Daily Digest 8/9/07

The Web on the Candidates

* Ed Cone's tour-de-horizon of the Internet campaign has been making waves online, mainly around the Elizabeth Edwards quote we highlighted yesterday. Cone explains more of the background on his blog, and describes the mini-frenzy the quote generated once it was picked up by the blog that rhymes with fudge, and the "tizzy" it put the Edwards campaign in. He also gets in a sharp zinger on ABC News Raelyn Johnson, who posted her own report on the Edwards quote implying that Cone wasn't a real reporter and making a big deal of her own "confirming" the quote with the Edwards campaign. The confusion probably resulted from the campaign's press operation not knowing that Elizabeth had spoken to Cone...and from Johnson not realizing that Ed Cone is the real thing, a blogger-reporter (or reporter-blogger). (See his coverage of the Dean campaign to understand how far ahead of the rest of us he's been.)

* Yesterday, Rocketboom* posted a special field report from Chuck Olsen, and in addition to a nice roundup of the weekend's highlights, he's got an interview with Jason Rosenberg, the incoming online communications director of the 2008 Democratic national convention that should get more attention. In it, Rosenberg promises: "It's in the beginning process right now, but ideally we're going to break down the walls. We're going to make this convention open access, and if you can't be at the convention, you will feel like you are at the convention. We want videobloggers to come out, we want people to understand what it feels like to be at the convention thru the eyes of videobloggers and text bloggers....We want this to be the most open convention in the history of conventions...You get to see how the sausage is made." Longer version of the Rosenberg interview here. This could get really interesting. [*Note: Rocketboom is working on an online project with the Edwards campaign, as its producer Andrew Baron discloses in a comment thread on this report, and he shot the Edwards announcement video for the campaign.]

* The uneasy coalition between liberal bloggers and the Democratic party is showing some cracks this week, in the wake of Congress' passage of an expansion in the Bush administration's wiretapping powers. Carl Hulse has the outlines here, and you can go much deeper here, here, and here. It's not clear yet how this will affect the Democratic presidential primary as most of the netroots anger is directed at the Congressional leadership and all the candidates either voted against it or have otherwise expressed their opposition, but people are wondering if any of them will show leadership on the issue. Markos Moulitsas is going on Meet the Press this Sunday (debating former Rep. Harold Ford, now chair of the DLC); surely more sparks will fly there.

* The Globe had a nice feature on ActBlue, "a unique bundler of the unbundled [which is] ... reshaping political fundraising and giving the Democratic Party a powerful, lasting resource for presidential contests, state legislative races, and everything in between." If I'm not mistaken, ActBlue had its genesis in a meeting between its founders, Ben Rahn and Matt DeBergalis, at the very first Personal Democracy Forum in 2004. And we haven't gotten our 10% finders fee...

* Syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman wades into the conversation about the maleness of the political blogosphere, praising the "grassroots rebellion surfacing in the netroots" among women bloggers who want to see it change. She makes several good points about how women are more likely to be harassed online, how the tone of some political blogging may be more off-putting to women, and how the early adopter pattern may have cemented in a gender tilt among the most popular political bloggers. I'm not sure, however, that this explains why Hillary Clinton isn't doing better in online activist circles.

The Candidates on the Web

* David All reports on TechRepublican about some fun new updates on YouTube's YouChoose site. YouChoose now includes issue navigation, allowing viewers to search by topic. Steve Grove, the site's editor, told All: "The campaigns have designated which videos they want to represent them (from their channel) on each issue, which you'll see on various issue pages. You'll still be able to get to candidate channels, but we wanted to add this issue functionality so that users could compare and contrast and engage candidates on the issues in this election." Right now the site just breaks things down into six areas: Education, Energy, Healthcare, Immigration, Iraq and the Economy. That list, as All notes, could definitely be wider (see ExpertVoter.org for a cool mashup demonstrating how). Most interesting element: YouChoose is asking people to post their responses on each issue; it will be interesting to see how those get used.

* More good news on the online video front: ABC and NBC have opened up access to their presidential debate footage, following in CNN's footsteps. ABC is allowing footage of its August 5 and 19th forums to be used "without restrictions" while NBC has okayed unlimited re-use of footage of this week's AFL-CIO forum "in all media where the primary purpose it to report on, comment on, or analyze the forum." MoveOn.org Civic Action, which has built a right-left alliance to liberate presidential debate video (of which we are a part), issued a statement praising the moves. Said Carl Malamud, a pioneer for decades in the fight to free public data, "It is really great to see the networks beginning to take their community service role seriously again." Hear, hear!

* John Dickerson of Slate has the dirt on online dirt, and particularly how it's getting slung in the Republican primary battle in Iowa (like this anti-Romney site). He writes: "You don't have to slip a flier under a windshield wiper anymore. No more cutting out letters from the newspaper. You can unleash a little havoc with a few keystrokes or by launching a Web page. Slime by keystroke is more effective during the caucuses and primaries than in the general election because your audience is comprised largely of activists who are already known. Many of them are probably on a party e-mail list or supporter list from a previous GOP campaign. Those lists are available to lots of different campaigns." [Hat tip to Colin Delaney.]

In Case You Missed It

* techPresident named Knight-Batten finalist in Awards for Innovations in Journalism contest.

* Housekeeping: The estimable Patrick Ruffini will be pinch-hitting in this spot tomorrow, as I will be on a plane for most of the day and Josh is on an island in the South Pacific, enjoying the perks of his exorbitant techPresident salary and benefit package.