Personal Democracy Plus Our premium content network. LEARN MORE You are not logged in. LOG IN NOW >

Daily Digest: Primary Campaign '08 Goes Out in a Digital Flurry

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, June 4 2008

The Web on the Candidates

  • Hey, what’d you guys do last night? Anything fun? Me, I read a little, took a bath, kinda quiet...kidding, kidding. Last night marked (we think) the end of the '08 primary contests, and it went out in a digital flurry. With CNN blaring Hillary Clinton's vow to keep fighting on in the background, I watched a live video stream from inside the Barack Obama rally in St. Paul...while reading Twitter commentary from my network of snarky friends and acquaintances on both the right and left...including @rghanbari, someone unknown to me before last night and whose name I don't know, who was reporting live from inside in the Xcel Center...and posting photos from what seemed to be Obama's feet. Our editor Micah Sifry likes to talk about the "world live web," and last night really felt like the Internets were changing how I experience politics.

  • (Make of it what you will, but I left the Twitter-scanning tool Summize open last night in two browser windows -- one set to track "Clinton" and the other "Obama." When I got to my computer this morning, Summize reported 684 new mentions of Hillary’s name and 4080 of Barack’s.)

  • Comedian, writer, and activist Baratunde Thurston had some fun with nytimes.com's interactive data doohickey showing how different demographic groups voted Clinton and Obama.

  • How the World Sees Obama's Win: a nice compendium of front page news stories from across the globe; we shouldn't forget that the whole world is watching. (Thx Craig Newmark)

The Candidates on the Web

  • One thing particularly striking about Hillary Clinton's speech last night was how insistently she pushed supporters to get thee to hillaryclinton.com. What was she up to? Seriously soliciting ideas on going forward? Trying to harness whatever momentum is left? Collecting emails for a future run? TechPresident’s Dan Manatt and Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas came to the same conclusion -- she's looking for help retiring her campaign debts. (Indeed, it's not subtle -- the "I'm with Hillary!" form redirects to a contribution site.)

  • A day after hitting the magic number of 2,118 delegates, Obama will be in two places at once today...speaking to the pro-Israel group AIPAC live and in the flesh and addressing the SEIU convention now taking place in Puerto Rico. The senator won’t be hopping a plane to San Juan to speak to the union gathering. He’ll be using Ustream, the online streaming video app that’s quickly becoming a neat political tool.

  • A new online ad from the Republican National Committee remixes video clips from the loooong campaign that feature Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Edwards criticizing Barack Obama and praising John McCain. Love it or hate it, it shows some dexterity on the video editing front.

  • Writing on CIOZone, David Carr goes deep inside the Obama online effort. While much of Carr's long article is well-trod ground, points to look for include how ex-Facebooker Chris Hughes has worked to foster life to a self-directed community and how the campaign takes an eat-your-own-dog-food approach, using the same tools internally that it encourages supporters to use.

In Case You Missed It...

After the RNC boasted that their Facebook group was bigger than the Democratic National Committee's, the left-leaning netroots, Luigi Montanez, reports, rallied together to say "nothing doing."

Micah Sifry offers up "Snapshots as Campaign 2008 Resets," real-time tracking of what the web was up to last night with a look back at what the Democratic primary contest looked like from November of last year.

News Briefs

RSS Feed friday >

Google to Charlie Rangel: You Are Dead to Me.

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) might be facing particularly challenging reelection odds this year, at least acording to Google: based on its new Knowledge Graph interface, the search engine says that the very-much-alive Congressman died on November 20, 2004, as Colin Campbell first reported for Politicker via Azi Paybarah and Anthony Adragna. GO

friday >

Roemer to Americans Elect: Thanks Anyway

Americans Elect announced recently that it would suspend its online candidate selection process, leaving organizations in several states with an open slot on the ballot. Naturally, potential candidate Buddy Roemer is not enthused. "I am taking the next few days to review with supporters how best to proceed from here," he says. GO

Chris Anderson Says That Nixed TED Talk Was Rated "Mediocre," Links To It Anyway

TED's Chris Anderson responds to criticism of how his idea-spreading operation handled a talk about inequality — and posts video of the talk online. GO

Was the "Ricketts"/Fred Davis Obama-Wright Ad Pitch a Good Deal?

As if the content of the now-discarded plan for a new Super PAC-funded attack campaign against President Barack Obama wasn't controversial enough to grab attention — it would revive attempts to link President Obama to the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright just before the beginning of the Democratic National Convention this summer — the now-discarded plan featured a two-page pitch for a pricey social media component meant to boost its exposure. GO

Facebook's Growing Political Importance, Visualized

To commemorate Facebook's impending IPO, the Sunlight Foundation's* reporting group has a new story chronicling Facebook's increasing political spending. Accompanying the story, though, is an instance of their Capitol Words tool that shows Facebook's increasing relevance in Congress as well. GO

TED: Some Seattle Billionaires Have 'Ideas Worth Spreading'; Some Don't

A year ago, Microsoft mega-billionaire Bill Gates gave a talk at TED about state budgets and education funding, entitled "How state budgets are breaking US schools." It was an attack on state budgeting practices. All but one of the fifty states are supposed to balance their budget, but Gates argued that most states used gimmicks "that ... GO

Summer Olympics to Stream Live From the UK — For Some

The BBC announced its plans yesterday to broadcast its live Olympics coverage of London's Summer games to PCs, mobile-devices and Internet-connected televisions, Reuters reported.

With a free Olympics application for Apple and Android phones, the BBC says it will be offering up to 24 live streams and video highlights clips, and plans for over 2,500 hours of live programming ... that is only available to viewers in the UK. NBC also plans to stream online, but the majority of free viewing of the Olympics will only be available to existing cable TV subscribers.

GO

CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" Will Have Some Tech-Politics Commentators

This should be interesting: CNN nightly news program Erin Burnett OutFront is out with its list of political commentators for the general election. Some of the names are familiar in Internet-politics-land. The gang includes Upworthy's Maegan Carberry, who was previously director of communications at Rock The Vote; Sasha Issenberg, who ventures into our corner of the political world frequently while documenting the new science of political campaigns for Slate; and Ben Smith, veteran political blogger turned BuzzFeed's top politics editor.

GO

More