Politics – Page 2

How New Media Leveled The Playing Field For Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel

January 27, 2023 By Curtiss Thompson 12 Comments

It goes without argument that the Internet will play a big role in the 2008 presidential election, but I don’t think anyone expected that an Internet based grassroots campaign could effectively level the playing field for unknown candidates like former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel. But that’s exactly what is happening. Over the course of a few days, a candidate unbeknown to virtually everyone has generated buzz on the Internet like we’ve never seen before.

As the graph above shows, Mike Gravel’s website now rivals that of the top tiered candidates in the race in reach, traffic and page views. What’s even more amazing is that this happened in just under a week’s time, and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. Now of course this is only representative of Internet popularity, but with the new media on the Internet beginning to rival and even influencing old media mediums like television, this news is significant.

Update: As of May 3rd there has been a significant pitfall in traffic to Mike Gravel’s website, which would normally indicate that he’s lost all momentum, but in actuality the traffic is merely diverting to Students For Gravel, a new website that is devoted to building a grassroots campaign of students supporting Mike Gravel. Here’s an image of the graph as it appears today.

Originally posted on May 4, 2007 @ 8:47 pm

Your Space, MySpace, Barack’s Space

January 27, 2023 By Raj Dash 5 Comments

Some people consider 2008 Democratic Presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama to be the most “wired” candidate in either major political party. That is, he has utilized online social networks and even streaming video channels to his advantage – showing that he’s hip and understands a younger generation. He even has a MySpace page profile that had 160,000 “friends”. An Obama supporter has been running it for nearly three years, with the blessing of the Senator’s campaign team. They suddenly decided, though, that they were uncomfortable with an “outsider” running the page, which of course represents Obama’s viewpoints, etc.

The campaign team wanted control of the profile page, and the supporter, Joe Anthony, a paralegal, was fine with that, though he wanted nearly $50K in total fees to do so, which the Senator’s team said no to. Big mistake. At $50,000 of effort put in by Anthony to build 160,000 friends, each “friend”, and no doubt supporter of Obama, cost only about thirty cents. The stink that ensued caused Myspace to step in and decide that the Senator’s team could have control and Joe Anthony could take the contact info. All 160,000 friends. So what if it was supposed to be volunteer work?

Does this translate into 160,000 lost future votes? Maybe. Maybe less, maybe more. Who can know? The fact is, there are now only just over 21K friends. Obviously, it was a monstrously stupid move for the campaign team of a seemingly well-loved, charismatic candidate who has been a historic figure and may continue to be. Someone on the campaign team should be fired. It’s not like the campaign money isn’t there. But even more to the point, Anthony obviously was a good buffer and did a tremendous job building goodwill for the Senator.

Will the MySpace page be the same with the official campaign team running it? I doubt it. However, the Senator phoned Anthony to offer his apologies and try to win back his vote. Had the campaign team invited Anthony to be part of their team, everyone would be way ahead.

Originally posted on May 3, 2007 @ 2:29 pm

Borat, Justin, Rosie, 93 others more influential than Bush

January 27, 2023 By Minic Rivera 3 Comments

US President George W. Bush has been dropped from Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. Sasha Baron Cohen (better known as “Borat“), Justin Timberlake, and Rosie O’Donnell all made it to the list that included 71 men and 29 women from 27 countries.

“I think Bush by this point in his presidency probably has less influence than the position should grant him automatically,” Time’s Deputy Managing Editor Adi Ignatius said in explaining the non-inclusion of Bush.

The list, which is designed to recognize “the men and women whose power, talent or moral example is transforming our world,” does not appear in any order or give the magazine’s reasons why some people were chosen over others.

Chinese blogger and activist Zeng Jinyan made it to the list.

Originally posted on May 3, 2007 @ 9:04 pm