Archive for October, 2006
From the Hartford Courant comes an insightful article by Chris Bigelow that helps to place the role of blogs in the political game. In it, Bigelow remidns us that blogs are still more of a vox populus than a slickly-run piece of campaign trickery. The key player in the recent Connecticut election wasn’t Lamont’s personal blog, or even one particular pro-Lamont blog. Rather, it was a collection of blogs run by people who might have only supported similiar causes as Lamont instead of him specifically. The lack of control that a campaign manager has over these blogs must be maddening but there is no use fighting against it. For now, the power of the blogs seems to be siding with those on the left. Remember though that this is only temporary and the history of the internet is full of fickle trends.
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This article appeared in the Examiner yesterday:
Robert Cox: When will the right recognize the cost of conceding Web 2.0?
WASHINGTON – If you doubt the Internet is causing a sea change in politics, just ask “independent” Senate candidate Joe Lieberman, who came out on the wrong end of a blogger-fueled campaign for the Democratic nomination in Connecticut.
That was no accident.
The article discusses the sale of YouTube and how online technologies and media are beneficial for the left side of the political spectre in the US.
Comment on the article on RedState
Although I find it hard to believe that people are sending us press releases/articles about their latest political marketing tool (considering how young our website is), I find it harder to believe that they are sending us press releases that are at least two weeks out of date, like PointRoll has done. PointRoll’s CEO Chris Saridakis, is informing us about rich media, which he believes will be what the 2008 election hinges upon. We do agree with Saridakis when he claims (backed up by a study by E-Voter) that the 2008 election in the US will mark the golden age of the Internet campaign. However, the main problem we have with his model of what rich media (and, we assume, his company) offers is that it seems to be drowning among all the other online political marketing tools out there. But yeah, keep informing us about the ‘political marketing revolutions’.
Updates on the blog situation in Iran.
Will a Google buy-out stop YouTube’s political revolution? John Harris dabates in The Guardian.
Huffington Post about Joe Liebermans campaign staff:…somebody needs to pull Joe’s astroturf crew aside and tell them that they really suck at this whole “blogging” thing.
Feel free to feed us with relevant stories.
While our website has primarily been focusing on the blogs of notable politicians, we would also like to note that focus groups, with their ability to sway the vote and draw attention, also deserve recognition for their political work in the blogosophere. From the left side of the spectrum, we have the Friends of Hylebos, a group of Americans dedicated to saving their local wetlands area. Through their blog, they have created a community of like-minded individuals and have definite potential to sway votes. Props to them for creating an easily-readable and frequently-updated blog that involves a large segment of the population in the process.
And on the other side, we can at least sleep peacefully knowing that bloggers (if no one else) are looking out for wealthy capitalists who have been accused of environmental crimes by poor natives. Eric Ness has created a blog aimed at clearing his father of pollution charges in Indonesia. Mineweb tells us that the blog has “managed to capture and sustain the attention of U.S. politicians, the international news media, the U.S. State Department, and other stakeholders.” Powerful stuff, I’ll admit. My favourite part is how Eric Ness posts a document that accuses NGOs of undermining democracy. It’s a bold move for a man who hasn’t updated his blog in almost three weeks. In the blogosphere, timeliness is next to godliness.
If you want to be taken seriously in the blogosphere, professionalism and accuracy are crucial to whatever work you do. Old news, I know, especially if you want to blog as a politician. Still, I had to learn it the hard way when I was totally slaughtered over at Tim Blair last week. In some way I guess I deserved it. Anyway, this is what I learned from the incident. Although these are blog specific suggestions, they probably apply to anyone preparing to enter the public sphere.
1) You might want to do a Google search on yourself before starting up your blog. There are always some sleazy pictures out there that might harm you. 2) Its important to have someone proofread your posts, even more so when you are not posting in your native language like myself 3) Prepare to have everything you have ever done dragged out into public view, especially if you are in a punk rock band whose lyrics would embarrass even your closest friends. Google will find you. 4) Delete previous and potentially contradictory blogs. 5) If you don’t turn away form the criticism, but rather roll with the punch, you might gain back some respect – Maybe not much, but at least some.
One of the questions that we continually ask ourselves is what exactly makes a good political blog. While some blogs focus only on basic policy issues, others delve into the personal life of the politician. Boingboing points out that Sayyid Ali Khameini, leader of Iran, takes it one step further by providing personal advice on his blog. While we may not agree with Sayyid’s condemnation of masturbation during Ramadan and disapproval of “accidentally” viewing dirty websites, he gets top marks from us for maintaining a well-written and topical blog that is relevant to his audience. It is a perfect example of how a blog differs from traditional media (like radio and television) in its ability to go into greater detail than simple sound bites and press releases. Western politicians aspiring to blog excellence should also take note of the “Send a Question” link, allowing people to inquire about specific aspects of Sayyid’s policies.Keep up the good work, Sayyid!
An interesting article appeared in Spiked October 3:
On the eve of the Conservative Party’s conference this week, leader David Cameron has been busy generating headlines. He was fancifully pitched alongside John F Kennedy for making similar ‘ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’ comments in the broadsheets. Most of all he made the front pages as a result of a new initiative called ‘webcameron’, which apparently will assist the Tories in ‘reaching out to a blogging generation that is disaffected and disconnected from mainstream politics’ (1).
Update:
Australian IT published an article on the same topic yesterday.
Update:
Cameron’s blog targeted by spoof
This article was also published in Crikey today.
Despite a recent Queensland state election just behind us, and a 2007 federal election looming around the corner, the numbers of Australian politicians making use of the blogosphere remains almost negligible. In fact, with a few exceptions, the chances of seeing an Australian politician blogging is as large as seeing John Howard avoiding a cricket match.
And the number of politicians blogging during the Queensland state election could be counted on one hand. In the US on the other hand, monitoring bloggers has become a part of understanding the modern political campaign. Since 2004, blogs have been used both by the Democrats and the Republicans to generate candidate visibility, to float stories, and to trigger discussions for political activists.
Blogs like The Daily Kos and Howard Dean for America (now called Blog for America) raised millions of dollars for candidates, organised meet-ups where activists were encouraged to write direct mail to the electorate, and develop the candidates to creative ways to communicate the campaign’s core message.
To briefly illustrate the significance of blogs in the US it is worth mentioning that boggers played a significant role in both claiming the scalp of Senate Majority leader Trend Lott in 2002 and Dan Rather in the so called ‘Rathergate’ scandal in 2004.
In an interview with IQ Inside last week, Joanna Jacobs (editor of the recently published Uses of Blogs) claimed that with 45 million blogs on the net, blogging is now a mainstream communication tool for people under 35. Despite this, only one Queensland candidate had listed their blog on Technorati during the course of the campaign.
None of the major three parties has a blog linked to their official website, and only once during the election campaign did they even publicly mention blogs. In what seems almost like defiance towards this, Australia’s most established political blog (Larvatus Prodeo) frequently discussed the election campaign and received 42 comments on its busiest day during the election.
As the popularity of sites like Larvatus Prodeo increases, a need to understand the potential power and influence of these blogs arises. Up until now, knowledge about the phenomenon has been fairly limited.
In an effort to generate some critical thought about this aspect of the political landscape, I have created my own blog on the topic as part of my masters degree at Griffith University.
We are living in an era where being a part of the general conversation is not only more important than ever, but also easier than ever, thanks to the internet. As the forum for political communication moves away from the airwaves and televisions and into cyberspace, politicians will have to wake up from their dream of one-way communication and realise that interacting with the politically involved citizens of cyberspace will become an important way to achieve electoral success.
Correction:
As people have addressed: Tim Blair is a higher ranked blog than Larvatus Prodeo according to Technorati. However, Tim Blair did not discuss the Queensland State election to the extent that Larvatus Prodeo did.
The significance of blogs in political campaigns is illustrated in an article in USA Today by David D. Perlmutter where he discusses Hillary Clinton’s future relationship with the emerging blogosphere. Perlmutter claims that howHillary plays the blogs, or is played by them, will be one of the most important political stories in the next few years. As of today, Hillary Clinton has three choices according to Perlmutter: either to ignore the left bloggers, attack left bloggers or co-opt left bloggers. Her husband Bill Clinton made the choice to attack a female black rap artist in the 1992 election to show his desire to appease the middle vote. The situation today is different for Mrs Clinton. If Mrs Clinton chooses to attack the left bloggers she will face a group that has grown in power with its influence in the cyber space. As Perlmutter remarks; the female rap artist that Bill attacked 1992 could only complain to the media and her friends (by phone), but today’s blogs can swarm the world with a mouse click.
What Perlmutter fails to mention that is perhaps just as important, is that the group he refers to as left bloggers has become much more united and aware of their power and influence than the activists on the left were in 1992. My advice would be to go for Perlmutters last option and co-opt the left bloggers. Hire an experienced advisor and ask the left bloggers for support.
And what does Hillary think of this new technology?
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