Daily Digest: 10/29/07

The Web on the Candidates

• The Bivings Report’s Todd Zeigler weighs in on the ban on Ron Paul “shills” imposed by RedState. Due to his own experience watching poorly-moderated online forums get hijacked, Zeigler agrees with RedState’s decision. “As an admin at one of these sites you have a responsibility to your community to preserve the level of discourse by providing oversight. If you don’t, you run the risk of alienating the core contributors that made your community site great to begin with,” Zeigler writes. The post is also a good place to start if you’re just learning about the issue; Zeigler links to every significant post on the subject.

• OpenLeft’s Matt Stoller is impressed with techPresident contributor Patrick Ruffini’s analysis of newly-released demographic data about Facebook’s users. But while Ruffini argues that the data helps Republicans “on the edges of the process to engage,” Stoller thinks this doesn’t represent a net gain in supporters. Instead, other conservative news outlets like Fox News and the Weekly Standard will suffer. “There’s a very real possibility that as the right-wing web takes off, these instruments are losing power,” Stoller writes. One thing’s for sure: those Facebook stats promise hours of data-mining fun. At TechRepublican, David All discovered some interesting cultural information:

  Broken Social Scene (Music: Indie/Canadian)
  Total Users: 52,200
  Liberal: 21,800
  Moderate: 5,200
  Conservative: 1,540

  Guns
  Total Users: 29,100
  Liberal: 3,560
  Moderate: 3,880
  Conservative: 8,320

• A new joint study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press confirms what we’d suspected: the news media (online, television, print, and radio) is more obsessed than ever with horserace coverage of the election. Sigh. The New York Times’ Katherine Seelye breaks it down. While most voters are interested in the issues and the candidates’ backgrounds, “the media is even more obsessed this time around with questions of tactics and strategy,” Seelye writes. The public wants depth and breadth, but instead they’re given insider baseball reports about the frontrunners. Though we at techPresident contribute to the focus on strategy (that’s our job, isn’t it?), we’ll do our best to counter this trend.

The Candidates on the Web

• Today Barack Obama will become the second the candidate to participate the MySpace/MTV Presidential Dialogues. Obama will respond to questions from a live audience at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA. Viewer/participants online will also submit questions via IM, and will be able to vote on Obama’s performance in real time. (The top video question from our 10Questions.com site will also be shown; it looks like it will be a video asking about net neutrality.) Stay tuned for our liveblogging of the event.

• When a professor at Champlain College in Burlington, VT heard that Sam Brownback was dropping out of the race, she went straight to his website to read about the news. The problem was, he hadn’t posted anything about dropping out on his site or his blog. “It looks like, at the moment, no one is attending to the needs of the online community that is left behind,” Elaine Young wrote on her blog. Two days later, he added a splash page saying thanks; three days later a post appeared on the blog. It seems even Brownback’s post-candidacy web presence lacked, er, a presence. (via the Burlington Free Press.)

In Case You Missed It…

Fred Stutzman wonders what the crazy Facebook "support" for Stephen Colbert means, and what it says about the political use of Facebook.

Patrick Ruffini dives into Facebook demographic data provided by the Flyers Pro advertising engine and makes some fascinating connections. In the comments, a commenter finds the data interesting, but not as useful as that provided by big data vendors.

In our daily 10Questions update, we report that the rate of additions to the 10Questions site has quickened somewhat, reaching 88 videos as of Friday afternoon. The total number of votes was at almost 27,000, a gain over over 300 from Thursday, and more than 6100 voters, up 500 from Thursday.

A video from liberal commentator Jim Hightower, a new song from the folks who brought you Obama Girl, fun with tagging, an explanation of just what is going on in the Iowa caucuses, John McCain’s celebration of his “I was tied up” remark, and more, all in last week’s roundup of our favorite political videos.