Serendipity35

I guess it should be no surprise that with the new and relatively cheap technologies that have emerged since the 2004 elections that the Presidential candidates have moved online in a big way.

Sen. Hillary Clinton has a chief technology officer and John Edwards was advertising for volunteers who can program Ajax. Both Clinton and Barack Obama announced there intentions to run through videos on the websites and not at the usual press conference.

The candidates are expected to spend more than a billion dollars this time out. A lot of that will still go to the high cost medium of TV, but a much larger share is headed online and that will probably increase in the next 19 months.

The Web played a role in the presidential campaigns in 1996, but it was probably 2004 when it really got noticed. Using blogs, MeetUp and online fund raising certainly made Howard Dean look like a frontrunner. But it burst like a dot com bubble.

There are campaign buses that have Wi-Fi and everyone on board is ready to text message, record video and send content out to YouTube, cell phones and BlackBerrys as well as traditional news outlets. After all, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the number of homes with broadband access has doubled to 50% since the last election.

Rudy Giuliani is offering some widget code to paste into your blogs allowing your readers to head right over to the JoinRudy2008 site (and thanks for your email and information folks).

Most candidates have multiple site URLs. At My.BarackObama.com you can create a profile, blog and link with friends. Geeez, it's only a matter of time before K-12 districts block that site! Many schools already block YouTube, so they can't check out Obama's YouTube site either.

Salesforce.com software has found its way into the Mitt Romney campaign (turning supporters into customers?). Romney is the founder of venture-capital firm, Bain Capital, and has 8 video channels on his site's Mitt TV. Hillary Clinton has "Hillcasts" on health care, national defense, energy and other issues.

Of course, user-generated content is playing a role in video this time as blogs first began to emerge in the last election cycle. And that's not always good for a candidate.

An "anti-Hillary" video (called "Hillary 1984") went from YouTube (3 million views) to blogs and then on commercial TV for some free airtime. It mashed the famous "introducing Macintosh" Apple TV commercial with Clinton speeches and carried the same Big Brother + 1984 tone as the original. I'm not sure that the "anti" message comes through. I asked some students what they thought the message was and they equally thought that it was saying that Clinton will "change everything" in 2008. And how come this didn't get pulled down from YouTube? Doesn't Apple have some copyright on that footage?

The video's producer (who called it a "citizen ad") was revealed by the Huffington Post as being an Obama supporter.

It was immediately redubbed by the media as "voter-generated content."

Romney was accused in some YouTube videos of "flip-flopping" on issues like single-sex marriage and abortion, so he hit back with 66 videos on his YouTube page. Watch out LonelyGirl15.

Then there were those virtual terrorists who hit John Edwards Second Life campaign headquarters in February. (Yes, he has an HQ in Second Life. Get with program people.) These virtual attacks in Second Life (AKA "griefing"). The campaign team filed an abuse report. Read all about it on the Edwards blog. They hit the place with Marxist/Lenninist posters and slogans, a feces spewing obscenity, and an altered picture of John in blackface and harassed visitors with right-wing & obscenity-laden abuse of Democrats.

They all better think twice about holding press conferences in SL. Remember that in December when CNET interviewed SL businesswoman Anshe Chung (described as SL's first millionaire) in that virtual world, she was griefed with flying, animated phalluses.

Still, Forefront Media (a "virtual event and promotions company") is supposed to be hosting a virtual
campaign in Second Life for the Senator Barack Obama on their island called SoHo.

Social networks aren't being ignored either. MySpace and Facebook is popular with candidates and MySpace announced a virtual primary for Jan. 1-2. That's 170 million members who can vote for a presidential nominee. Of course, a lot of those users can't actually vote cause they are teens and tweens, but... young people are a key target audience.

"Iowa and New Hampshire may be selecting delegates, but the MySpace vote will be the first test of where candidates stand in the election year," said Tom Anderson, president of MySpace.

MySpace also has a new website dedicated to the presidential campaign called MySpace Impact that contains pages for each of the presidential candidates in the the 2008 campaign. Thirteen today, but who knows how many will end up having pages. Collect all 13 for your kids.

How's the MySpace friends Democratic primary race going? Hillary has 8,614 friends; John Edwards 17,574 versus Barack with an overwhelming 94,961 as of 4/07/07. For comparison, Rudy Giuliani has - geez, I can't tell you, because it says that "This profile is set to private. This user must add you as a friend to see his/her profile." That's not cool. Very Web 1.0.

And there's money in them there clicks! Obama raised $6.9 million (25%+ of his total so far) on the Net, also netting more than 50,000 online donors' information. Ninety percent of those online contributions were for $100 or less. And he didn't use any postage, envelope stuffers or rent any halls and buy refreshments so he could give a speech. Very nice return on investment.

So, it's all going to change, right?

Blogger Bruno Giussani isn't buying it.

"This is not to say that in the future, citizens empowered by online tools won't be able to change politics for the better. Not this time though: the campaign up to 2008 will be wild. The tools are still too new, the possibilities too exciting, and a politically mature usage of them will take time to settle in.

Which means that 2008 -- boosted by California moving their primary to February, which changes the whole dynamics -- will probably be a campaign hitched to personality and authenticity, not to policies. That's the only signal that may emerge from the growing noise: leadership. How will this person respond in a crisis? Can I trust him or her to take the right decisions? Empathy and warmth will trump any carefully drafted social-security reform plan. Because with the message blurred by its own multiplicity, the messenger will become the (only) message."