Archive: Category: TechPresident

There's nothing like transparency in the campaign finance arena, and with the first quarter reports in for the 2008 presidential candidates, here are some gleanings on who is giving to whom. I personally think it's more important overall to know how much each campaign is depending on maxed-out donors and the super-fundraisers known as "bundlers" vs how much each campaign is raising from small donors, but that data isn't up yet on the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org site (my source for what follows). In the meantime, here are some interesting findings on which way the digerati are leaning in this election: Hillary Clinton has a couple of major high-tech names backing her, including Google's Vint Cerf ($4,200) and Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel...

No one doubts that MoveOn.org is one of the most powerful and versatile e-organizations of the 21st century. But a quick glance at participation rates in the group's first "Virtual Townhall" this week might make you think otherwise, as just 43,000 members voted in the straw poll that followed, not even two percent of the group's 3.2 million e-members. But figuring out what sort of participation rates matter online is a tricky process, and I think you shouldn't be fooled by these seemingly low numbers into thinking that the liberal-progressive base attached to MoveOn isn't paying attention to the primary race. Tuesday night, seven Democratic presidential candidates participated in a live web-video townhall-style meeting, the first of three the group is...

RedState had the story first. Followed by Breitbart, then Drudge. I can't remember now who it was who said that the Republicans seemed to be on a roller-coaster, with a different flavor rising and then crashing each month. Our best wishes to Senator Thompson...

Blogger and human rights activist extraordinaire Ethan Zuckerman has a fascinating post up about a Tunisian version of the 1984 Apple ad video mash-up that predates the now famous "Vote Different" Hillary 1984 video by three years. Dans la tête d?Aziza...

We're hard at work pulling together this year's fourth annual Personal Democracy Forum conference, which will be taking place this May 18 at Pace University in NYC along with a participant-driven unConference on the 19th, and I'm pleased to share with you the emerging schedule for the main day. (Note: what follows is subject to change.) First, we're excited to be able to announce that Phil de Vellis, a.k.a. ParkRidge47, the creator of the "Vote Different" video (a.k.a. "Hillary 1984") will be speaking this year on a panel on "Message Jamming with Online Video." His bit of voter-generated content has been viewed more than 3 million times on YouTube, and million times more on TV and cable, proving that this really...

So Barack Obama is keeping track with Hillary Clinton in the money chase, with "over $25 million raised," compared to $26 million by her. Or, is he actually ahead, with $23.5 milliion raised for the primary, compared to some unknown subtotal for her? We won't know til mid-April, when the campaigns file formally with the FEC. He certainly seems to be ahead in the people primary, with more than 100,000 donors, compared to 50,000 for Clinton. Online Obama's team claims more than $6.9 million, compared to $4.2 million "raised on the internet" by Clinton. But what do these numbers really mean? Does "online fundraising" really mean anything anymore? After all, for many people, there's nothing special about making a contribution online--it's actually...

YouTube news and politics editor Steve Grove has a great interview up on YouTube with Phil de Vellis (a.k.a. "ParkRidge47") on how and why he made the now famous "Vote Different"/Hillary 1984 video. Some quick highlights: de Vellis explains that he chose to mash-up Apple's 1984 ad because he's a big fan of the company, plus he had recently re-read the book and thought that by working from their ad he'd get interest not just from political folks but also Apple fans. He also says that he was "stunned" by all the attention the video has gotten, and that he was "basically a spectator" after he posted it and was "fascinated" to watch how it spread. He gives a nice shout-out to...

I'm spending most of the week at eTech, one of O'Reilly Media's premier gatherings of technologists, that happens every year in San Diego. I have fond memories of attending this conference three years ago, when it included a special day on "Digital Democracy" focused on the emerging impact of the internet on the last presidential election. I'm not sure what I'm going to learn here, but I find it refreshing to get out of the political environment every now and then and talk with people who are used to making things that work, who take for granted that the systems they are working on will get overthrown every few years, and who know that the best ideas are probably being...

Buried in today's New York Times story on public reaction to John Edwards' decision to continue his campaign despite the news of his wife Elizabeth's renewed cancer, is this line: But in the interviews, and more than 500 reader postings to The Caucus, The New York Times’s national political blog, a major dividing point in how people reacted to the Edwardses’ decision was their experience with cancer in themselves or a loved one. I do believe that this is the first time the Times has ever referred in print to reader postings as a source of relevant information in a political news article. Good for them; it's long past time that they joined in the online conversation that the web affords and...

Last summer MoveOn's Eli Pariser decided to have a little fun with web video, and with the help of Brave New Films got some folks together to post "Stop the Falsiness," in part to poke fun at themselves and to also take advantage of Pariser's being on the Colbert Report to advance their campaign against right-wing news programs. Their video went up on YouTube, and in the first week alone got more than 40,000 views. But recently, the video was taken down in response to complaints from Viacom (Comedy Central's parent company) that it violated their copyright by using several snippets of Colbert on his show. So now MoveOn and Brave New Films are suing Viacom, with legal help from free...