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Daily Digest: The Mobilized Mob Does as It Pleases

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, June 30 2008

We offer the TechPres guarantee that the single most enjoyable thing you can possibly do this Monday is to participate in this spankin' new poll: Does a Connected World Need a Connected POTUS? Register your vote and the join the discussion in the comments. Come on, it's guaranteed, so what do you have to lose? Vote and discuss!

The Web on the Candidates

  • "The mob, now mobilized, will do as it pleases." That was keynoter Mark Pesce at PdF '08, and there are signs today that he might have been onto something. A "Senator Obama Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity – Get FISA Right" protest group launched with a couple mouse clicks on Barack Obama's MyBarackObama.com last Wednesday has swelled to 4,160 members, making it at the moment the fifth largest group on the campaign's official social-networking site. There's now an off-site wiki dedicated to growing the group and ginning up interest in the press. And all this week, MoveOn will be emailing its giant membership list encouraging anti-FISAites to join the MyBO group. The Obama campaign is facing a question: what does their ground-breaking style of collaborative campaigning mean when it comes time to tackle the hard tasks of governing? The Nation's Ari Melber has more.

  • Also on the holding-candidates-accountable front, The Obama Let Down Watch is a new watchdog site launched by a pair of Obama supporters to, they write, "ensure that Senator Obama lives up to the standards -- and the expectations -- which he has set."

  • The New York Times' has a timely story out about how "freelancers" are using cheap tools to have an out-sized voice in the campaigns, but their poster child is not a kid in a garage with an iMac and a copy of iMovie, but Robert Greenwald -- a high-profile California filmmaker who runs the well-established film shop Brave New Films. Robert, who spoke on a PdF '08 panel on political video, has proven that digital shorts can have a big impact online, having garnered more than 20 million views and counting with series like "The Real McCain" and the "Fox Attacks."

  • A bit more freelancer-y is the effort from the Arizona-based outfit SyntheticHuman Pictures, whose "I'm Voting Republican" video is a polished short that blends some pointed anti-Republican arguments with humor; one faux-Republican couple explains their own reasoning: "We just love cheap plastic crap from China." It's a message and approach that seems to have legs. The Internet monitoring firm Hitwise reports that, in the last two weeks, the site set up to house the video captured a higher market share than JohnMcCain.com.

  • Baraculture watch: Without direction or support from campaign HQ, a good number of Obama supporters are changing their middle names to "Hussein" on social networking sites and in their email handles, hoping to make the candidate's Arabic name seem a little less frighteningly foreign.

TechCongress and Beyond

  • Both the Republican convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul this September and the Democratic National convention in Denver this August will be host to about 200 credentialed bloggers -- a sharp increase from the 42 total bloggers who had passes for the 2004 party gatherings.

In Case You Missed It...

C-SPAN has posted video of selected sessions from Personal Democracy Forum 2008. Sit back and enjoy:

We'll be posting our own video of conference sessions in the weeks to come.

Barely Political, the team behind the "Obama Girl" videos, has posted a collection of short interview clips from PdF '08. Watch it to see technopoliticos struggle to find words when confronted by the microphone of Obama Girl herself, Amber Lee Ettinger.

News Briefs

RSS Feed yesterday >

"Power Politics in the Age of Google"

TechPresident's editorial director, Micah Sifry, will be speaking this afternoon on a panel at Harvard University called "Power Politics in the Age of Google," alongside Susan Crawford, Nicco Mele, Elaine Kamarck and Alexis Ohanian. The panel will be moderated by Harvard Shorenstein Center Director Alex Jones, and will be live-streamed here. GO

House Republicans Get a Jump on the Budget

Via Politico's Mike Allen, the House Republicans are out with a video — this one attributed to Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy — getting the drop on President Barack Obama's next federal budget, expected Monday. GO

Mittbucks.com Lets Voters Compare Their Paychecks With Romney's

What would it take for Mitt Romney to be able to relate to the average American's daily economic life? He'd have to pay $1,208.09 for a gallon of gas, according to Mittbucks.com, a web site recently created by Adam Rosenscruggs and his wife Danielle in Washington, D.C. The eye-popping figure results from an annual income that I plugged in ... GO

What Twitter Won't Tell You About the Election

A new study released on Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press on Tuesday offers the opportunity to get real about what the political conversation on Twitter and Facebook can — or can't — tell you about the progression of the 2012 political campaign. Pew has found that even among users of Twitter and Facebook, a paltry percentage of people use social networks to get news about politics: Only 24 percent of Twitter users in the sample and 25 percent of Facebook users said they "sometimes" got campaign news through that network, while a full 40 percent of Twitter users in the sample and 46 percent of other social media users reported "never" getting campaign news through either Twitter or Facebook. GO

Navigating New York's "Road Map for the Digital City," One Year In

In May 2011, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg revealed a "Road Map for the Digital City," a plan to use technology to make city government more and participatory, and to leverage the city's tech sector for economic and civic gains.

New York City Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne will join our editorial director, Micah Sifry, on a conference call this Friday afternoon to discuss the progress on that road map so far. The call is free and open to anyone to join. You can sign up here.

GO

tuesday >

Pete Hoekstra's Campaign Website's "Offensive" Source Code Changed After Outcry

As if "chop suey fonts" and obvious graphic allusions to the stereotype of the Chinese as the Yellow Peril weren't controversial enough, the group that created an incendiary microsite for former Rep. Pete Hoekstra's campaign has managed to further fan the flames with what it's calling a mistake in its code. GO

Fidel Castro Loves the Internet

“The Internet is a revolutionary instrument that permits the receiving and transmission of ideas, in both directions, that is something we should know how to use,” Fidel Castro told a crowd of supporters on Feb. 4, according to the state-owned Cuban newspaper Granma International. Castro, who made his first public appearance since April 2011, launched his two-volume memoir, “Guerilla of Time,” and took the opportunity to discuss issues of importance to him. Earlier this week, Miranda Neubauer reported that one of these topics was the need for the Internet. Castro has been a proponent of the Internet as a tool for the exchange of ideas since 2003, but the average Cuban citizen faces great difficulty getting online. GO

Claire McCaskill Hires Blue State Digital's Alex Kellner As Digital Director

Missouri's senior Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill has hired Blue State Digital's Alex Kellner as its digital director. GO

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