Dec 9th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Matt Bai, who is starting a new political blog next week covering the U.S. election campaign, has a piece in the New York Times today about what might loosely be called Politics 2.0 — the use of blogs and Facebook and other social media as part of a campaign. He says the major parties have tried to adopt the tactics first used by the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, but have missed the point on a number of things:
“It seems clear that the candidates and their advisers absorbed the wrong lessons from Dean’s moment, or at least they failed to grasp an essential truth of it, which is that these things can’t really be orchestrated.
Dean’s campaign didn’t explode online because he somehow figured out a way to channel online politics; he managed this feat because his campaign, almost by accident, became channeled by people he had never met.”
Bai describes how Ron Paul supporters — who had nothing to do with the official campaign — organized their own online fundraiser for the candidate on Guy Fawkes Day and pulled in more than $4-million and over 20,000 contributors in a single day, which turns out to be the largest one-day haul of any Republican candidate to date. Even Ron Paul’s campaign probably doesn’t have a clue how or why it happened.
The point Matt Bai is trying to make is related to my point about online community: You can’t create one, just as you can’t create a “viral” hit, or in fact an online sensation of any kind. You can create what you think are the right conditions for such a thing to grow, and hope to encourage one that already exists to adopt you, but other than that you have very little control. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something.
Nov 26th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
According to the New York Times, the ABC television network has signed a deal with a social-networking site you might have heard of — a little site called Facebook — that will allow users of Facebook to “follow” reporters through the U.S. election and talk about the issues, and also pose questions for political debates that will be jointly sponsored by ABC and Facebook. Not exactly a new idea, as many have pointed out.
Caroline McCarthy of CNET doesn’t think Facebook or ABC News are going to have much success with this idea because, well… Facebook users see “the site as a platform for social recreation, not information consumption.” In other words, they’re too busy goofing around with Super-Pokes and sharing photos of each other staggering drunk at frat parties. I’m extrapolating, but I think that’s more or less what Caroline means.
Is that true, though? I know that Facebook started out as just for university students, but the user base has broadened considerably, I would argue. There has been a tremendous response to issues such as the Burmese army attacks, not to mention Iraq and other U.S. issues. Admittedly, people still primarily use Facebook for social purposes, but I don’t think that necessarily precludes there being a political aspect to it as well.
On the other hand, maybe this announcement between Facebook and ABC is just a lot of blather and not much will come of it. Even All Facebook’s Nick O’Neill doesn’t seem to think it amounts to much.
Apr 11th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 2 Comments
From Jeff “Buzzmachine” Jarvis comes news that YouTube is expanding its recent moves into political media — which I wrote about earlier here. In addition to CitizenTube, where all the political clips are aggregated, YouTube has launched a feature called Spotlight, and is asking the political candidates to upload videos of themselves and engage with voters. Nine of the candidates have signed up already.
Apr 7th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
From Marshall Kirkpatrick at Splashcast comes word of an interesting development at YouTube: the launch of a dedicated politics “channel,” hosted (if that’s the right word) by news and politics editor Steve Grove, which aims to aggregate all the political video clips that get uploaded to the Tube (so far there are only 10, and the channel has about 500 subscribers).
But I would expect this channel is going to involve more than just aggregating — or at least I hope so. I (and plenty of other people) have already seen Steve Grove interview Phil De Vellis, aka ParkRidge47, about why he created the Hillary Clinton Vote Different/1984 video, and if the new YouTube “editor” does more of that kind of interviewing things could get very interesting indeed (Phil De Vellis, incidentally, is going to be a panelist at the upcoming mesh conference in Toronto, which I am helping to organize).
With YouTube hosting a politics channel, and Huffington Post working with NewAssignment.net to field a bunch of citizen journalists, the upcoming U.S. election campaign could be very interesting indeed. If YouTube were still a small startup, this might be seen as a “power to the people” kind of move, but now that the video site is part of the Googleplex, there are already some — like Republican media strategist David All — who are concerned about the amount of power and influence Google has.
Mar 29th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Jay Rosen, the online journalism veteran behind NewAssigment.net — an experiment in “crowdsourcing” journalism, or “citizen reporting” or whatever you want to call it — announced earlier this week that NewAssignment and the Huffington Post are collaborating on a new journalism venture aimed at covering the upcoming U.S. elections.
Jay posted about it on his own blog, but has also written about it in a guest-post on Marc Glaser’s blog at PBS. As he describes it:
“Our idea is not complicated: it’s campaign reporting by a great many more people than would ever fit on the bus that the boys (and girls) of the press have famously gotten on and off every four years, as they try to cover the race for president.”
In other words, instead of just one or two reporters trailing John Edwards or Rudy Giuliani or whoever, the idea is to have dozens of people tracking different parts of each campaign, filing to blogs and stories and other formats, and then aggregating all of that and editing it and posting the best of it somewhere like Huffington Post.
Arianna Huffington’s post on the new venture is here. As she describes it:
“We are recruiting large groups of citizen journalists from around the country to cover the major presidential candidates. Each of these volunteer reporter/bloggers will contribute to a candidate-specific group blog — offering written updates, campaign tidbits, on-the-scene observations, photos, or original video.”
Ms. Huffington says that this is “the wisdom of crowds hits the campaign trail,” and that hopefully such a venture will avoid the kind of group-think reporting that the mainstream media can become guilty of at times, adding that “Exhibit A is, and will always be, the press’ shameful lack of questioning during the run-up to the war in Iraq.”
