derek abdinor

I blogged last week about techpresident.com and the impact Elections 2.0 is having on the campaigns. Well, YouTube has just upped the ante by getting in on a debate where voters are sending in video messages to presidential hopefuls (much like sending an sms to a live panel show). Read it at the Guardian.co.uk

“YouTube, which did not exist during the last presidential campaign, has already had an impact on this one. More than 2.5 million people have viewed the video I’ve Got A Crush … On Obama since it was posted last month and a follow-up about women fighting over Mr Obama and Rudy Giuliani, the Republican frontrunner, has been watched more than 500,000 times since it appeared last week. A Hillary Clinton campaign spoof on the final episode of the Sopranos was also popular.”

“YouTube effectively knocked the former Republican senator George Allen out of the race . A video of him last summer referring to a dark-skinned Virginian as “macaca” cost him re-election to the senate and a tilt at the presidency.”

Update: August 2, 2007: cynical, media-aware opposite viewpoint | Guardian

TechPresident is an online aggregating service about all the US Presidential candidates’ use of online social media. You get to measure their effectiveness, or newsworthiness, on Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Technorati.

Votojournalism
The excellent portmanteau of Voter and Photojournalism, for voter-generated content where users post pictures of the candidates on the campaign trail, online. I think the term will be hijacked to come to mean the use of social media by voters, or by candidates (see below) to run an effective campaign.

Microblogging
I was suprised to find that Barack Obama microblogs (blogs constantly from a computer of mobile device, usually one-liners of his movements) on Twitter, and does a really handy job. In fact, he has raised over 40% of his funding online! Funding is key to success in US politics, and Barack’s online strategists have been on the money.

I feel this would have an impact on business, after the elections. You could never bring microblogging to business, but it would be excellent for wannabe celebrities to grow an active stalking community.

Update: this was fleshed out into an article for BizCommunity. Read/Write Web has some interesting stuff on this, although they seem to be looking at the metrics of voting at first blush:  a lot of users in the world deperately want/need the US to change its policies and are following the campaigns, or lending their online presences to candidates they hope will bring about meaningful change.

No time to Digg or Muti or Reddit:
Heinz writes with an article in Forbes on how [0]advertising in techmedia is drying up and going — where else? — into specialist blogs andGoogle. “Silicon Valley is booming again. But if you work in tech media,there’s blood on the floor. Take Red Herring. It hung onto its officesafter getting the eviction notice earlier this month. But gossip siteValleywag is breaking story after story not just on its beat — but aboutits woes. Meanwhile, bigger publications are hurting too: Time Warner’sBusiness 2.0 saw ad pages drop 21.8% through March from the same period ayear ago; PC Magazine’s editor in chief walked out the door after adpages fell 38.8% over the same period; and one-time online powerhouseCNET is reporting growing losses even as the companies it coversflourish. It may be happening in tech first, but there’s no reason thesame thing won’t happen, eventually, in every media niche.”Discuss this story at: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/07/17/0110256Links: 0. http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/07/16/redherring-print-blogs-tech-media-cx_bc_0716techmedia.html