Over the past few months, I’ve been writing for the excellent blog TechPresident. A project of the Personal Democracy Forum, the blog takes a non-partisan look at how the 2008 presidential candidates are using technology. The content there is really very interesting, and I urge you to check it out or add it to your feeds.
A few weeks ago, I decided to forego cross-posting my TechPresident posts to Unit Structures, just because they were sort of a huge context-leap and I like to keep this blog as focused as possible. As a compromise, every few weeks I’ll post a little update about recent posts I’ve contributed to Techpres. Here are a few recent posts:
Looking at Voter-Generated Presence on Candidate Websites
Fred Stutzman 04/03/2007
As candidates cede authority over their web presence to supporters, allowing the posting of voter-generated content to campaign sites, there are bound to be some interesting and unexpected consequences. I decided to explore the presence of voter-generated content on candidate sites and its effect on the site’s rank. The results I found are presented below.
- Covered by USA Today here and here
The New Influencers
Fred Stutzman 03/22/2007
Over the past two weeks, ParkRidge47 has effectively and persuasively illustrated the role voter-generated content will play in race to 2008. With over 2.3M views at time of writing, his 1984 culture-jack has become the canonical example of a voter-generated content coup. And while ParkRidge47 deserves a tremendous amount of credit for his work, it is important to remember that his is just one piece in an evolving story – why, the laughable Anti-Obama version of the ad has over 380k views despite its one-star rating.
- Covered by The Blue State
Myspace Impact Launches
Fred Stutzman 03/19/2007
As reported by David All last week, Myspace has launched its politics portal – Myspace Impact. And you know what? There isn’t much to write about. The Impact channel feels like little more than a hastily-thrown-together [1] landing page for “official” candidate profiles.
- Covered by MyDD
Searching for Social Media’s Holy Grail
Fred Stutzman 03/18/2007
In the Times coverage of Myspace Impact Pages for political candidates, I was struck by the following paragraph…In essence, we’re searching for the holy grail of social media.
- Covered by The National Journal
Feel free to send me any feedback, etc. If you’re going to be in the NYC area May 17-19, I will be there to hang out with JJB and attend the PDF Conference.
Tags: politics, techpresident
Not sure which side of the context-leap this thought belongs, but I’m going here for the social network aspect of it.
Why does the Democratic / Republican party not have a scalable, tagged, digital identity available for supporters.
You sign up, link your bebo, or facebook, fill out your political interests and you are in.
Now you can “find party members like me” based on tags, or get filtered RSS feeds from any level of office. I.e. when the mayor is speaking about immigration, I get the feed, when Obama writes a position paper, I get the filtered feed.
Seems like Moveon could do this in a heartbeat, instead they e-mail me three times a day about anything.
In short – Party “Meta” social networking, with filters and scale. Grouping around topics creates stronger connections for the whole “long tail.” Aggregate result: greater engagement, community cohesion, and mobilization.
Seems obvious, and not too hard, what’s wrong with it?