groups with hundreds of thousands of members, and generate great questions for the candidates at debates. To give one fresh example...

The Web on the Candidates * There was a bit of a feeding frenzy yesterday over Slate's mini-scoop that Rudolph Giuliani's 17-year-old daughter Caroline is a supporter of Barack Obama, according to her Facebook profile. The Giuliani campaign confirmed the story, saying, “Before the presidential campaign got under way, Caroline added herself to a list on Facebook as an expression of interest in certain principles. It was not intended as an indication of support in a presidential campaign, and she has removed it.” Indeed, Caroline Giuliani's Facebook profile is now down. I checked with Farouk Olu Aregbe, the founder of the "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)" group that Caroline had joined, and he told me he didn't recall seeing...