John Edwards Woos Robert Scoble
Ever since his appearance before hard core geek bloggers and techies at Gnomedex in July, there has been a certain enthusiasm about John Edwards’ Presidential candidacy in the tech blogosphere. Why? I think a big reason is that he is wooing a contingency that isn’t used to being wooed by politicians.
For political bloggers this stuff is old hat. They meet with candidates, exchange emails with staffers, participate in campaign conference calls and have opulent parties thrown for them. Hell, last cycle a number of them got put on the campaign payroll.
Tech bloggers are also used to being wooed. But by tech companies. They get pitched on daily basis and sometimes even get sent free computers by Microsoft.
So what happens when a tech blogger gets wooed by a political campaign for the first time? They are flattered and feel important and get a little star struck by the important of it all. Just like political bloggers are the first 4-5 times they are wooed. They also don’t look at things nearly as critically as political bloggers. Unlike political bloggers, their opinions about the candidate haven’t been hardened by an obsession with politics. They can forgive Edwards for voting for the Iraq War or for being on the ticket with John Kerry.
In advance of his official announcement, the Edwards campaign upped the stakes in their wooing of the tech blogosphere and invited super blogger Robert Scoble to follow him around this week. From the sound of things, Scoble is getting awesome access to Edwards and his campaign staff. What Scoble is doing isn’t clear. Is he some sort of unpaid advisor? Or just covering the campaign as a blogger/journalist?
Regardless, the result is what you would expect. Scoble, who appears a bit intoxicated by the experience, has compared Edwards to JFK and is writing enthusiastically about how technology is changing politics (a subject many have been writing about for years). I think the coverage would be quite different if InstaPundit or DailyKos were on that plane.
Scoble, like most Americans, isn’t burdened by a hardened ideology or an encyclopedic knowledge of recent political history. He doesn’t have an agenda.
I think reaching out to the tech blogosphere is a very shrewd move by the Edwards campaign.
Kids vs. Sen. Stevens: A Web-Savvy Showdown or a No-Brainer?
According to the average American, this one’s a no-brainer. In a poll of 1,203 American adults, Zogby International and 463 Communications reported that 83% of those surveyed believe that a typical 12-year old knows more about Internet than members of Congress.
Do I even need to remind anyone that The Internet is a Series of Tubes?? If the average member of Congress thinks like Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, it’s pretty obvious that this 83% of people are 100% correct.
It’s getting increasingly difficult for older career politicians to catch up with younger generations in terms of knowledge about the Web. I personally remember having computer classes as early as elementary school; I’m sure kids today are being exposed to the Internet at even younger ages. The result? Politicians that declare nonsensical myths about the “mystery” of computers. They just don’t get it.
CNET blogger Anne Broache also wrote about this survey:
“…when it came to deciding which political party has a better “grasp” of the Internet, survey respondents were mostly, well, undecided. About 30 percent threw their confidence behind Democrats, 20 percent chose Republicans, and more than 40 percent picked “neither” or said they weren’t sure.”
All of this information ties in with our research about political campaign sites and blogs (here, here, and here), which we found were generally of poor quality and failed to reach the general public on a personal level.
This leads me to make one obviously clear conclusion. Politicians should have 12-year olds run their websites.
Okay, maybe not. But on a more serious note, I do believe that it would be to the advantage of every campaign staff to include some younger people in their day-to-day operations. College students, for example, operate in huge social networks (both digitial and actual), and could help politicians reach out to younger and more tech-savvy demographics. I realize that many campaigns have college interns, but it would surprise me if these interns did much more than make photocopies and coffee.
At any rate, it’s apparent that politicians need to do something to improve their use and understanding of the Web. As shown in Sen. Ted Stevens’ “Series of Tubes Speech”, it is simply unacceptable to have senior members of our Congress have no understanding of a technology that so greatly affects our daily lives and operations of the US government.
In addition to the discussion of kids vs. politicians, the survey had some other interesting findings. One that caught my eye is that when asked “What would make it harder for you to work – your car not starting, or losing Internet and email access?”, 78% of those surveyed said their car, while just 10% said the Internet. I personally do not own a car, but the thought of going one day without Internet or email is actually scary.
Also of note is that just one in five Americans believes that the next Bill Gates will come from the US. Half of those surveyed think that the next Internet mogul will be from China or Japan.
The survey was conducted between 12/5/06 and 12/8/2006, consisted of 1,203 American adults, and has an error margin of +/- 2.9%. You can read about the survey here and here.
Problogger Group Writing Project Roundup
The Problogger Group Writing Project wrapped up last Friday and somehow I managed to win a Nintendo Wii for participating with my Top 8 YouTube Videos of 2006 post. The prize was kindly donated by 451 Press.
As a wrap up, here are some cool posts submitted by other contestants:
Voter Contacts During 2006 Election Cycle
Pew Internet Life released a fascinating study a few days back (PDF) that looked at voter contacts during the 2006 election. Below is a table summarizing the key findings:
Two things jump out at me here:
(1) 56% of folks surveyed received recorded calls urging them to vote, usually from celebrities and high profile politicians. That’s a big number. I hate robocalls and can’t hang up fast enough. But the calls are dirt cheap to make and clearly effective enough to justify the expense. These things are definitely a case of campaigns using a shotgun instead of a rifle.
(2) People were more likely to have a campaign representative visit their home (16%) than to receive an email from a campaign (12%). Basically all that means is that parties still have some work to do in developing email lists of voters. If parties sent emails to 12% of the population, that pretty much means they have the email address of 12% of the population.
[Via CNet]
Top 8 YouTube Videos of 2006
The Associated Press released a list of their Top 10 YouTube videos a few weeks back. And we did a Top 10 Political Videos list back in September. So here’s a derivative post listing our Top 8 YouTube videos of 2006.
(8) Microsoft designs the Ipod packaging….
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