Daily Digest: 8/24/07
BY Joshua Levy | Friday, August 24 2007
The Web on the Candidates
- On the heels of publicity for Big Red Tent and Slatecard comes the re-launch of Rightroots.com, another fundraising site looking to be the conservative Act Blue. TechPresident contributor Patrick Ruffini has the announcement. Like Act Blue, Rightroots -- which was first launched in 2006 to raise money for House and Senate challengers -- lets people donate to Republican candidates directly through the site. The money is then passed directly to the candidates via ABC PAC (after credit card fees are extracted, of course). Users can also come up with slates of candidates based on issues to further direct fundraising. Look for more from them as they continue to build out the site.
- MTV is not only partnering with MySpace for real-time chats with the candidates, its Choose or Loose project is also looking for citizen journalists, in the form of writers, vloggers, and photographers, to cover the campaign. Specifically, they're looking for one reporter from each state, who will be armed with media-makin' tools in New York and sent back to their state to cover the race. Their pieces will be "posted online and spread to mobile devices — and the top stories will be broadcast on MTV, MTV2, MTVU or MTV Trés each week."
The Candidates on the Web
- For presidential candidates, Silicon Valley is the new Detroit. "Like auto factories a generation ago, Google is increasingly popular as a place to raise money and speak to a crowd," writes the New York Times' Laurie J. Flynn. The computer industry has already contributed $2.2 million to the candidates, more than in any other cycle. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton
, and Mitt Romney are the top three fundraisers in the tech industry. "Part of Mr. Obama’s appeal, it seems, is that he is considered something of a start-up, reminding many of the technorati of themselves," Flynn writes. - Chris Dodd's team has put together a cool video page listing videos of Dodd speaking on core issues of his campaign, including "Restoring the Constitution," Iraq, and an energy and corporate carbon tax. The campaign is asking supporters to send a link to the page to 10,000 people by the end of the week. The idea is to get the word out that Dodd is big on issues and light on fluff, though I'm wondering if there isn't a hint of desperation in the line, "Even when the road ahead appears long and impassible at times, there comes a point in every Presidential campaign when the door opens up just a crack ... and it's up to all of us, together, to kick that sucker wide open."
- Daylife, the news aggregation site, has put together an experimental site that collects the most common quotes from all of the candidates. It's a neat tool that shows us just how repetitious this horse race campaign can be. The best quote, repeated frequently since last Sunday, comes from Mike Gravel: "I'm going to vote for myself."
In Case You Missed It...
Micah Sifry finds new ways to dress up your site with political data via easily-embeddable widgets.
Let's put our cards on the table: candidates' blogs are nothing more than glorified PR fluff, writes Jeff Commaroto.
Colin Delany hates to agree with Jonah Goldberg about anything, but he thinks Goldberg is right to point out that liberals and progressives don't own online activism.
Correction: Yesterday we incorrectly described Ryan Gravatt and Brad Jackson as "lobbyists" working with the Patriot Group; they are not lobbyists, but online strategists.