Uncategorized

Jack of all trades, Master of none? Not anymore

Here is an excellent article about Arianna Huffington, the baby-boomer blogger and founder of The Huffington post. I believe that the level of obsession that Arianna talks about is what will make really drive blogs in the next few years, especially as communities develop around them. Rather than newspapers or magazines and general news sites, I think that we will begin to see sites like popurls that simply filter through and amalgamate more specific sites. Rather than the current system where journalists are simply professional writers discussing many topics, amateur citizens will become experts in one specific field. What this could mean for the future of campaigns is that candidates (or corporations) will not just have one blog about themselves, but will perhaps have many different blogs. Each one will be able to attract a different segment of the audience and the conglomerate of blogs will be more effective than on broad blog.Also, I kind of think that Arianna is a babe.

Update

I have now updated the list of resources.

All the links should now work and it should be easier to view the format, year, author and content of the publications. We will continue to update the list in the coming weeks.

If you know of a publication, video, pod cast, campaign, etc. discussing the role and effect of blogs in political campaigns, please send us an email or post a comment to guide us in the direction of the piece.

Blogwars

Newswise reports of an upcoming book examining the history of blogs and its effect on politics.

The book is called Blogwars, and is the latest project of David Perlmutter, associate dean and professor of journalism at the University of Kansas. Originally the book was scheduled to be released next year but has been delayed in order to include the effects of blogging on this year’s mid-term elections.

Perlmutter said to Newswise that it is a challenge to writing a book about blogs as the medium is constantly changing.

The book will in particular focus on the growing impact blogs have on campaign ads and fundraising.

Markos Moulitsas on the past and future of political blogs

The New Politics Institute offers a video interview with DailyKos founder, Markos Moulitsas, on the past and future of blogs in the political sphere. Markos, who helped found The New Politics Institute, talks in the interview about how blog communities operate within the spectrum of US politics and how political activism and 'people powered' politics have claimed a growing role in the post-modern era of political campaigning.

If you haven't yet checked out the New Politics Institute website I encourage you to do so. The site offers several videos and reports addressing the role of online campaign tools.

This is how it's done.

Mark Warner impresses me, and if you are a politician or campaign director, pay attention to what he is doing. The Caucus tells us that the former Virginia Governor is using known bloggers to help him get in touch with the 'myspace generation'. While many politicians have acknowledged the importance of the intert, Warner has embraced it. The effectiveness of his Facebook profile is a start, and the fact that he has hired a well-known blogger to head up his internet team goes a long way to helping him securing what is a new, younger, and better-informed voting public. In short, he "gets it."And the best part? That he held a press conference in the online game Second Life. As we become used to living through our computer screens, events like this will be better attended than their real-world equivalents.

Blogs that work: Straight outta T-Dot

Toronto mayoral candidate David Miller gets top marks in our books for his beautiful blog. Well, it might not be beautiful but at the very least it is aesthetically pleasing (which, good as it may be, is more than we can say for Garth Turner’s blog). The frequent updates are also good, and provide a reason for interested voters to return to the site again for more updates on his policies and responses to issues that may arise throughout the campaign. The Ask The Mayor section is good, but could probably be positioned a bit higher up on the page for greater visibility. He also gets points for having his blog translated into the many languages of Toronto. Although English may be the lingua franca of the internet, it is not necessarily the only language spoken in multicultural cities like Toronto. Nice work, David Miller. Or rather, whoever David Miller paid to do his blog did good some nice work.

Garth Turner Gets It

After reading this article in the Halifax’s Chronicle Herald, I’m pretty certain Garth Turner knows what’s going on. The Independent MP in the Halton region of Ontario is changing the way Canadians do politics. His interactive website and blog are making it easy for constituents to get in touch with him and discuss his policies. It seems to be working and, as the article’s author says, “political blogging can’t be put back in the bottle.”

The State (Province?) of Canadian Blogging

As our first guest writer, Olaf from The Prairie Wrangler blog writes about political blogging in Canada... "I would describe Canadian political blogging as a massive ocean, fully saturated with fish and containing three clearly discernable whirlpools. Now, I'm not much of a poet, as you will soon find out, so try to bear with me on this analogy.

There's a left wing pool, a centrist pool, and a right wing pool that all connect at their edges. A vast majority of bloggers swim towards the pool they find most comfortable, and often get sucked down into the depths of that dark void, never to return again, and never to see beyond it.

They become more and more confident that their pool is superior as they sink deeper and deeper, and convene only with the like-minded. Together, all arrogantly smirk at those who have, through moral deviancy or intellectual dishonesty, chose a pool different from their own. They no longer need to swim; they merely rest near the bottom of their pool, drinking the party "kool-aid", chatting amongst themselves, and going around in circles.

Then there are some swimmers who gravitate to the area between the three pools. These are the strongest swimmers, and must constantly fight the whirlpools of their ideological home, however comfortable it may be, and must constantly swim towards the outer edge. They are able to converse with the other pools without derision, and make arguments by challenging their arguments, with an underlying respect, instead of contempt. It is these bloggers who prevent the blogosphere from degenerating completely into tri-polar, mutually exclusive pools. They are able to contribute constructively to political discourse, because they have to keep swimming to stay where they are.

Although there are quite a few edge-swimmers from each whirlpool, in my opinion, the top two from each are:

Right-wing swimmers: Andrew at BoundByGravity Greg at Political Staples

Centrist swimmers: Bart at Calgary Grit Peter at Paper Dynamite

Left-wing swimmers: The Idealistic Pragmatist John at Dymaxion World"

Thanks, Olaf!

We will be looking for more people to write guest articles in the future, so if you are interested send us an e-mail.

Weblogs in Political Campaigns - The Critical Success Factors

I found this paper on weblogs role in political campaigns by some help from a Norwegian based blogger today. Haven't had time to read it yet, but I will. The paper was presented at BlogTalkReloaded in Vienna, Austria this month and aims to estimate the potential of weblogs as a campaigning instrument. According to the authors the paper present some answers to the question of whether campaigning via weblogs can be a success.

Blogs growing by the second

Steve Johnson said in yesterday's Chicago Tribune that blogs are about to become "mainstream". Recent numbers from the Pew Institute show that only 8 percent (12 million American adults) of U.S. Internet users operate a blog and a significantly higher number aren't entirely sure what the term "web blog" means.

However, we are (according to David Sifry - founder of Technorati) seeing a growth of 175,000 blogs every single day – about two every second of every day – opposed to a growth of one every second seven months ago.

57 million American adults (39 percent) read blogs on a daily basis, 72 percent of all bloggers looks online for news or information about politics. Technorati have listed 57 million blogs on their site. Surely these numbers must indicate a significant impact on the political sphere and the way we visualise political campaigns. The question we still have to dig deeper for is how blogs can have impact on political campaigns.

News link:
Europe's Politicians Embrace Web 2.0

Can Outside get on the inside of politics?

Today's boingboing has a link to a fabulous concept site, Outside.in. I feel that by saying this is a location-based information-collector (based on certain neighbourhoods) I am not giving them enough credit. Take a look at their site for yourself and see what a great concept they have come up with. Afterwards, think about how this kind of system could be used for political purposes. I feel that it will make it much easier for interested voters to find out about issues in their area and how the different candidates relate to this issues. Outside.in looks like it will work much better than a simple search engine or list of links for these kinds of purposes, and I look forward to following their progress.

How ICT technologies can enhance visability for community campaigns

The Hansard Society recently released a report looking at how new information and communications technologies can provide a stronger voice for marginalised groups and communities. The report looks at how the ICT technologies can make the democratic system function more effectively and how the role and effect of blogs can help community based campaigns receive recognition and visibility.

The report is added to our list of academic books and articles focusing on the effect of blogging in political campaigns. Help us make the list more comprehensive by posting a comment on our academic research page.

Hometown Hero

From the home of the Calgary Flames comes a blog that reminds us once again that it is not the politicians or marketing machines who rule the blogwaves, but rather the do-it-yourselfers. CalgaryGrit's political analysis is amateur in the best sense of the word. It shows the ability of blogs to showcase an opinion without having to pander to corporate or editorial ideologies as journalists in the past have had to. Although CalgaryGrit has an admittedly liberal slant to it, its conversational style realizes the dream of the blogosphere as a political realm for the everyman.

Virtual Politics

Speaking of fickle trends, someone recently pointed out an article about how the virtual worlds in online roleplaying games are reaping real world profits for some of their slightly more shrewd players. Even recording artists are holding concerts here, and fashion designers are selling virtual versions of their garments. Now, as politicians begin to embrace the blogsophere, I begin to wonder how long it will be before a candidate steps onto a soapbox in one of these in-game worlds to give a speech. With a growing user base at least as devoted as the bloggers, do these online worlds have the potential to become venues in the political sphere?

Who has blog power?

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.

Link

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.

Link to the article

Comment on the article on RedState

Just another political marketing tool?

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’.