From the Tea Party to Progressives, Outside Groups Look Online to Train New Candidates
BY Miranda Neubauer | Friday, April 20 2012
As city and state legislatures become battlegrounds where the political right and left do combat over education reform, labor organizing and social issues, outside groups from both sides are looking online for recruits to fill their ranks of local elected officials.
Read MoreIn Case You Blinked In the Last Two Hours, Here's Why Romney, Obama, and Cookies Have Anything in Common
BY Miranda Neubauer and Nick Judd | Thursday, April 19 2012
Regularly coordinating a new line of attack every day goes back at least as far as the George H.W. Bush-Michael Dukakis campaign of 1988. This year, though, the battle over the message of the day moves so fast as to cause whiplash for anyone who tries to look too closely. Although any political observer is likely able to point to many examples over the past year, it seems like the speed with which these things spin into and out of public view has been steadily increasing. Read More
Quote of the Day: Surprises
BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, April 17 2012
"October Surprise is from another age. We have an 'October Surprise' every ten minutes. You can't hold anything any more."
— ABC's Jake Tapper speaking at Harvard Kennedy School today, on the speed of news. Read MoreFor Efforts To Live-Tweet the Titanic Sinking 100 Years Later, Questions About When to Begin
BY Miranda Neubauer | Monday, April 16 2012
Several Twitter accounts this weekend attempted to tweet, in real-time, the sinking of the Titanic on the 100th anniversary of the tragedy. But translating an event that happened at the advent of the telegraph into the era of the tweet is — for the detail-minded, anyway — harder than it may seem.
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From "Texts With Hillary" To a Face-to-Face Meeting
BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, April 10 2012
Talk about starting something online and moving it offline: The makers of the Texts from Hillary tumblr met with, and collected an autographed "TfH" submission from, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "Someone on her staff emailed us yesterday and said that she had seen the site, she liked it and wanted us to come by and say hello for a few minutes," site co-creator Adam Smith told techPresident by phone today. Smith said that while she was "warm" — a contrast to the always-telling-people-what-to-do persona they've given her on the site — they didn't speak long. "She had another meeting to go to," he said. "I mean, she is the Secretary of State." Read More
EnemyGraph, the App that Lets You Share the Names You Love to Hate
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, April 4 2012
The creators of EnemyGraph, a Facebook app that asks you to indicate your enemies rather than your friends, are back in the laboratory. The application lets users indicate people or ideas they hate — either friends or celebrities — and select an archenemy to tell the world who or what they hate most of all. It was created by University of Texas at Dallas Emerging Media and Communication student Bradley Griffith, the emerging media program director, Dean Terry, and Harrison Massey, also a student in the program. "I feel like our intuition about people wanting to express dislike about a variety of things in an aggregated fashion and in a social context has been confirmed," Dean Terry, the director of the emerging media program at UT-Dalls, wrote to me in an email earlier this week. "The next step is to think about how to facilitate alliances around things people are upset about." Read More
Tumblr Gets a Director of Outreach for Causes and Politics
BY Jack Harris | Tuesday, April 3 2012
Liba Rubenstein recently became Tumblr's new director of outreach for causes and politics after spending the last several years at News Corp, most recently as director of their Global Energy Initiative. Rubenstein was previously MySpace’s public affairs coordinator, and managed MySpace’s causes and politics channels, before taking on her role in corporate social responsibility at News Corp. Read More
Time Magazine Plans to "Check In" With Foursquare at Democratic and Republican National Conventions
BY Raphael Majma | Monday, March 5 2012
Time magazine and Foursquare are partnering to provide attendees of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions with unlockable badges and curated information. During the conventions, Time plans to use Foursquare to spread updates from reporters and other guests, and promises "a visualization of convention activity" using Foursquare data. Through the partnership, visitors to each convention can also get a Time-branded Foursquare badge.
Read MoreAmid Social-Media-Fueled Furor, AOL Pulls Ads from Limbaugh's Radio Show
BY Miranda Neubauer | Monday, March 5 2012
AOL has become the eighth company to pull its advertising from Rush Limbaugh's radio show over his remarks directed to a Georgetown University Law Student over her testimony to Congress in support of coverage of contraception. As with the companies that previously announced removal of their support, AOL has been under pressure through critical social media reactions, and announced its decision using that medium as well. Read More
The Game: How Campaigns' New Obsession With Social Media is Hurting America
BY Nick Judd | Monday, January 9 2012
The thing about attaching numbers to people's names is that it usually makes them want to make the number go up. Call it gamification if you want. The truth is that it's human nature, and as more people pay attention to social media, it is creating a sort of downward behavioral spiral. Candidates wanting more points on the social media scoreboard are urging supporters to tweet and post to Facebook on their behalf — spreading borderline spam on social networks and doing nothing to make the campaign season less of a horse race when that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Read More