Daily Digest: Digging Obama
BY Joshua Levy | Thursday, May 29 2008
The Web on the Candidates
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If they don’t come to you, go to them. A new site gives Barack Obama supporters the chance to submit suggestions for the campaign, and to vote, Digg-style, on the submissions. Think the campaign should make transparency a core issue? Change the font in its designs? Go to Oh Boy Obama, submit an idea, and get voting. It’s a great idea, and one likely borne out of necessity: the Obama campaign has been criticized for not reaching out enough to online activists, and this adds a missing feedback loop (though my.barackobama.com seems to be working pretty well). (via Ben Smith)
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Also from Ben: a video of Young Hillary Clinton (the anal editor in me has to point out that her name is spelled wrong in the title cards). Produced by online video producers 60frames, it picks up on the Hillary-was-always-like-this theme first expressed in Slate’s classic parody of Election from earlier this year.
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A user on the new conservative hub The Next Right, echoing the oft-repeated lament that the GOP is lagging behind the Dems online, asks her Republican readers who, exactly, they are. The responses show a diversity of backgrounds — professional thirtysomethings, independent libertarians, baby boomer vets, hyper-educated twentysomethings, etc. — that makes it clear that online conservatives, like any large community, belong to a positively large, and heterogeneous, tent.
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Xeroxing the spirit of FreeRice, the online game that seeks to end global hunger via mouse clicks, the Click 4 Obama game coverts clicks into Obama ads. Answer correctly a trivia question like “How long have American forces been fighting in Iraq,” and you’ve donated some prime pro-Obama ad space. With a generous helping of simple trivia questions to keep you clicking, it’s pretty addictive.
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Causes, the Facebook app that we’ve covered before, has announced they’ve raised $2.5 million for almost 20,000 non-profits in the last year and have registered 12 million users. Those are impressive stats for an application that, for now, lives solely on Facebook. But the future is uncertain: as Facebook reconfigures its application platform and other services like Google Friend Connect arise, we’re certain to see Causes and other similar companies change their game plan.
The Candidates on the Web
- Coinciding with John McCain’s attack on Barack Obama for only visiting Iraq once in the last two years, the RNC is featuring a countdown clock on its homepage that displays the days since Obama visited Iraq (872). They’ve smartly converted it into a widget so you, too, can keep tabs on Obama’s Iraq visits.
In Case You Missed It…
John McCain’s often aimless email messages are something of a recurring theme here at techPresident, so much so that Michael Whitney is dubbing the topic “McCain Email Watch.” Today’s example: a fundraising message that offered a 3’x6’ personalized banner for the low price of $250.