Daily Digest: The Wikipedia Primary

Dayton, OH Edition

• I’m in Dayton, OH, patiently waiting for my lost luggage to return to me (right now it’s in Chicago or something), so please excuse any random outbursts of anger.

The Web on the Candidates

• Rightly impressed with his list of achievements and projects, MediaShift’s Mark Glaser interviews techPrez contributor Patrick Ruffini, asking about the relationship between online fundraising and offline votes, why John McCain should produce a daily video blog, his Twitter experiments, and mobile campaigns. Required reading.

• Rolling Stone has a big feature on Barack Obama this month, with writer Tim Dickinson honing in on the roots of Obama’s grassroots organizing. NDN’s Simon Rosenberg tells Dickinson that the campaign has “married the incredibly powerful online community they built with real on-the-ground field operations. We’ve never seen anything like this before in American political history.” And there’s more: “They have taken the bottom-up campaign and absolutely perfected it,” Joe Trippi says. Rolling Stone has endorsed Obama, so don’t expect a critical piece. But it’s still a fun investigation into what makes this campaign team so different, and why so many tech/politics geeks are searching for superlatives to describe it.

• techPresident contributor Mike Connery, who runs the site Future Majority (and just published a book) is guest-posting at TPMCafe this week, inviting readers to chat about the role of millenial voters in the election. There’s some smart discussion happening over there — do check it out.

• Who’s winning the Wikipedia primary? According to this cool site showing Wikipedia traffic, Barack Obama’s entry is the seventh most-viewed article on Wikipedia — and the most viewed among articles about actual people (he falls behind Valentine’s Day, three special Wikipedia pages, and the entry for Wiki), with 1,934,492 views in February. John McCain’s entry is in ninth place, with 1,151,929 views in February. Hillary Clinton’s page is far, far below those two, around 75th place with only 422,124 views last month (there are other Clinton-related pages even further down the list).

• This isn’t directly about politics, but it could be: Flickr has partnered with nonprofit and technology group TechSoup to roll out Flickr for Good, a simple program that gives Flickr Pro memberships to nonprofits involved in “good causes.” Participants include a group providing free reconstructive surgery for children with clefts and a group doing relief work to assist victims of disasters. If you think you might fit the bill, get thee a Flickr Pro acccount!

The Candidates on the Web

• The story of the splash: In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s victories and John McCain’s clinching of the Republican nomination, the candidates’ splash pages communicate different messages. As we noted yesterday, McCain’s site opens with an idiosyncratic photo of — presumably — the Arizona desert, which communicates… Western movies? Clinton’s site goes directly to a donation page. Subtle! And Obama’s splash page hasn’t changed at all — it’s still a pic of the Obama family sitting atop an email form. Obama comes across as a confident frontrunner, Clinton is projecting herself as a the insurgent with momentum who needs your help, and McCain is… again, we’re not sure what McCain is communicating. Hardiness? America? Thirst?

In Case You Missed It…

Michael Whitney writes that Facebook has changed the way it lets users identify their political views, replacing a simple spectrum of views with a cluttered list of international political parties. It may seem like a small change, but organizing people into political parties allows Facebook to sell microtargeted ads to advertisers looking to reach, say, Democrats in Ohio.

From the Politics Online Conference, Colin Delany posts some quick numbers on how candidates are expected to spend their money online in 2008 and what it will take to boost the percentage of political media money flowing onto the internet.