Archive: Category: TechPresident

Welcome to our new group blog on how the presidential campaigns are using the web, and how the web is using them, TechPresident.com. This blog is an extension of Personal Democracy Forum, our online zine and annual conference on how technology is changing politics. Over there, we'll continue to cover all the ways the political arena is being reshaped by new tools and practices born on the web, while over here we're going to drill down on what the presidential campaigns are doing online, and vice-versa, how bottom-up initiatives launched by ordinary people, what we call voter-generated content, are going to impact the campaign. Compared to four years ago, when an email message from one campaign's then-obscure blogger (Mathew Gross, whose...

So far, on pure incoming blog posts as tracked by Technorati (disclosure, run by my little brother), Hillary Clinton is generating far more conversation online than John Edwards or Barack Obama. The chart below shows the track for the last thirty days, with a huge spike for Hillary around her announcement in late January, a smaller spike for Obama just before that, which was probably around his filing exploratory papers, and a lesser jump for Edwards in late December when he officially launched his campaign. Edwards also shows a recent boost, no doubt around all the controversy over his hiring two feminist bloggers with a paper trail that offended some rightwingers. This is a dynamic chart, so it should start...

Leaders of non-profit organizations all across the country may want to sit up and take notice. Ben Rattray has opened the public beta of his new site, Change.org. Here's what he says about it: Today as citizens of the world, we face a daunting array of social and environmental problems ranging from health care and civil rights to global warming and economic inequality. For each of these issues, whether local or global in scope, there are millions of people who care passionately about working toward a solution but have no way of connecting with each other to advance a common goal. Change.org aims to transform social activism by serving as the central platform that connects likeminded people, whatever their interests, and enables...

So now the rightwing Catholic League has waded into the presidential scrum with an attack on the John Edwards campaign for hiring two bloggers who have, in the past, written harsh, even profane, criticisms of the Church. Free speech is a bitch, isn't it? I don't have much time today for this, alas, but I think liberal blogger Glenn Greenwald makes two terrific points today. First, he shows that if people want to, they can comb thru the old posts by other campaign's staffers and find equally controversial writing. He demonstrates this by pointing to a couple of pithy remarks by Patrick Hynes, one of John McCain's internet consultants. And, interestingly, he points out that there's been no lynch-mob campaign to...

So, I wrote Danny Glover a note this morning about his coverage of the brouhaha online over John Edwards' hiring of Pandagon blogger Amanda Marcotte to be his campaign blog-master. (If you think this controversy isn't roiling the political blogosphere, just take a look at this over-the-top performance by A-list rightwing blogger Michele Malkin). I got a reply within minutes from Danny. Here's the text of what I wrote, followed by his reply, and some further back and forth. If you think this is a tempest in a teapot, skip this post. I've been going back and forth all morning wondering if it's worth the effort. But ultimately I do think we have a serious issue here, one that is...

Danny Glover of Technology Daily, who also writes the Beltway Blogroll for National Journal, has a post up claiming to have found the "First Blog Scandal of Campaign 2008," but in my humble opinion it's much ado about nothing. The John Edwards campaign has hired Amanda Marcotte, formerly of the blog Pandagon, to be the campaign's blogmaster (-mistress?) and some rightwing blogs are making a stink over some pungent posts Marcotte has written in the past about various issues, including the Duke rape case. They're claiming that Marcotte has deleted those posts to cover-up her own past, but the truth is the Pandagon site has had server problems and also lost a treasured trove of old posts during an upgrade to...

It's been a busy week in the 2008 presidential campaign--Hillary Clinton launched her online "conversation" (see David Weinberger's spot-on critique) and went to Iowa; John Edwards also did an online video web-chat that he calls a "live online discussion"; Barack Obama laid low and let the explosive growth of one unofficial Facebook group (now at more than 158,000 members) speak for him; and Bill Richardson formally announced his campaign launch. Not surprisingly, the Democratic candidate who showed the most growth in online grassroots support, as measured by trends in the number of friends they have on their MySpace page and in incoming blog posts to their campaign site was Richardson, whose MySpace numbers were up a whopping 61,100% and blog posts...

Or rather, Rep. Stephen Urquhart's legislative wiki, Politicopia, is having a good showing in its first week. Urquhart emailed me to say, "The first week has been good. Citizens are participating and leaders are taking notice. Politicopia made both of the major newspapers, and the Governor, the Senate President and the Speaker of the House have all been on the site." Indeed, the Salt Lake Tribune reports that Urquhart used the site to put up a preview version of an education voucher bill he is sponsoring, and Democrat Minority Whip Brad King responded positively, saying he "really kind of liked" the idea. "We'd much rather have it out there where we can all see it," he said. Urquhart is clearly enjoying shaking...

It's taken me a little longer than I had hoped to pull together the data on how the Republican presidential candidates are doing in terms of bottom-up support for their campaigns online, for which I apologize. Here's the headline: They're almost invisible on the web. Compared to the Democratic presidential field, which I posted on a few days ago, the Republican contenders* are playing bush league ball online. Not even Triple A. To give you just one example, if you add up all the friends all the Republican candidates have on their MySpace pages, and compare it to all the friends the Ds have, the totals will amaze you: 4,007 to 51,471. If I take fringe candidates Ron Paul and Tom...

Andrew Rasiej and I have started writing a bi-weekly column in the new Washington paper The Politico, and here's how our first one starts: Ever since Howard Dean's 2004 Internet-driven presidential campaign ended, many observers concluded that the Internet was not really changing anything in politics -- other than making fundraising easier. It couldn't alter the agenda of an election, and it certainly couldn't decide who wins. Well, a closer look at the 2006 midterm election reveals that bottom-up political action using the Internet is dramatically altering campaign dynamics. As we head into 2008, one big question is who will have the upper hand: top-down campaigns that see technology as a tool to better game the existing system or grass-roots activists who...