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As promised BlogCampaigning continue to bring you the latest and most comprehensive list of articles, reports and news discussing the effects of blogging on politics. I have added a few academic papers to the list of recourses this week. However, it is hard for us part time bloggers to have a total overview of all the resources out there, so please let us know if you stumble across an interesting piece, and we'll add it to the list.

And if you are the kind of guy or girl who think this collaborative way of increasing knowledge is a good idea, I suggest you also check out Erin Tellings post What if Academia met Social Networking?

Congratulations! (Blog Campaigning's Soft News Story of the Week)

We here at Blog Campaigning would like to take a moment to congratulate Martin Hoffman on his recent 7 year immigration anniversary. He told me the story of how he met his wife, and its pretty much the travelers dream. Ask him about it sometime. We would also like to congratulate long-time Blog Campaigning friend Paull Young on his new job. Hopefully, he won't forget about us when he becomes a ballin' big shot.

Still Waiting For The Internet's Major Impact On Politics? – Keep waiting reports Techdirt?

For quite some time, people have been predicting that the internet would have a profound effect on the American political system, but these statements have always sounded more like wishful thinking than anything else. This week, the internet inserted itself twice into the race for President. The first was when a commercial slamming Hillary Clinton, a takeoff on the famous Apple 1984 ad, was released on YouTube, garnering millions of views. The second incident was yesterday, when the political news site Politico mistakenly broke the story that John Edwards was dropping out of the race for President. Many sites, including MSNBC, ran with it as news, but it turned out to be a false story, reports Techdirt this week.

The question is: Did/will any of these events have an impact on the campaign?

Not likely reports Techdirt.

The Hillary Clinton "1984" ad was only interesting as a testament to the fact that an individual can make a really cool looking ad; as a political ad, it's hard to imagine it having any impact at all. The Edwards event briefly showed how quickly the internet can propagate a false story, but that's not really news at all, and again, the actual political impact of a brief period when people had the wrong idea about John Edwards' political future will be virtually nil.

I can agree to that. But to imply that we are still waiting for internet's major impact on politics? What about ‘Macaca’, Lott, Rather, Dean etc? Don't moments like that count for anything?  

Why you and I can influence political campaigns

Phil de Vellis and Jonathan Schilling are influential individuals. You can become one too.

TechPresident has an excellent article this week looking at how individual internet users like Phil de Vellis aka ParkRidge47 and Jonathan Schilling aka Wasted_Time_R have come to have a profound impact on political campaigns.

In the post The New Influencers, Fred Stutzman of TechPresident writes:

Over the past two weeks, ParkRidge47 has effectively and persuasively illustrated the role voter-generated content will play in race to 2008. With over 2.3M views at time of writing, his 1984 culture-jack has become the canonical example of a voter-generated content coup. And while ParkRidge47 deserves a tremendous amount of credit for his work, it is important to remember that his is just one piece in an evolving story - why, the laughable Anti-Obama version of the ad has over 380k views despite its one-star rating. Over the course of the 2008 campaigns, we'll see many of these new influencers emerge.

Stutzman also points out that other individuals, like Schilling have had a profound impact on shaping the identity of certain presidential candidates in the 2008 race. Why: Schilling has been a steady editor of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s and Rudy Giuliani’s Wikipedia entries – And where do people go when they look for information about a candidate? You know the answer: Wikipedia!

Start editing!

Yes, blogs do matter

In regards to my thesis about the impact of blogs on political campaigns I've been trying hard to locate arguments stating why and how blogs can induce power. I just came across an article discussing the impact of blogs on the outcome of Labour's deputy leadership election in UK in which Mike Ion hits the nail on the head:

Blogs take the media out of the hands of the corporate world and put it into the hands of anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Their audiences tend to be political junkies who have almost non-stop access to a computer and large amounts of time to surf the internet for breaking news. Yet, in part, this is what makes some political bloggers so powerful - their ability to influence the influencers!

Just as Lazarsfeld would have said it.

Myspace Impact: Guiliani doesn't want to be your friend.

By Espen and Jens Sunday MySpace launched  Impact Channel.

Catchy name, but that’s also about everything that is positive about the site right now.

Impact Channel will according to the New York Times be an online version of a town square, providing a collection of links to political MySpace pages that will make it easier for the site’s 60 million American to peruse the personal MySpace pages of, so far, 10 presidential candidates.

The idea is that the channel will be much like those on the site already devoted to music or video. By clicking into it and on the separate campaign pages, users will be able to read candidate’s blogs, view their personal videos and snapshots, and link to other sites that discuss pet issues. Then, theoretically, users will add their favorite candidates to their friends list, and their friends will add them, too. The campaigns will spread virally, in the 2008 campaign strategy of the moment.

But hold on for a moment… spread virally….spread what virally?

 

guilliani21.jpg

 

A snapshot of Rudolph Guiliani's official Myspace impact site reviles… well, nothing, it's f…… empty! It's set on private. Now that's what I call endorsing the SNS spirit! Meanwhile, Hilary Clinton likes to be written about in third person - How personal! And by the way; John McCain endorses torture for the sake of protection of the country: Just check his favorite TV-show. Now that’s American…or isn't it these days?

So is it just BlogCampaigning that have a fairly negative impression about the site? Let’s check how other blogs perceive the site:

Techpresident:

There isn't much to write about. The Impact channel feels like little more than a hastily-thrown-together landing page for "official" candidate profiles.

Obviously not!

However, as a majority of young people maintain their primary SNS identity on Myspace, it is clear Impact Channel presents a potential tool when it comes to reaching voters. So why not use its potential.

Allow me to quote Techpresident again:

This is uncharted territory for social networking services, and may prove to be one of the defining stories of the 2008 race. With Myspace owning the dominant share of the SNS market, if candidates can effectively design fund-raising destinations and widgets, the potential is enormous.

well, unless you're Rudolph Guiliani, that is.

New battle grounds

This is how British Bloggerhead in 2003 argued that the blogs would benefit politicians:

... publishing frequency (presented in the correct format) has a very positive effect not only on people, but also on the search engines that are using them increasingly to decide what is the most important, relevant and fresh result for any given search query.

A valid weblog will have a pronounced effect on the two top search databases on the planet - Google and Yahoo. People seeking information relating to issues you think to be important will invariably find your site among the top results.

In the 2006 Senatorial election some political grassroots organizations took advantage of this. Google Bombing campaigns were launched to try to tarnish political opponents.

Mydd's Goggle bombing campaing: The utilization of Google Adwords and simultaneous, widespread embedded hyperlinks in order to drive as many voters as possible toward the most damning, non-partisan article written on the Republican candidate in seventy key US Senate and House races. The campaign will run from Tuesday, October 24th until Tuesday, November 7th.

In 2008 the battle will be fought on other grounds reports Promotion World.

Google Bombing might be a non-issue for the 2008 election given recent changes by Google, but the MySpace wars and other Web battles are just now heating up.

Instead the war for web optimization will be fought using search engine rankings, Google PageRank inbound links, MySpace, and Alexa rankings.

To view out how the candidates are doing so far, check out this link.

Blog Moon Rising

....and if you are looking for something to fill the void of my departure (no, just think of it as a leave of absence while I get settled in my new job), check out this blog and also this one, both published by students at one of the colleges here in Toronto. Espen will also continue his posts, and I'll be doing my best to continue editing his wacky Norwegian-styled English. And I'm sure I'll be back again over the course of the next week or so.

No Longer Just Another Unemployed Loser

There is a popular conception amongst the general population that bloggers are generally nothing more than just a bunch of unemployed losers. While such a description might have applied to me for the past month or so (wait...how long has it been since October?), I have now found an actual job. Hopefully, I'll be able to put my media-analysis skills to good use and that the world will be a better place for it.

Unfortunately, a mountain of confidentiality agreements and the like prevent me from commenting too much about my job, but I will say that I its going to keep me busy and I don't know how much time I will have to continue blogging.

I'll do my best, but in the end I may have to pass the torch. Long live the unemployed losers of the world and their endless commentary.

I'll do everything I can to keep in touch.

Will the political game enter the mainstream...Home?

By Jens "the German" Schroder  The recently introduced Home for Playstation 3 Sony pretty much crams every successful Web 2.0/ social networking/ user generated content/ digital parallel universe trend into piece of – free – software (though allegedly they had all these ideas first). Users can customise their avatars and rich virtual spaces, show off in-game achievements and exhibit photos, videos and music. Classy!

Considering how many corporations, politicians and cocks currently strive for a presence in Second Life made me wonder: How could this environment be used for campaigning?

There is of course the possibility to create a virtual space with pictures of you and your family, your potential voters and important community members hanging on the walls, while your latest speech/ YouTube address streams on a screen in the lobby and all that jazz.

However, Home furthermore offers the opportunity to play games in a "game" by letting users put up arcade cabinets in their virtual world (think GTA San Andreas). The question is: Will this chance be used to get the message across? Due to their ability to showcase complicated dynamics in a user-friendly way "it would not be surprising if politicians tried to explain their plans on tax or health reform through video games" writes Gonzalo Frasca whose website newsgaming.com gives a taste of the possible things to come.

Not only offers home these ideas an interesting platform it is also less manipulable than Second Life, i.e. less hassle trough less anarchy, vandalism and flying penises. Furthermore taking the ever growing console market into account Home potentially offers a gigantic user base (to clarify that potential: the Playstation 2 sold about 115 million times while there are currently about eight million Second Life subscribers) – that is of course if Sony manages to turn the tide of negativity and starts selling consoles while keeping Home attractive enough for the next seven years or so.

With the ever expanding reach of consoles into the living room also gamer demographics changed. In fact most gamers are eligible to vote and don't consist of male nerds: According to the IEAA the average age of Australian gamers is 28 while women are the fastest growing audience for interactive entertainment.

Some questions remain though: How many users are allowed in a space at one time? Will it in the long run be possible to prevent vandalism? What about the negative bias towards digital games in politics or candidates who simply have no idea what they are talking about? Will they be seen as hypocrites who are just using a platform for their own ends? And in this connection: Imagine candidates greeting (early adaptor) guests with something like "Welcome to my Nintendo world!".

Blogs play critical role in campaigns

Earlier this week I pointed out a post by Jerome Armstrong were he talks about how blogs will be used different in this Presidential contest compared to the on in 2004. In regards to his post I thought it might be interesting to look at which aspects of blogging that actually had an impact on the election campaign in the 2004 race. I therefore did a quick Google search to see if I could locate any articles discussing the topic. I realize off course that I could be searching for months if I had the time. Instead of doing that I will post some of the interesting articles I found as an introduction; and encourage people to discuss the mater her on the blog: This article by ZDnet, posted in November 2004, argues that blogs helped shape and speed the presidential campaign's dialog, and contributed to a powerful grassroots mobilization that many analysts at the time said could tip the balance of the election.

This article by ClickZ argues that Blogs became mainstream media's guides to the Internet and therefore made an impact on the election landscape.

The article, The Rise Of Blogs, on the Beltway Blogroll argues that blogs put issues out before the public that mainstream media did not cover and therefore made an impact.

This report by Campaigns Online concluded in its study of the 2004 campaign that only blogs that managed to produce a user-friendly interactive atmosphere, like the Howard Dean’s blog, had an impact on the election.

Do you have an opinion or do you know of a good article discussing the matter, please let us know.

Update:

This is an interesting contribution to the question: Blog impact on Ohio 5/2/06 primary elections. Read the discussion on the comment section.

And this article, looking at the impact of blogs in the Canadian election 2006.

And this one, claiming Google bombing could potentially impact the 2006 U.S Senatorial election.

QuandO claimed the the impact of blogs on the 2006 U.S Senatorial election was negligible.

Peter Daou believes that assessing the influence of blogs is difficult: First, there’s no consensus on metrics. Second, blogs serve many purposes, some of which are more social than political. Third, the use of the Internet in political campaigns cuts across so many areas that it’s easy to confuse netroots influence in the communications and messaging realm with other Internet-based political applications such as organizing and fundraising. Fourth, ‘influence’ is a hazy term.

Blogs also begin to impact Japanese Political World.

2007 People’s Choice Awards for Impact Moment and Online Politician of the Year

The Institute for Politics Democracy and the Internet are staging the 2007 People’s Choice Awards for Impact Moment and Online Politician of the Year on their blog right now. Follow the link to see which moments and which politicians IPDI think deserve to take home the award. If you are interested in having a say votes can be submitted until Thursday March 15th to submit your vote.

Blogs Impact on the 2008 race: What's different from 2004?

Jerome Armstrong had a post on the Dole Institute Blog last month where he compared the US blogosphere in 2004 to the blogosphere of today in order to point toward some of the possibilities for how blogs will be used in the 2008 campaign. Here’s a long short-version of the main differences that Armstrong points to (in his own words):

Size: The blogosphere, in 2007, is 100 times as big as it was at this time in the last cycle, in 2003. Today, the top 100 blogs on the liberal side are visited by over 10 million hard core democrats on a regular basis. By and large, it is the same majority that votes in primaries and caucuses that visit the partisan democratic-leaning blogosphere.

Diversity: In 2003, most of the blogs that were focused upon by the big media outlets as having an impact upon the Presidential contest were very political-focused blogs. Now, there are blogospheres within the blogosphere, and pretty much anyone can find a blog community on the topic of their choice. Technology, Sports, Entertainment, Gossip, Counter-culture, Gaming, the list goes on and on. It’s where people are on the internet, and it’s the job of campaigns to interact with them, as many of them are the low-information voters that are needed to win. In addition, the development of local, in-state, blogospheres have become vital to connect activism on the netroots to local grassroots action.

Staff: Last cycle, on the Democratic side for the primaries, only Dean really had an internet team that did such things as blogger outreach, rapid response through the blogs, and fundraising over the blogs. This cycle, it will be just the opposite, with whichever campaign that does not have an internet outreach effort to the blogosphere, sticking out like a sore thumb.

Multimedia: In the last cycle, blogs mainly relied upon text to get their point across.. When You Tube launched in the beginning of 2006, everything changed. Now, bloggers can easily upload videos or embed/link to them from their sites. It’s now becoming the same way with the advent of Blog Talk Radio shows that have the ability to allow multiple users in on a talk show. Blogs are becoming multimedia content producers, which gives them the potential to reach larger numbers of viewers than having just text readers alone.

I’ve not even mentioned fundraising, technology and organizing, but the above should give you a feel for what’s in store with the blogs and the 2008 presidential cycle.

YouTube and the future of rapid response

In the 1990’s, both Clinton presidential campaigns and the Clinton administration developed a rapid response system to defend itself and attack opponents when their opponents made political or personal attacks. The system was run with an almost machine-like precision, and Clinton ended up winning two presidential campaigns - he even survived the Monica Lewinsky scandal, reports Jonathan Trenn of Blog the Campaing ’08. Today’s campaigns are being launched earlier than ever. And with the advent of YouTube and other social media applications the chance of a candidate or campaign staffers or political supporters screwing up in public has become almost inevitable (as we has seen so many times lately). Therefore, according to Trenn, political campaigns are going to have to develop rapid response strategies to meet with these screw-ups.

Trenn:

“Whether it’s an apology from a candidate, a firing of a staffer, or a distancing from an idiot like (Ann) Coulter, the response will - or at least should be - rapid.”

I couldn’t agree more, and if you ask me the best tool to use when responding rapidly to attacks will in many cases prove to be exactly YouTube.