YouTube’s First Video Uploaded Five Years Ago

Yes you have Facebook, Twitter, ect, BUT, In my book, two things has made New Media.

One is Apple iMovie/Final Cut (just had its own 10 year anniversary), putting low cost non-linear editing software in eveybody hands.

Two is YouTube, but one has to ask if it was not for iMovie/Final Cut would YouTube be as big as it is?

Hat Tip to Stan Schroeder & Mashable







Stan Schroeder

Although YouTube’s birthday is officially February 14, 2005, the first video was actually uploaded to the site exactly five years ago, on April 23, 2005.

The video is titled “Me at the zoo.” It was shot by Yakov Lapitsky and it’s only 19 seconds long, showing one of YouTube’s founders, Jawed Karim, at the San Diego Zoo.

The video doesn’t look like much, but it sparked a revolution; by July 2006, more than 65,000 videos were uploaded to the site every day. In October that same year Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion — a reminder of how fast things move in the age of the Internet.

See the first ever YouTube video below...

The first video on YouTube, uploaded at 8:27PM on Saturday April 23rd, 2005. The video was shot by Yakov Lapitsky at the San Diego Zoo.

Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress

The U.S. Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. In addition to a massive printed collection, the Library already has an extensive collection of other digital assets. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world.

The Library does extensive work with data format standards, the semantic Web and other platforms for outside analysis. The addition of Twitter into the organization's offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research. From a new kind of historical record to an unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction, this is big.

For now there are more questions than answers with regards to this Library of Congress Twitter news.

Will the archive include friend/follower connection data? Will it be usable for commercial purposes?

Will there be a Web interface for searching it, and will that change the face of Twitter search for good?

Is there any way that the much larger archive of Facebook data could be submitted to the same body for analysis of the same kind?

Pepsi Ditches Super Bowl Ads for Social Networking Campaign

While watching the Super Bowl this upcoming February, some viewers may notice a conspicuous absence: PepsiCo (PEP), which has advertised during the past 23 Super Bowl shows, won't be running any Pepsi commercials, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Before you brush this off as a non-event, let me remind you of some of the Pepsi commercials of Super Bowl past. The beverage maker has long paraded a series of A-listers to entertain us between plays. Puff Daddy (P Diddy, whatever you call him), Jackie Chan, Cindy Crawford (I will never forget that ad), and Ozzy Osbourne. So where will all of those unused Pepsi ad dollars go?

According to Frank Cooper, senior vice president of PepsiCo Americas Beverages, the company plans to focus its advertising strategy on a "marketing platform" rather than blitzing us with commercials during a single event. Pepsi says it is launching the "Pepsi Refresh Project," a collaboration between PepsiCo and a non-profit/charitable organization that awards grant money to community projects that are chosen by consumers.

A Virtual World of Advertising Possibilities

This so-called "cause-related marketing" evidently works well, as evidenced by several case studies referenced in this article from onPhilanthropy. According to the article, Avon raised $300 million for breast cancer awareness. Obviously, Pepsi's marketing move isn't completely selfless. By using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to reach out to consumers who might support and vote for a cause, the company is going to tap into a virtual world (literally) of advertising possibilities.

On Facebook, for example, Pepsi can issue invitations to participate in a poll to its followers. When someone votes on a charity choice, a message will get posted on their Facebook page that says they voted for one of Pepsi's cause choices and voila - advertising.

According to a report by Nielsen, Facebook is a virtual treasure trove for advertisers wishing to target 18 to 49-year olds. Twitter's numbers are a little lower - but impressive nonetheless. According to a March 2009 article from Social Media Today, 19% of adults between the ages of 18 and 24 have used Twitter or something like it, 20% between ages 25 and 34, and 10% between ages 35 and 44. For advertisers, this is the demographic sweet spot.

Pepsi's migration away from televised Super Bowl ads is a trend we can expect other big companies to follow. There is far more bang for the buck when advertising online then producing and paying for 30 seconds of airtime during one of the most expensive televised events of the year.

Sacrifice 10 Friends for a FREE Whopper….

Hat Tip The Tulsa Food Blog off twitter

If you are looking for an interesting and somewhat twisted way of getting free food consider Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice.

The Whopper Sacrifice is a new Facebook application that requires you to sacrifice ten of your friends to receive a free Whopper.

Almost 200,000 people have already been sacrificed. So if you are in the mood for a Whopper, do not hesitate to sacrifice some of your friends before they sacrifice you.

Visit - whoppersacrifice.com

McCain camp said no to text messaging

The only thing DUMBER than this is how Gary Jones and Oklahoma GOP still DO NOT GET HOW TO USE NEW MEDIA !

Republicans have been kicking themselves for not thinking of some innovations that Barack Obama's campaign rolled out one after another, but in some cases John McCain's strategists were presented the same ideas and gave them a thumbs-down.

One infamous case: text messaging supporters with the announcement of a vice presidential pick. Online GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini writes on TheNextRight.com that he's heard from "numerous" people inside the McCain campaign who say the idea of announcing online or via text message was floated "months before" the Obama camp made its announcement. Senior staff "shot down" the proposal as "undignified."

That's a dangerous mindset, Ruffini warns. "The notion that this is somehow not mainstream enough, that this is somehow not dignified, too cutting edge, too bleeding edge, is just so self-defeating and so illustrative of the problem that I think it must be discussed," Ruffini said.

Former McCain Web staff denied any notion texting was dismissed for being "undignified" but confirmed that it was considered before being disapproved on concerns it would disrupt the rollout of a surprise pick.

The campaign strategy was to "ride the wave of the pop," and "anything that would have mitigated that pop we couldn't do," said the McCain Web staffer. The surprise factor (announcing little-known Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin while the media focused on Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty) successfully drove thousands to JohnMcCain.com, and the campaign raked in $4.5 million in donations from the Web during the 24 hours after the pick, with thousands signing up for campaign e-mails.

No single tactic would have been likely to change the outcome of the election, but the Obama campaign used anticipation of its VP announcement to harvest thousands of e-mail addresses and phone numbers that fed its database and later were used to drive turnout and raise money. Ruffini says Obama's decision "clearly fueled his dominance in swing states and on the airwaves."

But McCain's staff was focused on stepping on Obama's post-convention bounce with a splashy announcement on television, with its much larger audience, just one day after the end of the Democratic National Convention. Ruffini dismisses that strategy as "a very old-school mentality" that disregards the importance of building the database.

The media would have covered the announcement no matter where it was made and would have broadcast a Web video if it were posted, while the campaign raked in voter contact information and generated buzz for an eventual televised press conference, Ruffini contends.

Still, back-to-back conventions restricted what the McCain campaign could do without risking an accidental leak coming before Obama even left the podium as he accepted the nomination, which could have been perceived as "dirty politics."

And then there are the polls. McCain's surprise strategy resulted in one of his only leads of the campaign after the Republican National Convention.

Although both the McCain surprise strategy and the Obama database-building strategy have their merits, Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, suspects that if the McCain campaign had enough time and resources, it would have done both. In other words, they are not mutually exclusive.

The campaign's mistake was in having to make a choice at all. "His Internet team was strapped for cash from their very beginning," Rasiej said. "The fundamental problem was not enough time and not enough understanding of the potential for technologies -- whatever they were, you name it -- at a high enough level."

Israel armed with New Media savvy

The thermal imaging footage shot from an Israeli drone hovering over Gaza shows eight Palestinian militants loading rockets on to a lorry.

Within seconds, the drone’s sights are locked on to the vehicle and it and the ghostlike figures nearby are incinerated in a missile blast.

The clip was one of several dramatic scenes uploaded to the site by the Israeli army last week, the first time a national army has created its own YouTube channel.

Israel is waged 'Operation Cast Lead' on several fronts, including unprecedented use of New Media.

Israeli officials said they are satisfied that Israel is winning sympathetic media coverage that has provided its military with the breathing space it needs to continue the strikes against Gaza.

“Israel has no small measure of understanding and support and even approval from many countries,” Dan Gillerman, a former ambassador to the United Nations, said last week. “Unless something very dramatic happens, such as a blundered hit that kills large numbers of civilians, then we will have enough time to do what we need to do.”

Led by Yarden Vatikai, a former official with the defence ministry and the Jewish Agency, the directorate decided to replace the traditional wartime press conferences with a wide range of initiatives using new media.

“In terms of communicating our message, new media is the future,” said Avi Benayahu, the chief spokesman for the Israeli army, who has organised a series of workshops for his staff over the past six months.

“Explaining your actions is a kind of ammunition in this sort of war.”

The YouTube channel, established the day after the first air strikes, is currently the most popular on the site. The dozen's videos relating to the current operation have recorded hundreds of thousands of hits.

Israel has turned to other New Media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter @IsraelConsulate / Twitter @IDFspokesperson, blogs and chat rooms, often relying on former army personnel and public relations consultants, to advance its case.

In addition, reporters and diplomats have been blitzed with text messages offering interviews, briefings and tours of Israeli communities in the Negev close to the Gaza border. Other initiatives are likely to be unveiled if and when a ground invasion is launched.

“We have photographers embedded in all the units preparing to enter Gaza and we already have incredible footage that we are planning to release [if] we go in,” Dinor Shavit, commander of the Israeli army’s filming unit, told The Jerusalem Post newspaper.

Opposition politicians, including the Likud party head, Benjamin Netanyahu, have set aside their campaigns for the parliamentary election next month and been recruited to the public relations offensive.

Officials believe coverage of Israel’s actions in Gaza have benefited as a consequence. According to a survey by the foreign ministry of the international broadcast media, Israeli spokespeople have been given three times as much airtime as Palestinian representatives.

Daniel Seaman, the head of the government press office, “We know that Hamas is in complete control of the news and that reports from Gaza are carried out under duress. Foreign media in Gaza will become fig leaves for the news, and will give credibility to the reporting.”

Syria Wary of New Media

After information ministers from Arab states agreed to make new media and communications technology compatible across the Middle East, critics of the Syrian government said its real interest was in regaining control of a sphere where censorship of information is less and less effective.

A resolution issued on November 17, after information and communications ministers from the Arab countries met in Damascus, contained a pledge to develop a joint strategy for coping with new technological developments and to coordinate national policies on IT. However, the document stressed that this was not about imposing censorship.

At the meeting, Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal indicated that his government was struggling to keep abreast of evolving technology. “Electronic media are moving very fast and we fear that we’ll be unable to keep up,” he said.

Analysts say the increasing popularity and sheer number of news websites, together with advances in mobile phone technology, present a huge challenge for regimes that have traditionally controlled the flow of information their populations have access to.

“New media such as the internet and text messaging have shrugged off the restrictions that some governments impose on media, and have helped [people] get access to news that wouldn’t have been accessible if it were up to government officials,” said Damascus-based media expert Muyasar Suhail. “Governments can no longer control the news that’s published or halt the flow of information.”

Syria’s information ministry has a special committee on electronic media and information whose official purpose is to study the media situation, although critics argue that it was designed to address a situation where the government can control domestic radio and TV broadcasters but not electronic media.

Adnan Naouf, editor of Champress, a news website based in Damascus, said, “The future lies with electronic media, and that’s why the official media are trying to control the means of communication in order to tighten censorship over all media outlets, both conventional and electronic.”

Nidhal Malouf, editor-in-chief of the pro-government Syria News site, agreed that officials in charge of media “lack a clear vision of the major changes that will take place in this sector in future, and the immense amount of competition that media outlets are now facing”.

He went on, “This competition will make countries that have narrow margins of freedom, including Syria, interact with one another to get accurate information out into the open. Since facts can be neither concealed nor controlled, let’s present them to our audience in the right way, just as they are.”

At the same time, Malouf drew a careful distinction between media sanctioned by the Syrian authorities and those that operate covertly, suggesting that only the latter behaved unprofessionally.

“It is unprofessional media outlets that are able to violate the restrictions imposed on media, because they are often in hiding. The professional outlets would not do this, because they adhere to the policies that are set out,” he said.

Ghusoun Suleiman, a journalist with the state news agency SANA, was similarly dismissive of independent electronic media that run into trouble with the authorities.

“Some websites have little credibility when they publish news and reports. Some of them engage in defamation, denigration and offensive comments, which results in them being closed down,” said Suleiman.

Internet Now Major Source of Campaign News

Too Bad Gary Jones,
Oklahoma GOP
still do NOT get this...

In Prec 59 in Cleveland County ,
I have 88% of the Republican and
even a few demo on my
Prec E-Mail list.
I use it to help get the word out !

Internet Now Major Source of
Campaign News

Continuing Partisan Divide in
Cable TV News Audiences

Many more Americans are turning to the internet for campaign news this year as the web becomes a key source of election news. Television remains the dominant source, but the percent who say they get most of their campaign news from the internet has tripled since October 2004 (from 10% then to 33% now).
While use of the web has seen considerable growth, the percentage of Americans relying on TV and newspapers for campaign news has remained relatively flat since 2004. The internet now rivals newspapers as a main source for campaign news. And with so much interest in the election next week, the public's use of the internet as a campaign news source is up even since the primaries earlier this year. In March, 26% cited the internet as a main source for election news, while the percentages citing television and newspapers remain largely unchanged.Not surprisingly, the internet is a considerably more popular source for campaign news among younger Americans than among older ones. Nearly three times as many people ages 18 to 29 mention the internet as mention newspapers as a main source of election news (49% vs. 17%). Nearly the opposite is true among those over age 50: some 22% rely on the internet for election news while 39% look to newspapers. Compared with 2004, use of the internet for election news has increased across all age groups. Among the youngest cohort (age 18-29), TV has lost significant ground to the internet.

On television, the cable news outlets clearly dominate the big three networks as main sources of campaign news. Nearly half of the public (46%) turns to the cable news channels, with 25% naming CNN as a main source of campaign news, 21% naming Fox News Channel and 10% naming MSNBC. Only 24% rely on the network news outlets ABC, CBS and NBC. Another 13% look to local TV news. This reflects broader changes in news consumption patterns. In recent years, cable news outlets have overtaken the networks as the general news sources that the public watches most regularly.1

Cable News Audiences Highly Partisan

The audiences for the major cable news networks are highly partisan, while the audiences for network TV and the internet are more in line with the general public.

Among those who name the Fox News Channel as their main source for campaign news, 52% are Republicans and only 17% are Democrats. By contrast, among those who rely on MSNBC for their campaign news, 50% are Democrats and only 11% are Republicans. Similarly, CNN's campaign news audience is largely Democratic -- 45% are Democrats and 13% are Republicans.

Notably, there are substantial differences in awareness of recent campaign events among the different cable news audiences. Majorities in each audience said they heard a lot about reports that the Republican National Committee spent about $150,000 on clothing for Sarah Palin and her family. But far more of those who get most campaign news from MSNBC than those who rely on Fox News heard a lot about the controversy (71% vs. 51%, respectively). Among those who turn to CNN for election news, 62% reported hearing a lot about Palin's wardrobe.

Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama registered more widely among the MSNBC news audience than among those who rely on Fox News for presidential campaign coverage. Seven-in-ten MSNBC viewers heard a lot about the Powell endorsement, compared with 54% of the Fox News audience. Close to six-in-ten (59%) of those who turn to CNN heard a lot about the endorsement.

About two-thirds of those who rely mainly on Fox News for campaign coverage (66%) said they had heard a lot about links between Obama and ACORN, the community organizing group that has been accused of voter registration fraud. A comparable proportion (62%) of those who rely mainly on MSNBC heard a lot about this story. A majority of those who get most of their campaign news from CNN (52%) heard a lot about the ACORN allegations.

Notes

1 See "Key News Audiences Now Blend Online and Traditional Sources," released August 17, 2008.

More Liberals Use Web Campaign Tools Vs. Conservatives, Reports says

A report out Thursday from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that liberals watch far more campaign videos and read far more political blogs than do conservatives, by a very wide margin.

A report out Thursday from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that liberals watch far more campaign videos and read far more political blogs than do conservatives, by a very wide margin.

The report found that 43% of liberal Democrats read political blogs, compared to only 22% of conservative Republicans. Twenty-seven percent of Independents read political blogs, it concludes. Overall, 30% of Democrats and 23% of Republicans read blogs.

(Related: Election Deception: The Web's 12 Dirtiest Tricks)

Similarly, 60% of liberal Democrats have watched some form of campaign video (which includes debates, commercials, and so on), while only 33% of conservative Republicans have done so.

In general Democrats use the Internet far more than Republicans to get political information. For example, some 12% of Democrats have gotten campaign information from social networking sites, says the report, while 7% of Republicans have, and 5% of Independents.

The report examined overall interest and participation of voters in the campaign, including donating money, and going to political events. Clearly, liberals are much more engaged than conservatives. The report concludes:

By almost any measure of political interest or activity, liberal Democratic voters are more strongly connected to this election than are conservative Republicans or other voters.

If you want the report, get a summary here, or the full report here.

Hoo-ah: Army Vision of New Media

LTG William Caldwell
addresses
2008 Milblogging Conference

This is from the 4th annual milblogging conference.

LTG Caldwell was invited to give the opening speech because of his reputation as an innovator who supports engaging with new media.

As the CAC CMDR, Caldwell oversees 17 different schools and centers which places him in a unique situation to influence the Army educational process.

GOP losing the new-media war

GOP losing the new-media war

By JONATHAN MARTIN

Republicans have no lack of would-be George F. Wills.

But what they really need are some more Robert D. Novaks.

The distinction between the two prominent conservative journalists isn't always obvious, but it's nevertheless important to understand: One almost exclusively writes opinion pieces, while the other offers reporting with a point of view.

The same might be said of the emerging differences between the conservative presence on the Internet and the liberal one: The right is engaged in the business of opining while the left features sites that offer a more reportorial model.

At first glance, these divergent approaches might not seem consequential. But as the 2008 campaign progresses, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the absence of any websites on the right devoted to reporting — as opposed to just commenting on the news — is proving politically costly to Republicans.

While conservatives are devoting much of their Internet energy to analysis, their counterparts on the left are taking advantage of the rise of new media to create new institutions devoted to unearthing stories, putting new information into circulation and generally crowding the space traditionally taken by traditional media. And it almost always comes at the expense of GOP politicians.

While online Republicans chase the allure of punditry and commentary, Democrats and progressives are pursuing old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, in a fashion reminiscent of 2004. Back then, the Drudge Report and other lesser-known conservative portals played a key role in defining John Kerry and pushing back against criticism of George W. Bush, such as when conservative bloggers debunked documents purportedly related to the president’s Air National Guard service.

Just as Drudge and critics of the now-infamous “60 Minutes” report on Bush were able to push stories damaging to Kerry or beneficial to Bush into the mainstream media, liberal online organs are now doing the same, to the detriment of GOP presidential nominee John McCain.

This week, for example, a young liberal writer named Spencer Ackerman heard that McCain committed a gaffe on Iraq in an unaired portion of an interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric. Ackerman, a former reporter for The New Republic and The American Prospect who now blogs at the liberal Firedoglake site, posted the transcript and pointed out the relevant portion just after 5:00 p.m. Tuesday night.

It was picked up by the Huffington Post two hours later, discussed on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show, moved onto The Associated Press wire overnight and by Wednesday afternoon McCain was forced to respond.

“We amplify its effect and then stay on it,” explains Arianna Huffington, namesake of the popular liberal news and entertainment hub.

But the left isn’t simply promoting its own version of the news — it’s also breaking it.

Deploying writers with backgrounds grounded in journalism rather than politics, The Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo, in particular, have already become a persistent problem for McCain’s campaign, regularly posting negative opposition research and embarrassing videos in addition to advancing damaging story lines against the GOP nominee.

There is simply no equivalent on the right to these two liberal-leaning websites.

The challenge these sites present have become so apparent that McCain was forced to hire his own in-house blogger to ensure dissemination of a steady stream of anti-Barack Obama material, much of it culled from the campaign’s extensive research file.

Michael Goldfarb, a former reporter at the Weekly Standard, almost exclusively uses his blog on McCain’s website to target the Democratic nominee in the hopes mainstream reporters will link to or pick up the oppo he’s posting.

To be sure, neither of the two liberal-leaning sites — referred to online as TPM and HuffPo — have yet to break the next Watergate story this campaign.

But every day, there comes a steady drip.

It ranges from the amusing (reporting that McCain’s campaign lifted recipes from the Food Network while he’s giving a major economic speech) to the strategic (popping up research on McCain’s opposition to a bill that included wind energy incentives when he’s about to give a speech at a turbine facility) to the eyebrow-raising (disclosing that Mitt Romney said at a private meeting that he would not likely appoint a Muslim Cabinet member).

In some cases, the stories incrementally move the anti-McCain message forward (by flagging an off-message Iraq statement by a McCain surrogate, for example). In others, the reporting scores broadside hits that inflict notable damage (such as posting controversial audio of the Rev. John Hagee that would prompt McCain to finally renounce the pastor).

Add in the increasingly aggressive online efforts of liberal think tanks such as the Center for American Progress, and it leaves the right at a severe disadvantage in the high-stakes business of distributing information about favored candidates and the opposition.

“It’s something we have to get in gear on,” says Patrick Ruffini, the Bush campaign’s webmaster in 2004 and former RNC ecampaign director. “What drives discussion in the blogosphere is original information.”

The lack of any meaningful right-wing entities today is partly because of how left and right media outlets sprung up, he says.

“Liberal media has traditionally been upstream media, generating information and putting it into circulation. Conservative media is downstream; it’s the second bite at the apple.”

For years, says New York Times columnist David Brooks, the model for conservatives who developed a passion for writing (or vice-versa) was not a reporter but a commentator: National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.

Besides being attracted to his elegant language and compelling arguments, up-and-coming conservatives saw something else in Buckley: job stability.

“In the past 60 years, only one employee of the National Review, Weekly Standard or any conservative magazine has actually been hired as a reporter for a newspaper,” says Brooks, who researched the question a few years ago.

At the same time, scores of young reporters from liberal-leaning journals such as The New Republic or The Washington Monthly have been called up to the journalistic big leagues by general interest newspapers and magazines.

“There is just no career line for a conservative reporter,” observes Brooks.

Further, prominent conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin have prospered by seizing upon the sense of grievance conservatives have felt toward the mainstream media.

Liberals, on the other hand, responded to their own disenchantment with the media and the Bush era by channeling their anger into the creation of parallel reporting outlets geared toward doing what old-line news outlets purportedly weren’t doing.

This development just happened to take place right when the mood matched empowering new technologies, enabling new players who would have found it impossible to break through under the old media model.

“It’s fair to say that the mainstream media…was increasingly either neutral or effectively browbeaten by the right,” says Josh Marshall, the founder and editor of Talking Points Memo.

The powerful presence of Limbaugh on the radio airwaves and the ascendance of Fox News on cable television energized liberals, Marshall says.

“People on the center-left, especially in the lead-up to the Iraq war and after the 2000 recount, realized that there was nothing on that side of equation,” he adds.

The result was the emergence of TPM and HuffPo, along with the opinion- and organizing-centered Daily Kos.

“Republicans haven’t developed a lot of that infrastructure because they haven’t been forced to,” says Michael Turk, a former ecampaign director at the RNC.

But Turk and others say that must change — and the GOP might soon find the impetus.

“If Republicans are out of power, they’ll start to realize this is one of the things we need to do to rebuild,” he says.

A writer for TPM puts it more bluntly.

“If Obama gets in, we'll see a lot of this stuff spring up, probably following the same initial pattern as the lefty Netroots,” predicts Eric Kleefield. “First it's a bunch of nobodies with dingy websites doing the equivalent of writing profanity on bathroom walls. And then it will evolve into some kind of real organization and discourse, and with its own journalism.”

While there is no real national site, Erick Erickson, founder of the popular RedState, points out that there is some reporting taking place on conservative blogs in Minnesota and Colorado.

“The next major wave of conservative funding will be toward journalistic institutions,” he says hopefully.

But for now, Erickson concedes that most potential angel funders are hesitant to bankroll a start-up, still gun-shy after many websites have flopped and skeptical that a right-wing version of HuffPo or TPM would be taken seriously by established media organs.

Conservatives have not been able to obtain the sort of financing that has powered the two sites — for HuffPo, it’s venture capital; for TPM, initially it was reader contributions but is increasingly advertisements.

Amidst the inertia on the right, HuffPo and TPM are not only prospering but growing.

Both major liberal sites have added new elements for this election, and the proprietors for each are already thinking past 2008.

Huffington said in the site's next round of financing, to take place later this year, she’ll hire more reporters.

Each promises that, even if Obama wins in November, they’ll keep up the scrutiny.

“If you want to break stories or report the news, you cannot do it only from your political views,” says Huffington, citing the ironic case of their most significant splash to date: Obama's comments, reported by an Obama donor, concerning the presumptive nominee’s assessment of the psyche of rural America.

“I think if Obama wins, people will see that we’re fundamentally a news organization,” adds Marshall. “We’d cover an Obama administration equally as aggressively. People will believe it when they see it, but that’s what we plan to do.”

Avi Zenilman and Alexander Burns contributed to this report.

Did YouTube KILL Hillary, New Media RULE !!

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Hillary’s St. Patrick’s Day Massacre
By FRANK RICH
Published: March 30, 2008

MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses?

In January, after Senator Clinton first inserted the threat of “sniper fire” into her stump speech, Elizabeth Sullivan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that the story couldn’t be true because by the time of the first lady’s visit in March 1996, “the war was over.” Meredith Vieira asked Mrs. Clinton on the “Today” show why, if she was on the front lines, she took along a U.S.O. performer like Sinbad. Earlier this month, a week before Mrs. Clinton fatefully rearmed those snipers one time too many, Sinbad himself spoke up to The Washington Post: “I think the only ‘red phone’ moment was: Do we eat here or at the next place?”

Yet Mrs. Clinton was undeterred. She dismissed Sinbad as a “comedian” and recycled her fiction once more on St. Patrick’s Day. When Michael Dobbs fact-checked it for The Post last weekend and proclaimed it worthy of “four Pinocchios,” her campaign pushed back. The Clinton camp enforcer Howard Wolfson phoned in to “Morning Joe” on MSNBC Monday and truculently quoted a sheaf of news stories that he said supported her account. Only later that day, a full week after her speech, did he start to retreat, suggesting it was “possible” she “misspoke” in the “most recent instance” of her retelling of her excellent Bosnia adventure.

Since Mrs. Clinton had told a similar story in previous instances, this was misleading at best. It was also dishonest to characterize what she had done as misspeaking — or as a result of sleep deprivation, as the candidate herself would soon assert. The Bosnia anecdote was part of her prepared remarks, scripted and vetted with her staff. Not that it mattered anymore. The self-inflicted damage had been done. The debate about Barack Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was almost smothered in the rubble of Mrs. Clinton’s Bosnian bridge too far.

Which brings us back to our question: Why would so smart a candidate play political Russian roulette with virtually all the bullet chambers loaded?

Sometimes only a shrink can decipher why some politicians persist in flagrantly taking giant risks, all but daring others to catch them in the act (see: Spitzer, Eliot). Carl Bernstein, a sometimes admiring Hillary Clinton biographer, has called the Bosnia debacle “a watershed event” for her campaign because it revives her long history of balancing good works with “ ‘misstatements’ and elisions,” from the health-care task force fiasco onward.

But this event may be a watershed for two other reasons that have implications beyond Mrs. Clinton’s character and candidacy, spilling over into the 2008 campaign as a whole. It reveals both the continued salience of that supposedly receding issue, the Iraq war, and the accelerating power of viral politics, as exemplified by YouTube, to override the retail politics still venerated by the Beltway establishment.

What’s been lost in the furor over Mrs. Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale is that her disastrous last recycling of it, the one that blew up in her face, kicked off her major address on the war, timed to its fifth anniversary. Still unable to escape the stain of the single most damaging stand in her public career, she felt compelled to cloak herself, however fictionally, in an American humanitarian intervention that is not synonymous with quagmire.

Perhaps she thought that by taking the huge gamble of misspeaking one more time about her narrow escape on the tarmac at Tulza, she could compensate for misvoting on Iraq. Instead, her fictionalized derring-do may have stirred national trace memories of two of the signature propaganda stunts of the war: the Rambo myth the Pentagon concocted for Pvt. Jessica Lynch and President Bush’s flyboy antics on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during “Mission Accomplished.”

That Mrs. Clinton’s campaign kept insisting her Bosnia tale was the truth two days after The Post exposed it as utter fiction also shows the political perils of 20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age. Incredible as it seems, the professionals around Mrs. Clinton — though surely knowing her story was false — thought she could tough it out. They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first lady’s foreign trip — as the CBS Evening News did on Monday night — and that this smoking gun would then become an unstoppable assault weapon once harnessed to the Web.

The Drudge Report’s link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news program’s nightly audience. It had more YouTube views than the inflammatory Wright sermons, more than even the promotional video of Britney Spears making her latest “comeback” on a TV sitcom. It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of “sleep deprivation” and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright.

The Clinton campaign’s cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start, and not just in its lagging fund-raising. Witness the canned Hillary Web “chats” and “Hillcasts,” the soupy Web contest to choose a campaign song (the winner, an Air Canada advertising jingle sung by Celine Dion, was quickly dumped), and the little-watched electronic national town-hall meeting on the eve of Super Tuesday. Web surfers have rejected these stunts as the old-school infomercials they so blatantly are.

Senator Obama, for all his campaign’s Internet prowess, made his own media mistake by not getting ahead of the inevitable emergence of commercially available Wright videos on both cable TV and the Web. But he got lucky. YouTube videos of a candidate in full tilt or full humiliation, we’re learning, can outdraw videos of a candidate’s fire-breathing pastor. Both the CBS News piece on Mrs. Clinton in Bosnia and the full video of Mr. Obama’s speech on race have drawn more views than the most popular clips of a raging Mr. Wright.

But the political power of the Bosnia incident speaks at least as much to the passions aroused by the war as to the media dynamics of the Web. For all the economic anxiety roiling Americans, they have not forgotten Iraq. The anger can rise again in a flash when stoked by events on the ground or politicians at home, as it has throughout the rites surrounding the fifth anniversary of the invasion and 4,000th American combat death. This will keep happening as it becomes more apparent that the surge is a stalemate, bringing neither lower troop levels nor anything more than a fragile temporary stability to Iraq. John McCain’s apparent obliviousness to this fact remains a boon to the Democrats.

The war is certainly a bigger issue in 2008 than race. Yet it remains a persistent Beltway refrain that race will hinder Mr. Obama at every turn, no matter how often reality contradicts the thesis. Whites wouldn’t vote for a black man in states like Iowa and New Hampshire; whites wouldn’t vote for blacks in South Carolina; blacks wouldn’t vote for a black man who wasn’t black enough. The newest incessantly repeated scenario has it that Mr. Obama’s fate now all depends on a stereotypical white blue-collar male voter in the apotheosized rust belt town of Deer Hunter, Pa.

Well, Mr. Obama isn’t going to win every white vote. But two big national polls late last week, both conducted since he addressed the Wright controversy, found scant change in Mr. Obama’s support. In The Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, his white support was slightly up. As the pollster Peter Hart put it, this result was “a myth buster.” The noisy race wars have failed to stop Mr. Obama just as immigration hysteria didn’t defeat Senator McCain, the one candidate in his party who refused to pander to the Lou Dobbs brigades.

The myth that’s been busted is one that Mr. Obama talked about in his speech — the perennial given that American racial relations are doomed to stew eternally in the Jim Crow poisons that forged generations like Mr. Wright’s. Yet if you sampled much political commentary of the past two weeks, you’d think it’s still 1968, or at least 1988. The default assumptions are that the number of racists in America remains fixed, no matter what the generational turnover, and that the Wright videos will terrorize white folks just as the Willie Horton ads did when the G.O.P. took out Michael Dukakis.

But politically and culturally we’re not in the 1980s — or pre-YouTube 2004 — anymore. An unending war abroad is upstaging the old domestic racial ghosts. A new bottom-up media culture is challenging any candidate’s control of a message.

The 2008 campaign is, unsurprisingly enough, mostly of a piece with 2006, when Iraq cost Republicans the Congress. In that year’s signature race, a popular Senate incumbent, George Allen, was defeated by a war opponent in the former Confederate bastion of Virginia after being caught race-baiting in a video posted on the Web. Last week Mrs. Clinton learned the hard way that Iraq, racial gamesmanship and viral video can destroy a Democrat, too.

McCain Throws Aide Under the Bus for Twittering YouTube Link

Soren Dayton was a Twitter friend (Soren has deleted his Twitter account) and STILL is a Facebook friend ! And I am a member on the "Support Soren Dayton!" facebook group !

McCain Throws Aide Under the Bus for Twittering YouTube Link

Posted by: Matt Lewis

Today, John McCain suspended an aide -- Soren Dayton -- for distributing this controversial YouTube video about Barack Obama and Rev. Wright. As campaigns spokesperson Jill Hazelbaker told Jonathan Martin, Dayton was "reprimanded by campaign leadership."

I defended John McCain when he distanced himself from that radio show host in Ohio who repeatedly invoked Obama's middle name. To me, the radio host was making a tawdry attack, meant to imply Obama was Muslim. And McCain was doing the right thing by not engaging in that sort of campaign.

But this situation is a bit different.

In reading his Twitter message (shown above), Dayton merely wrote: "Good video on Obama and Wright," and included the link. That's it. And for that, he was suspended.

Here's why I think this move might have been politically unwise. Suspending Dayton for passing this video on implies by extension that the message of this video was in some way incorrect, or, at least, not respectable. But, as I've written in the past, it is entirely legitimate to question Obama's affiliation with Rev. Wright -- as well as to highlight Obama's evolving positions.

From Geraldine Ferraro to Samantha Power, this has been the year for apologies and terminations. My question is whether John McCain is willing to throw everyone under the bus the minute they do something that might be embarrassing to him.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I've been told that campaigns actually attack their opponents from time to time. It is unclear precisely what Dayton's job for McCain was (a source tells Jonathan Martin that Dayton was doing "low-level political work for [deputy political director] John Yob."

Dayton was a fairly prominent blogger, and one would suppose he was doing more than simply "low-level" work. Perhaps he wasn't -- or perhaps this is an example of a McCain aide taking another shot at a guy who is already down.

Still, reprimanding him may cause future McCain operatives to think twice before doing their job. Is McCain recommending a sort of "limited war" in which the enemy can shoot at us, but we can't shoot back?

Standing on principle is a good value, but so is supporting your subordinates and so is loyalty. It takes political courage to stand up for your team -- even if it may cost you politically. Is McCain too concerned about wanting to come across as a nice guy?

Hazelbaker emailed me the following statement (which is the same thing she sent Martin):

We have been very clear on the type of campaign we intend to run and this staffer acted in violation of our policy. He has been reprimanded by campaign leadership and suspended from the campaign.

Though they have been clear on the type of campaign they want to run, it is still unclear if, or when, Dayton will be reinstated.

Of course, it is not unheard of for campaigns to engage in a bit of deception involving the leaking of negative information. For example, it is entirely possible that Dayton distributed it under the direction of a campaign superior. It is possible Dayton believed the campaign would have wanted this out there -- but that not telling them would give them plausible deniably.

It is also entirely possible that he has agreed to be the "fall guy" in an effort to save Senator McCain face. In fact, it is likely this little controversy will result in more people viewing this video -- which would obviously be a net-plus for McCain (who gets to remain above the fray).

But -- because this particular video added little to the narrative -- it is more likely that Dayton merely passed this link on, not knowing it would be a big deal -- and that the McCain campaign has chosen to punish him for this. What Dayton is really guilty of is failing to follow the maxim that you should never interfere when the enemy is in the process of committing suicide.

If McCain has any cause to be angry, it's not that Dayton made an ethical lapse -- it's that he made a political one.

Dayton distributed the video via Twitter. The default setting on Twitter allows anyone to "follow" a Twitterer. In other words, it would have been easy for anybody who wanted to catch Dayton (or any other operative, for that matter) in a gaffe, to sign up to receive his messages.

Most folks who use Twitter, do so in a very casual and personal manner. One source who follows Dayton told me that Dayton most likely didn't think he was Twittering in an "official" capacity. Still, anything you write can and will be used against you.

Dayton has since deleted his Twitter account.

Did the 'So call Power's' in the McCain camp goof up ?

Soren Dayton was a Twitter friend (Soren has deleted his Twitter account) and STILL is a Facebook friend ! And I am a member on the "Support Soren Dayton!" facebook group !

Defending Soren Dayton
Posted by: Patrick Ruffini

Earlier today, Soren Dayton, a friend and frequent collaborator in the blogosphere, was suspended from the McCain campaign for making a note of this video in his Twitter account.

To see Video, click here

A few notes here. I use Twitter a lot. And I'm "looser" on Twitter than I would be on my blog. My Twitter account has been updated 2,863 times since last June, while I've only penned no more than a couple hundred mostly long-form blog entries. My Twitter posts contain a lot of rough thoughts that are then refined into blog posts. So, there's a greater volume of chatter, and the sense that the tool operates more like a secure backchannel than a public blog.

Of course, this is really an illusion. Everything you say on Twitter is publicly accessible, unless you choose to protect your updates for friends only. If you can screencap it, folks in Peoria on the other side of the Fox News filter won't care if it was Twittered or blogged. This is a stark reminder that anything that you write on a social media site, now matter how "protected" is ultimately just as accessible as anything you put out in any other medium. (It didn't take long for people to sniff out "Kristen's" Facebook profile.)

I'm not going to argue that Soren was right in posting the link. But I do agree with Matt Lewis that there was some overreaction here. If they go further with this civility routine, they risk alienating conservatives in talk radio and the blogosphere who are doing the necessary work of defining Obama and rendering him just as radioactive with the base as Hillary.

A month ago, McCain-Obama looked like a bad matchup for us: a Republican nominee who didn't do much to galvanize the base against a Democrat who didn't either.

The New York Times kerfuffle and now the Wright story is slowly changing that. With an assist from Hillary Clinton's overtures to the right-wing of the Democratic Party, Obama is now a more polarizing figure in key swing states than she is. It is now clear that conservative media will do to Obama what they did to Kerry, Gore, and Clinton. This can be an unalloyed boon to the McCain campaign, as it pretty much takes care of his conservative problem and frees him to go after swing voters.

This is not about "Barack Hussein Obama" or Muslim smear emails, which need to be repudiated. It is about a Presidential candidate's literary muse going all Susan Sontag on us on the Sunday after 9/11. It is connecting the dots on the post-patriotic milieu that surrounds Obama seemingly everywhere he goes. These are legitimate issues for public discussion, if not by McCain himself, then certainly by talk radio and the blogs. If McCain doesn't want to be part of that, that's understandable. But he should get out of the way and let talk radio do its thing.

In many ways, the Bush campaign had the right approach with the Swift Boat Veterans. Any functionary or board member who had been connected in any way with the Swift Vets resigned from the campaign. The campaign told them -- and, crucially, any 527 -- to take down their ads. They repeated that they respected Kerry's service -- without turning into a mouthpiece for the Kerry Vietnam narrative.

But nothing was done to single out or disrespect John O'Neill and the other veterans who had earned their right to speak. The tone was firm but respectful.

With this campaign, there has been a tendency to do the necessary distancing, but with sharper words and a sense that freelancers are thrown willfully under the bus. First, Bill Cunningham, who was an important part of Ohio GOTV in the '04 election. Now this.

It is pretty well understood by most serious people that the Rev. Wright is not a racial/foreigner/Muslim issue, nor was it an unprovoked attack on Obama on these grounds, not in the way Ferraro was, or the Somali email that Clinton's staff circulated without reprimand (which was 10x worse than this, btw), or Bill Clinton's South Carolina comments.

I'm not suggesting the McCain campaign traffic in it directly. Politically, they probably had to do what they did today. Most people in this business understand that moves like are a game -- a show -- that the campaigns put on for the media, that won't swing a single vote at the end of the day -- but that if handled poorly, could cascade into a larger issue. See: Clinton, Bill -- South Carolina.

But what I am suggesting is that McCain in the future calibrate his response to different situations, and recognize the value in drawing certain personal contrasts with Obama. Voters are motivated less and less by issues, and more by personalities and narratives. So, a key McCain strategic goal is to turn the Obama persona in against itself, so that the rock star/Messiah/hopeandchange routine turns into a liability in dead-serious times when people are worried about losing their jobs and/or getting killed.

The challenge in modern Presidential campaign is not simply to paint your opponent as wrong on the issues, and to prevail in a civil debate. It is to render the opponent unacceptable to 48% of the electorate, and merely less preferable to 3%. Despite McCain's troubles with the base, conservative media (and Hillary) are doing the heavy lifting on the unacceptable part. McCain should get out of the way, and jump in ONLY when someone crosses a racial and/or religious line.

Poll: Conservatives Underrepresented in News Biz

Hat tip to Warner Todd Huston @ New Media Alliance

Poll: Conservatives Underrepresented in
News Biz
March 19th, 2008
-By Warner Todd Huston

A new survey of 585 journalists and news executives revealed that there are few who claim to be conservatives in the media today. The survey shows that the number of conservatives in the media is far below the average among the general American population. This fact certainly means that the media does not even come close to reflecting the ideological make up of the country.

Jennifer Harper of the Washington Times reported on the 18th that “only 6 percent of the national press corps describe themselves as ‘conservative.’” Yet, of the general American population, 36 percent “generally consider themselves conservative.”

This is a major discrepancy from an industry that so often criticizes government for not being “fair and balanced” and for not properly representing the country. For an industry that carps about preferences and quotas it is amazing that the industry itself is so ideologically monolithic.

The poll also reveals, though, that many in the news biz are worried about their future.

Indeed, 55 percent of the national press corps said business and financial woes were the most important problem in journalism today, up from 30 percent four years ago. Twenty-two percent cited the quality of coverage as the biggest problem, 20 percent cited the “media environment,” 9 percent cited flagging press credibility and 3 percent cited “ethics and standards.”

Unfortunately, it seems many aren’t seeing the forest for the trees if only 9 percent see flagging credibility and only 3 percent feel the industry’s falling ethics and standards is part of their problem.

The journalists surveyed had mixed feelings about the Internet’s impact on their profession.

More than three-fourths of the respondents said they welcomed user comments on news sites and more than two-thirds favor video sites such as YouTube and online “news aggregating sites” such as Google News. More than half favor citizen-based news sites and journalist blogs.

But the convergence of electronic and traditional media remains a work in progress: 42 percent said the Internet strengthens traditional news values; 41 percent said it weakens them.

Obviously journalists are very worried about the Internet, but at least many do see the potential upside.

Sadly, the final word here is that the paltry number of conservatives in the media have not changed much.

The findings have remained “basically flat” since 2004 when a similar survey was taken, said Amy Mitchell, deputy director of the media research group.

For all the media’s carping about everyone else being “balanced,” though, it is clear that the media itself has made no efforts at all to better reflect America. Some might say that is a bit hypocritical, but this ideological imbalance shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, the MSM imagines that they are above any such strictures. They imagine themselves on some higher plane somewhere, of course.

New Media Continues to Grow in Influence

New Media Continues to Grow

in Influence; Further Fragments
Influence of Traditional Media
by Admin
March 10, 2008

Advertisers trying to increase their ROI would be well advised to pay more attention to what their customers say influence their purchases and, in particular, the new media options which are growing the fastest, according to BIGresearch’s (http://www.bigresearch.com) Simultaneous Media Survey (SIMM 11, Dec. 07).

While traditional media still rank on top, many are declining in influence and some are showing double digit losses over the previous year; whereas, many new media options are showing double digit growth. For example, when compared to SIMM 9 (Dec. 06), Instant Messaging and Blogging experienced double digit growth for purchase influence of electronics at 22% and 21.5%, respectively. Conversely, Broadcast TV and Cable showed a decline of 13.9% and 14.4%.

“It’s no longer enough for marketers to advertise only a slogan or warm fuzzy feeling. Top line sales growth and bottom line increases are where it’s at in today’s highly competitive no growth market,” said Gary Drenik, President of BIGresearch. “Marketers need to better understand the changing dynamics of the consumer media market and develop new marketing plans that integrate new media to replace the erosion of traditional media for influence to purchase. Marketers who can’t tap new media options for their influence to purchase will suffer a decline in advertising ROI,” said Drenik.

Not only is influence of new media growing, it is much more influential among minority groups. Influence of new media is higher for Hispanics and African Americans across all new media forms compared to all adults. Alternatively, influence of new media for Caucasians is lower than the general market for all types.Further analysis comparing new media influence to purchase with traditional is available by clicking: http://info.bigresearch.com/

Web politics go beyond YouTube

Web politics go beyond YouTube
By Jennifer Harper
March 5, 2008

Technology-challenged politicians beware: George Allen's infamous "macaca moment" was a little disaster compared to what's to come, according to the Politics Online Conference, which got under way yesterday.

"YouTube moments will be nothing compared to the impact of emerging, disruptive technologies in political space," said Julie Germany, director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, which organized the event at the Renaissance Washington hotel.

For the uninitiated, "disruptive technology" is a term for daring innovations — digital photography and e-commerce, for example — which jolt us out of the status quo toward new behaviors.

Such technology is reshaping the presidential election. The conference will showcase political applications of MoSoSo (mobile social software), microtargeting, widgets, UGC (user-generated content), mashups, radical transparency, open source government, wireless engagement, actionable public data and search marketing, among other things.

"It's a matter of pervasive politics. We're looking at a combination of satellite technology, incredibly detailed databases of consumer and voter habits, social networking, online activities. Advertisers can track everything — where you go, what you do. As technology evolves, anonymity slips away," Ms. Germany said.

So does decorum, perhaps. At times, the forum was almost drowned out by the giddy din of attendees as they gleaned free coffee mugs, Gummi candies, trail mix and T-shirts from Yahoo, Google, Politico, ValueClick Media, RealClearPolitics and other sponsors in the back of the room. Meanwhile, much of the multitasking audience was chatting on cell phones, fiddling with laptops or tapping frantically on a BlackBerry.

The experts du jour — slouched onstage with wireless microphones — bickered over marketing phrases such as "dual transparency" and "integrating the chaos factor." They also pondered the burgeoning big picture.

"Should we always be online, always connected? I'm not so sure that's a positive thing. We have to start making decisions about whether we want to be on the grid, 24/7," noted Jon Taplin, a communications professor at the University of Southern California.

"Whatever media I consume, I try to remember what ideological agendas I am exposed to, and correct for it," said Adam Greenfield, a panelist and author of "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing."

Bob Boorstin, a spokesman for Google, was not worried that Web-based political groups would threaten the nation's traditional two-party system. "I'm excited that the orthodoxy is challenged. If the Internet enables MoveOn.com and other organizations, I'm all for that," he said.

The political mainstream already may be hip to technology, disruptive and otherwise.

Maria Cino, president and chief executive officer of the 2008 Republican National Convention, announced yesterday that the Sept. 1-4 event would be the most "tech-savvy in history" via new partnerships with Google, YouTube, Qwest and bloggers "both emerging and traditional."

"This isn't your father's GOP — but Dad is still a proud Republican," noted convention spokesman Ryan James.


The GOP eCampaign guru's for the 21st Century ..

Fred08.com: An Outside Insider’s View

Fred08.com: An Outside Insider’s View

Hat Tip to Michael @ Kung Fu Quip

Fred08.com:
An Outside Insider’s View

January 24th, 2008
by Turk

A lot has been written about the Thompson campaign in the past two days. I have read a bunch of post-mortems all focused on what went wrong, but I thought I would spend a little time telling you what went right. For people interested in online politics and the way candidates use the web, the Thompson campaign is a great case study in what can go well, and go badly in our world.

On May 22nd, I was sitting at Inova Fairfax hospital as my wife was rehydrated. A vicious stomach flu was circulating through the house and had brought my wife and son down. As we sat there that evening, I received an e-mail on my Blackberry from the brother of a friend of the Thompson’s. A few days earlier, they had seen an article in the Washington Post wherein I chastised my party for not using the Internet effectively.

I had been sweating the fallout from that article for two days. I was not exactly loved by the RNC for my critical assessment of their online operation. That article, which was about 180 degrees removed from the series of conversations I had with the reporter, was not going to help.

The Thompson team, however, agreed with my assessment that campaigns could use the Internet differently and wanted me to come out to “The House” to chat about it. We agreed to meet the next day despite what would become a full-blown case of the flu. The Thompson team, it seems, had circulated that same flu about a week earlier and none of them were afraid of catching it again.

On May 23rd, I met with Team Fred and after a three hour discussion of new and innovative ways you could use the Internet to supplement a traditional campaign, I left with an assignment - build a Presidential website in the height of a media storm, that would withstand a huge rush of traffic the moment it launched, and do it all in 10 days.

The Launch

On June 5, 2007, we launched ImWithFred.com. The site was originally envisioned as a simple splash page that would gather low hanging fruit - early donors and supporters looking to sign up. A requirement that all forms be pre-populated so visitors would not have to fill in information more than once threw in a wrinkle and we ended up building personalization into a splash page - not something most people would do. We also ended up building tools that would allow viral recruitment for both donors and volunteers.

Now these tools were hardly new or innovative, but the combination of designing the data architecture, doing the graphic design work, cutting up the site, coding it all, and allowing time to test for bugs in 10 days (over Memorial Day weekend, no less) was about the craziest thing I have ever tried. The data architecture alone had to support huge traffic, and getting the servers provisioned, hardened and tested would eat into our ability to deploy a test environment. Doing all of this over the holiday made me very popular with the development team.

Speaking of the team, I have to give credit to Dan Hopkins, Blaise Hazelwood, Todd Zeigler, Ken Smith, Brian Lyle and the gang that pulled this together. They did an outstanding job getting the site launched under those conditions and rarely complained (to me at least).

On Hannity and Colmes, Fred announced his website url and the flood came in. We took a lot of heat for the thin site, but we didn’t have time for much else. Had we had a month to design, build and test, we could have done more. Given the time we had, and the limitations of working under the “Testing the Waters” rules, I thought we did fine. We attracted over 100,000 unique visitors, raised over a quarter million dollars, and added nearly 30,000 names to our list in the first 24 hours.

On June 12, we rolled out the Fred File, added Fred’s bio, and added tools to spread the word through traditional media by contacting talk radio and newspapers. I was traveling back from a meeting in Colorado that night on a flight that was seriously delayed. I ended up doing the go-live countdown from a seat just inside the arrival gate at Dulles airport on their wi-fi connection. We made the rollout about 30 minutes ahead of Fred’s appearance on Leno that night.

The blog was a hit almost instantly and led me to believe the path we had chosen was right. Fred’s commentaries were getting a lot of comments and I saw the beginning of an online community I’ve never seen around a GOP candidate’s online operation. What’s more, nobody wrote a single word about what supporters were saying online. Nobody accused us of endorsing the random beliefs espoused by the occasional nut, and nobody on the campaign had to answer a single press call (that I am aware of) about the blog or anything said on it.

ImWithFred.com Version 2.0 - The New McKinley

Described inappropriately as ImWithFred.com 2.0 by some creative types, the actual site was finished the week of July 9th. We had been asked to shoot for having the live site ready the first week of July (timed to be released with the announcement). The site was delayed by a week. The announcement was delayed by two months.

Originally I saw the campaign’s Internet operation as the modern day equivalent of McKinley in 1896. As Fred took his message to the people, they could, at the same moment, come and visit him sitting on the front porch of this virtual house. FDT could simultaneously campaign in Iowa and around the world, by carrying the coffee shop conversations online - posting about questions he was asked at a rally, or continuing to develop regular, and lengthy posts about the issues we face.

While the pundits will discuss and debate exactly where the campaign went wrong, the one thing I believe they misunderstand is the way the Internet could have, and should have, shaped this campaign. That misunderstanding contributed to the “Fred is lazy” storyline early on.

The campaign still had to do the things necessary to win - talking to, registering, IDing, and mobilizing voters. Nobody questioned that. That the campaign strategy was written off as “relying entirely on the Internet” was simply not accurate.

The idea, from my perspective, was to harness the power of the Net to build a robust community that would become an integral part of the ground game. The Bush-Cheney campaign had begun the process of enabling volunteer action online. It pioneered activism tools that allowed voters to create and run phone bank and canvass operations from their home. It allowed people to participate on their own terms, rather than forcing them to attend a Saturday morning walk.

I saw this campaign as the natural evolution of that effort, but it would go further in the one arena where BC04 fell short. The Bush campaign was innovative in allowing people to participate in the mechanics of the campaign, but it never developed the community that could interact, inspire, and spur each other into action. I felt in 2004, and still feel today, that is the missing pieces required to fully realize the benefit of these applications.

The Thompson web operation would be different. With Jon Henke, Howard Mortman and William Beutler constantly opening new channels through local, state and national blogs, and the campaign site providing a vehicle for those attracted to participate in the campaign, we could reach the tipping point where engaged people are empowered to contribute in ways never attempted by the GOP.

Buy In

When I first met with Linda Rozett, Mark Corallo and Ed McFadden, I was distrustful. I unfairly stereotyped them as traditional communications people. It has been my experience in dealing with campaign Communications staff that they have developed a sort of impenetrable cocoon around themselves. Any thought that runs contrary to the way they did things on their first campaign is somehow filtered out as a bad idea. I would describe it as a mild form of mental illness. It’s a cognitive dissonance of the first order and it seems to afflict nearly all of them.

Mark, Ed and Linda didn’t fit that mold. They understood that we needed to be part of the dialog on blogs and online forums like Townhall, but they also understood the need to drive traffic to our own property and to develop a community. The chatter about Fred online, the traffic to the site, and the money coming in led me to believe the theory was right and we could introduce a paradigm shift.

I knew from my RNC days and the Bush days that buy-in for a radically different approach would be critical. I was pleased to see that everyone in the campaign from Fred and Jeri through Linda, Mark and Ed was onboard. It really did make a difference.

The Little Red Truck

Unfortunately, the staff turnover that began in the late summer had an almost immediate effect on the Internet operation.

As the Communications team focused on traditional media tactics, their attention increasingly turned away from the Internet. The commentaries became less frequent, online initiatives were no longer part of the equation.

In October, we began discussions of an end of quarter fundraising drive featuring a real-time disclosure of our success. The concept was shot down over concerns that it would place too much emphasis on money. As we moved through November, we began to hear rumblings of Fredsgiving Day - a third party money bomb effort scheduled the day before Thanksgiving.

It was unclear whether the campaign would support the effort. There were concerns (voiced by many online) that the timing was off - nobody would pay attention the day before the holiday. In the event the campaign decided to jump in, we went ahead and built the little red truck to track contributions that day. It was never deployed.

It was late in December when the little red truck finally saw the sunlight. Over the next three weeks, that little red pickup helped the campaign raise 1.25 million dollars. Had it been unveiled sooner, who knows what might have happened.

Lessons Learned

I share all of this anecdotally in the hopes of illustrating something for GOP campaigns (and more broadly for campaigns in general). I’m afraid that the withdrawal of Fred Thompson will lead people to conclude that the model was wrong. I really don’t feel it was.

As I said, I think the Thompson Internet operation, in the early days, and in the final days, was really second to none. Political campaign professionals should study the Thompson effort not as a case study in what went badly, but as an example of what was going very well, and could have been extraordinary had it not been for the media’s obsessive demand for ‘the tried and true tactics of the 1980s’.

As an example of the strength of Thompson’s online effort, look at the Thompson campaign blog and you’ll see something remarkable for GOP candidates - comments. And not just a few comments, but hundreds and even thousands of comments.

Rudy’s blog doesn’t allow comments. Romney’s gets a few per post. Ron Paul just recently launched a blog (despite the fact that blog software is largely free). He currently gets between a handful and a few dozen comments.

I don’t think this indicates a lack of supporter enthusiasm as much as it indicates that the campaigns have created a blog with nothing to say on sites that are so scrubbed of interesting content they’re alsmost sterile. Most of the posts are rehashed press releases, rehashed campaign e-mails, or occasionally a video so overscripted it becomes almost completely unwatchable.

Most campaigns think of comments as a way for people to respond to the post. Almost nobody on the GOP side sees this as a way for their supporters to network, to share ideas, or to brainstorm ways to help the campaign.

Most Republicans fear the rogue comment that will be used to tarnish their campaign. What they fail to realize is in a vibrant community that rogue comment is always surrounded by dozens of voices or more shouting them down. If anything, they typically dispel arguments that your base is crazy.

For the rabidly partisan Democrats reading this, please don’t mischaracterize this post as “Republican Internet guru just discovers blogs and comments.” That is not at all the point. The point is something much larger that I have been shouting at my party for several years now - they need to trust and engage the people. Since the people are online, they need to engage people online. There are just as many Democtrats who need to learn this lesson (cough, cough, Hillary, cough, cough).

They need to build online operations so they invite people to the discussion rather than turning them off of it. Get candidates to write, in their own words, frequent posts. Understand that a ground game is critical, but it must be viewed in terms of ROI. A thoughtful, honest post from a candidate may be discussed and passed around by thousands of people online. It takes little time to write if it’s sincere and not obsessive studied and focus grouped.

If your candidate honestly doesn’t have time to write, have staff carry a video camera and a MacBook to post from the road. Forgo the hair, the makeup, and the lighting. You’re on a bus 50 miles from Waterloo. Nobody is going to believe that your makeup is perfect and so is the lighting. Be real. We don’t expect perfection, but we do expect honesty.

My last piece of advice is this… In your interview process, ask your Communications Director to name his five favorite blogs. If they can’t, ask them for a suggestion on how best to target communications to specific demographic segments using banner ads. If they can’t answer either of those questions, don’t hire them. They don’t get what’s going on in the world around them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Bloggers, Candidates, Elections, Fred Thompson, News Media, Operatives, Politics, Republicans, The Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Thompson Failed to
Capitalize On Initial
Media Interest
01-25-2008

NPR's Audie Cornish followed former Tenn. Sen Fred Thompson during this past summer when he was still thinking about starting his run for the Republican presidential nomination - which he dropped this past week. She offers this analysis of why he wasn't able to capitalize on the initial surge of interest in his candidacy.

First, Thompson focused a lot on conservative blogs and radio, and some Fox News shows. It was very difficult to get him or through to that campaign in those first few weeks. After a certain amount of time Thompson's so-called "earned media" diminished - and he pretty much fell off the radar. The campaign sort of squandered the attention they had from the mainstream media at the start.

Second, Thompson did not defy the "lazy" label with his campaign schedule. While he made strong and hard pushes in the final week or two before Iowa and again in South Carolina, I would be very surprised if his schedule matched up to say a Mitt Romney or a John McCain - or any of the Democrats. Just a week before his announcement in September his campaign manager-to-be Bill Lacy told me this in an interview when I asked about the "lazy" thing.

He knows how important it is to prepare and be ready for big events. I think that preparation is important and that is going to involve - maybe I don't ask him to have a grinding schedule every day where he spends 18 or 20 hours out because frankly I'd much rather have him able to be deliver better performances.

By not putting in the trail time and making good use of initial media interest I think Thompson made it less likely he would be able to exploit potentially "big" debate performances that could have elevated him above the pack.
-- Audie Cornish