Barack Obama's promise to announce his VP pick by text-message -- a smart and obvious ploy to sign up mobile users for future campaign communications -- has been getting a lot of attention this past week, not just from us, but also in a smart op-ed by our friend Garrett Graff in the New York Times, and also today in a (rare for him) catch-up story by the Times' Brian Stelter. What I hadn't noticed ...

The Web on the Candidates Pushing Clark: As the clock ticks on VP nominations, two members of the netroots have launched a campaign to push Wes Clark for the Dem slot, focusing on his long-standing objection to the Iraq war and the face of America an Obama-Clark administration would present to the world. Behind the ObamaClark.com push are Open Left's Matt Stoller, a long-time Clark fan, and Aaron Ament, who worked for Clark in '04 ...

Cross-posted on e.politics Eight million list members. One million MyBarackObama members. Nearly two million Facebook/MySpace "friends." A couple of million online donors. By the time November comes around, those numbers will have grown — and Barack Obama is likely to be on his way to the White House. Assuming he wins, what will he do with his online following? Will Congress be next in his sights? Candidates running for president usually promise big changes, but ...

Looking back at the past 18 months, what’s remarkable about the 2008 campaign is how unremarkable it’s actually been when it comes to the use of the Internet. While Patrick Ruffini earlier argued that Barack Obama’s website is boring, it’s been stewing in my mind for months that the entire cycle has been rather ho-hum. All campaigns, from the presidential level on down, have seemed to be unwilling, or unable, to rewrite the rules of ...

Some members of the netroots are experimenting with a new collaborative writing tool called MixedInk to craft a Democratic party platform. The idea grew out of a brainstorming session between MixedInk co-founder David Stern and MyDD's Jerome Armstrong and found support from the organizers of Netroots Nation, where the idea was presented at two sessions. The platform is accessible directly through the url netrootsplatform.org. Stern, a former economic development consultant with a masters degree from ...

The Web on the Candidates Soldier Furiously Clicks "Recall This Message": The Army captain who sent a widely-distributed email claiming that Barack Obama gave the brush off to troops in his recent stop at Afghanistan's Bagram Airbase has since dialed back his criticism. The email, says the captain, was only intended to be read by his family -- not, you know, the whole world. And after checking some of his sources, he has decided that ...

(Crossposted to Engage and The Next Right.) The common wisdom is that BarackObama.com is not only better at wrangling donations from the faithful, but is categorically better than JohnMcCain.com because it embraces an interactive as opposed to a broadcast model. Time's Michael Scherer put it this way last April: Even today, if you go to McCain's website, you are more likely than not to find a page that just asks for money and broadcasts the ...

Cross-posted on e.politics Here's a clever idea -- install a web browser toolbar sponsored by the Republican National Committee and you can raise money for the RNC "through normal online activities such as searching and shopping." It seems to be a variant of the Yahoo toolbar, so presumably it's some kind of ad revenue-sharing deal with kickback from selected online retailers as well. And of course it contains a communications function, placing an RNC brand ...

Cross-posted on e.politics On the first day of Netroots Nation, Chris Hughes and friend-of-e.politics (and new Obama campaign employee) Judith Freeman led an overview of how the nominee-to-be's campaign has used social networking tools of all kinds to bring in new supporters, organize locally and (most importantly) put volunteers to work on their own. Let's break down the tools and how the campaign uses each. MyBarackObama MyBarackObama is a "walled garden" social network, meaning that ...

There's a lot of hype surrounding microtargeting -- which is the process of targeting voters scientifically based on consumer and demographic data. This piece in Salon yesterday on "Obama's super marketing machine" is no different. But as someone with a bit more than a passing understanding of what microtargeting is, I have to shake my head a little at articles like this. Because the media gets it almost completely wrong -- whether it's hyping relatively ...

"It's impossible," says a naysayer to cartoon version of Sean Tevis, a Democratic candidate for state house in Kansas's District 15. "Impossible?," he responds. "This is the Internet!" Tevis, running to represent the city of Olathe in the northeastern part of the state, is raising much-needed campaign cash by using a web comic styled after xkcd, a cartoon series popular with the geekiest of geeks. (h/t Carlo Scannella) The strip, called "Running for Office: It's ...

[Cross-posted at The Network Thinker] Karl Rove and I do not agree on much. Yet, his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal does provide an opportunity for overlap. Rove discusses Obama's 2008 campaign strategy... "For starters, Barack Obama's manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an "army of persuasion" modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor[emphasis mine] "Victory Committee" of '00 and '04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade ...

I want to do take a longer look at something I briefly mentioned in today's Daily Digest but which deserves more consideration -- GOPPlatform2008.com. The Republican National Committee is calling it an "historic online platform." Simply put, it's an innovative attempt to collaborative craft the GOP's manifesto before its convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul this September. In the past when our national political parties wanted to craft their platforms, the process was simple -- and, largely ...

When I finally hit "publish" on Friday's post, "Twitter in a Teacup Part Deux: The Speaker Has Spoken," I figured I could safely head for the beach free from concern that anything exciting would happen before I made it back inside the beltway on Monday. Boy was I wrong. The Gray Lady picked up the story today (p. A21 in the National edition). Falcone chose to emphasize the partisan angle writing "But some Republicans, like ...

The Web on the Candidates Over the last several days we've focused attention on the Get FISA Right effort to push Barack Obama to oppose the federal surveillance law that George Bush signed into law yesterday. Now, on the morning after, comes post-vote reflection. And the focus seems to be on one question: where does Obama fit into the political spectrum? While the Washington Post's Dan Balz reflected upon Obama's "ability to confound both left ...