Archive: Category: TechPresident

Elizabeth Edwards' announcement that her breast cancer has returned in a potentially more dangerous form is sad news, and we salute her and John's courage in declaring that they will fight on. Our best wishes to them both. It's interesting to take a quick look at how the other campaigns are responding online. Hillary Clinton, to her credit, has posted this personal message front and center on her home page: Barack Obama, by contrast, doesn't seem to have gotten word (yet?). Hold the presses--45 minutes after I started writing this post, Barack has caught up to Hillary with this message and photo of Elizabeth on his home page: [UPDATE] Dennis Kucinich's wife Elizabeth Kucinich has a blog post up, and Bill Richardson posted a press...

My hat is off to Arianna Huffington and her crew for figuring out who made the "Vote Different" Hillary 1984 video mash-up, and even better for getting Phil de Vellis, its author, to say more about his reasons for making the video. He clearly states that he was working as an independent in his spare time (even though as an employee Blue State Digital, a political technology firm with a contract with the Obama campaign, he should have avoided this territory; he's since been fired by BSD). And his reasons for making the video are eminently noble: "This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens." Spoken like a true small-d democrat. I'm glad that de...

It's become a parlor game for the chattering class: Who is ParkRidge47? TechPresident blogger David All has a great post up on his personal site that, at least for me, pretty definitively closes the door on the author being a mischief-making Republican. He tracked down an email exchange between ParkRidge47 and a person who had tried to post a video response on YouTube and had it rejected, and the language PR47 uses makes clear that this person is no friend of the GOP. Well, I have a different theory, which is that it's a professional--the language in our email exchange, and the proficiency of the technical work, makes it unlikely this is a kid. So, which professional? Last night, I was...

NY1, the all-news cable channel of New York City, has gotten a response from Hillary Clinton to the "Vote Different" 1984 video. They report that she isn't worried about the video's impact. I'm told that this was an off-the-cuff response on her part. Here's the key parts of the transcript: Q: What do you think of the video? "I haven't seen it but I'm pleased that it seems to be taking attention away from what used to be on YouTube and getting a lot of hits, namely me singing "The Star Spangled Banner." Everybody in the world now knows I can't carry a tune. I thank heavens for small favors and the attention has shifted, so maybe people won't have to tune in...

Heads-up: There's a response video to Hillary 1984 that's started circulating on the web. More on that below. But first this bit of self-promotion: I'm on CNN's "Situation Room" today at around 5:50pm eastern and on the CBS Evening News, in both cases talking about the Hillary video and what it all means, and PdF co-founder Andrew Rasiej is going on MSNBC tonight with Keith Olbermann. Set your DVRs and Tivos. What does it all mean? I think my old friend David Corn captures it pretty well: What happens when practically anyone can make an attack ad and place it on YouTube--and can do so anonymously? This could change the usual dialogue, as witty and engaging ads (or over-the-top screams) catch fire....

Breaking news: Barack Obama is taking off like a rocket in the video-sphere, judging by the number of views his YouTube channel has garnered in the last 48 hours. Just take a look at our chart: After slowly rising in the last week to about 100,000 views, his site has shot through the roof, passing 400,000 in the last day. Everybody else is relatively flat. I've got various inquiries out, but the only answer I have at the moment is that YouTube's launch of "YouChoose" has generated a surge of attention and when people come to YouChoose home page they are picking the one candidate they are most interested in to check out. I guess it helps to be a fresh...

Here's my semi-verbatim but not for direct quotation transcript of this morning's fascinating panel on how the web is changing political journalism. The players: Moderator: Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine, Speakers: David Plotz, Slate; Jim Brady, WashingtonPost.com and Jay Rosen, NewAssignment.net. Jarvis: It strikes me that there is a different dynamic in the political reporting space. Political reporting isn't really reporting, it's repeating what you're hearing from the campaigns, prognostication, speculation, analysis and opinion. The body of facts isn't the same as in other fields of reporting. Asks Jim Brady how the bloggers change the work of political reporting. Brady: The first thing that changes is citizens can be everywhere. They can cover more ground, even than newspapers with big staffs. You're already seeing it...

Which campaign has the hotter grass-roots? One way to answer that question is to search for local events being organized by volunteers around the country and see who's got more things going on. The top three Democratic campaigns make this really easy to do, with "find an event" tools on their sites. You can find Obama events here, Edwards events here, and Clinton's is smartly located on her home page. I guess the other campaigns either don't have a clue, or are afraid that if they gave supporters the freedom to list events, no one would. As it is, my quick research shows "Team Hillary" looks a lot like a Potemkin village. Events within 100 miles of New York, NY (10001) Barack Obama:...

It's Friday afternoon, and time to ask the burning questions that don't get asked at any other time of the week...

We just received this letter from Benjamin Katz, founder of CompleteCampaigns.com, responding to our posting of a lengthy letter from Aristotle about our Consumer Guide to Software-as-a-Service. (We will reporting the results of our updated survey shortly.) Dear Mr. Phillips, I read the recent letter from your attorney to the Personal Democracy Forum, which questioned the validity of the PdF survey. I feel that Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry did a wonderful job of explaining the value and importance of the survey they're conducting and addressing the insinuations of ballot stuffing. However, they could not address the question, why did CompleteCampaigns.com have so many more respondents? The answer is simple. We asked. We encouraged all our users to take part in the survey because we...