Archive: Category: TechPresident

Kerry voters were two-and-a-half times as likely to participate in online discussions or chat groups about the election than Bush voters, almost twice as likely to register their opinions in online surveys, and four-and-a-half times as likely to contribute money online to a candidate, according to the just-released Pew Internet study. Remember the "gender gap"? Now it looks like there's an "Internet gap." Patrick Ruffini, Bush-Cheney '04's webmaster, has helpfully placed the relevant chart on his blog, and he argues that, contrary to appearances, there's mixed news for the left in this finding. Democrats, he suggests, "tend to excel at the web-only kind" of e-activism, "while the Republicans focus on building powerful synergies between the online and the offline." He continues: And...

I just had an interesting chat with Garance Franke-Ruta of the American Prospect about her new article "Blogged Down," which details how conservatives have been working the political blogosphere in recent months. Most of the conversation was off-the-record, though I think it would be fair to characterize it as me trying to convince Garance that her frame of "originally pristine citizen-blogosphere corrupted by stealth Republican political operatives" was a misreading of events, and her defending the traditional lines dividing old-fashioned reportorial journalism from online opinionating/activism and arguing that not all political blogging was as innocent or independent a phenomenon as the hype would have it. I called Garance because I have generally enjoyed her reporting--she was one of the best of...