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Obama 2012 Hiring More Staffers To Manage Campaign Data

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, April 26 2012

Barack Obama's re-election campaign is once again on the look-out for data geeks. Specifically, the campaign is creating an "Obama Field Tech Academy" to train new staffers to manage the volumes of information generated ... Read More

Jon Stewart and Barack Obama's "Techno-Wizard" Ways

BY Nick Judd | Friday, April 6 2012

By now you may have seen this video of Jon Stewart taking Barack Obama's re-election campaign to task for the barrage of casual requests for money that tend to crop up towards the end of each month and as campaigns approach quarterly filing deadlines with the Federal Election Commission. Besides Stewart being Stewart, the idea that the President of the United States doesn't need to resort to headlines like, "Hey," to get money, and a brief clip of techPresident publisher Andrew Rasiej, the video is worth watching because it's an example of another thing the Obama campaign is casually doing: Figuring out exactly what to say to you online. Read More

The Obama Campaign Online, Easter Edition

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Friday, April 6 2012

President Obama took off the gloves this week and started to attack Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney by name in speeches throughout the week. That freshly confrontational stance manifested itself in the ... Read More

Conservative Grassroots Group To Arm Tea Party Activists With Mobile Canvassing Tool

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, March 29 2012

American Majority Action, a conservative "social welfare" group, is unveiling a new initiative on Thursday that it hopes will help Republicans catch up with Democrats in the political technology arms race in the 2012 ... Read More

Obama Loves You Back

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, March 16 2012

We don't think it's a coincidence that just days after the site ObamaLovesYouBack.com appeared online, the Obama '12 team sent out an email from Michele Obama titled "I Love You Back" and reading: Dear _____ I see this ... Read More

Romney Campaign Hijacks Obama Campaign Manager's Fundraising E-Mail Again

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, March 14 2012

Mitt Romney's campaign manager Matt Rhoades sent out a fundraising e-mail Tuesday night, but most of the writing in the note was done by Jim Messina, President Obama's campaign manager. Rhoades had forwarded Messina's ... Read More

The Short-Form Birth Certificate Obama 2012 Coffee Mug (from his Facebook Timeline)

Yes They Can: What Voters Have Lost and Campaigns Have Gained From 2008 to 2012

BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, March 13 2012

Is the Internet empowering voters as much as it did in 2004 and 2008? Or have campaigns regained the upper hand, with their sophisticated use of data-mining? That was the question we debated Sunday afternoon in Austin, at the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference. Read More

From left to right: Chris Kelly, Christine Pelosi and Fred Davis at Rally's Super Tuesday party. Photo: Rally.

San Francisco, Organizational Hub for a New Class of National Politicos

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, March 8 2012

What was unusual about an evening Super Tuesday gathering in San Francisco was that many of the people there aren't working in a startup aimed at making some commercial aspect of life easier, faster and more fun. Instead, they are part of a generation of people with both political and tech savvy, using the web to fundamentally alter politics in general and specific campaigns in particular. For these people, the promise of a networked world and a new, networked politics — where people connecting outside the by-all-accounts-flawed and scandal-fraught party apparatus are starting to make an impact — is coming into focus. And rather than using their knowledge of the technology world to start the next Facebook, they're building a cadre of Silicon Valley companies that work in public affairs — not just non-profits, government, and civic life, but politics and campaigns. Read More

GOP Campaign Vet Leaves CRAFT Media/Digital to Start a Firm Focused Outside the "Partisan Arena"

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, February 29 2012

Longtime GOP digital and communications strategist Michael Turk is branching out on his own after having spent the past two years with his partners and colleagues at the Republican-leaning political media consulting firm CRAFT.

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Team Obama's Questlove Endorsement

BY Miranda Neubauer | Thursday, February 16 2012

In a video, Questlove, the drummer and joint frontman of the The Roots, the in-house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, endorsed Barack Obama's reelection as part of the campaign's African Americans for Obama effort. "When I started supporting Barack Obama in 2008 he promised to bring real change and hope to our country and community as a whole," he says in the video. "This is not a quick fix. It's not like you can take a wand, 'BING,' and just make magic overnight. He needs eight years to finish the mission and we need to have his back." Read More

News Briefs

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Summer Olympics to Stream Live From the UK — For Some

The BBC announced its plans yesterday to broadcast its live Olympics coverage of London's Summer games to PCs, mobile-devices and Internet-connected televisions, Reuters reported.

With a free Olympics application for Apple and Android phones, the BBC says it will be offering up to 24 live streams and video highlights clips, and plans for over 2,500 hours of live programming ... that is only available to viewers in the UK. NBC also plans to stream online, but the majority of free viewing of the Olympics will only be available to existing cable TV subscribers.

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CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" Will Have Some Tech-Politics Commentators

This should be interesting: CNN nightly news program Erin Burnett OutFront is out with its list of political commentators for the general election. Some of the names are familiar in Internet-politics-land. The gang includes Upworthy's Maegan Carberry, who was previously director of communications at Rock The Vote; Sasha Issenberg, who ventures into our corner of the political world frequently while documenting the new science of political campaigns for Slate; and Ben Smith, veteran political blogger turned BuzzFeed's top politics editor.

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Copyright Fights Heat Up Again Around Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) today re-released part of a previously leaked February 2011 draft of the U.S. proposal for the Trans-Pacific Partnership pact on his KeepTheWebOPEN website, as he joined calls by advocacy groups to make the currently ongoing deliberations about the treaty more open.

The United States, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam are all involved in negotiating the agreement, which include provisions about intellectual property and copyright that will play a role in the developing global online economy. A 12th round of negotiations on the deal is now under way in Dallas, Texas. Issa is encouraging users to use his MADISON platform to comment on the document, which the website Knowledge Economy International obtained and released in March 2011.

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House Republicans Relaunch Speaker.gov

House Speaker John A. Boehner's office on Tuesday pulled the wraps off of the Speaker's overhauled web site just in time for a major policy speech about House Republicans' stance on any debt limit negotiations in the coming year. GO

We're All Journalists, Indeed: Obama Campaign Guests Checked Mobile Phones at the Door

Zeke Miller at Buzzfeed, studiously reading pool reports from President Barack Obama's recent campaign fundraisers, catches something: the Obama campaign, per Washington Post pooler David Nakamura, appears to be collecting mobile phones from event attendees at the door, and storing them in plastic bags. At least, that was the case at a Monday event in New York City.

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Americans Don't Elect to Use Americans Elect; 3rd Party Hits Wall?

Is Americans Elect, the third ballot line cum party that hoped to use the Internet to nominate a centrist ticket for president in 2012 dead? It certainly looks that way. But before anyone starts writing the post-mortem, remember that it has ballot lines in half the states--and those could be used by renegade factions in 2012, or possibly in 2014 to run candidates for Congress. GO

Lori Compas, Netroots Challenger to Wisconsin Senate Republican Scott Fitzgerald, Posts Irreverent YouTube Riposte, And It Takes Off

Lori Compas, a Democrat who's challenging Wisconsin state Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) in the state's June 5 recall election, had a rather unusual Mother's Day this year: She spent at least part of the day making a YouTube video with her family. GO

Romney Campaign Targets Obama's Barnard Commencement Speech With Google Ads

New York City area web users looking for details about Barnard College's Commencement Ceremony, where President Barack Obama gave the Commencement Address earlier this afternoon, are also likely to have encountered a targeted ad calling out "Obama's Wasteful Spending" on Mitt Romney's website, as Emily Schultheis from Politico first reported. While she suggested it was targeted at only the zip code where the college is located on Manhattan's Upper West Side, it also showed up on a search for a zip code located in Queens, while accessing the Internet from Lower Manhattan. But it did not show up for an Internet user located outside the New York area. GO

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