Many of the major American presidential candidates have MySpace profiles, and I think that is a great way to connect with the younger and/or tech savvy crowd.  Below is a snarky list of reasons why politicians should join social networks like MySpace.  I don't mean to discourage the candidates from using the site, but these are issues that any campaign must consider. 

1. NBC looks there for stories

NBC's Dateline probably frequents MySpace looking for adults trying to befriend youngsters for its popular "To A Catch Predator" shows.  Political candidates always want press time.

2. You can come across as accepting

It shouldn't matter how risqué a "friend's" profile picture looks; a president should accept everyone for who they are.

3. MySpace makes it easy to look good 

Since the common MySpace page templates are so horribly designed, it is really easy to have a better than average looking profile page.

4. It's easy to come across as more dignified than you really are  

Some people create profiles to masquerade as dignified individuals.  Don't political candidates do this in real life?

5. Get moral support

I was going trying to find some "gangsta" message written in texting language on a candidate's profile page comment section, but after visiting several candidate profiles it seems like most of the comments are substantive and well written.  OMG!

This post is part of ProBlogger's most recent group writing project, with the theme of "top five". Be sure to check out other entries!

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about the efforts of supporters of Ron Paul to promote Paul-related news articles to the Digg homepage. Along similar lines, there was a story yesterday on ABCNews.com about a resounding Paul victory in an online poll that asked who won the recent Republican debate. As of this writing, Paul has attracted 13,343 of 15,590 votes cast.

This piqued my interest enough to take another look at the situation on the U.S. Elections 2008 channel on Digg. A quick glance shows that the influence of Paul on Digg has grown since my last look. Here are some key points: (more…)

I am currently in the midst of the incredibly frustrating process of finding a new apartment here in DC. As I become more and more involved in this process, I am realizing that finding an apartment would be much easier if real estate and property management companies used the internet better….or if they used it at all. Below are the top five reasons real estate companies need to get involved with the world of Web 2.0.

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If our poll is any indication, there really isn’t any consensus on whether political candidates should maintain official MySpace presences or let supporters lead the way. I tried to make the case for official presences a few days back.

E.M. Zanotti has a great post arguing the other side.  Here is a snippet:

The big mistake comes in thinking that a Presidential campaign can run a MySpace page effectively. Suddenly, everyones inboxes will be full of carefully crafted press statements about appropriations, floor votes, positions on tax reform, and the ever popular “referrals to the Ways and Means committees.” For hipsters in tune with MySpace, its like getting a letter from your parents in your comments section telling you how adorable you are even though you’re constantly on the verge of killing yourself in your effort to be as street as Jared Leto.

Read her full post.

After last week’s debacle with Barack Obama’s MySpace page, lots of bloggers have been discussing whether or not political campaigns should take control over MySpace profiles and other voter-created websites and online groups. It’s no surprise that bloggers have been covering this issue, but I wondered to what degree the story had reached mainstream media (MSM) outlets.

I did a quick Google search for articles about Barack Obama from May 2 to May 4. I limited my search to print media outlets (newspapers and magazines) and major online news sources (such as CNN.com or MSNBC.com). I did not include blogs, international sources, or TV/radio outlets in my search. To further narrow my search, I only considered articles that were directly about Barack Obama–his name was either in the headline, or he was a substantial part of the story. I did not include political overviews or articles where he was mentioned in brief.

I found 51 articles over the three days, 10 of which were about Barack’s MySpace page. I marked particularly negative articles with an asterisk.

Political blogging growing like a vine*
Barack Obama Could Lose Some ‘Friends’ In MySpace Debacle*
This Should Make Bloggers Happy *
Learn from Obama: Hire a Professional *
Campaign takes control of ‘official’ MySpace site
Between Barack and MySpace
I’m Sorry, Barack, We’re Through*
Obama Campaign Asks: Is it MySpace or Yours?
Obama Takes MySpace Page from Backer
Obama to MySpace: That’s MyPage

These 10 articles were spread over 8 different publications and make up 20% of Barack-specific coverage during May 2-4. I was pretty surprised that such a variety of MSM outlets, some of them very significant publications, picked up on this story. I was also surprised that MSM outlets were so critical of Barack’s efforts at regaining control over his MySpace page. I expected that since most newspapers and magazines maintain top-down strategies in most of their media coverage, they would be supportive of the transition to the “official”, rather than voter-controlled strategy.

To see the articles I included in my survey, please take a look at my datasheet.

Our media monitoring platform, ImpactWatch, would be perfect for tracking an issue such as this one. In order to complete this analysis, I had to manually search through Google results. If I had used ImpactWatch, this search would have been automated, allowing me to pre-determine which news sources I would be tracking. In addition, ImpactWatch would have given me a mechanism for sorting, graphing, and ranking the results according to subject, source, author, and bias (positive, negative, neutral).

For more information about ImpactWatch , check out the website and our current free demo, which tracks coverage of the PS3 and Nintendo Wii.

I took a look at who is buying Google text ads for searches for Democratic contenders in the 2008 presidential election.  Let's now look at the Republicans.

Read below for the ads that I found.  Here's a few general trends I found: (more…)

Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell did a hit job in her column today on the Post’s decision to allow comments on all articles. Here are the first few paragraphs, which pretty clearly demonstrate her attitude:

Not so long ago, the only way to talk back to The Post was to write a civil letter to the editor, with a verifiable name and address, or to contact the ombudsman.

Now, click on “view all comments” at the end of a story, column or blog on washingtonpost.com and enter a new world that challenges long-held practices and that can unnerve some journalists and readers. The online comments are immediate, use only e-mail addresses as identification and can be raw, racist, sexist and revolting.

Howell goes on to say that many reporters don’t appreciate the “rude” feedback and lays out some examples of reader complaints. No real attempt is made to explain the value of comments. She closes the piece calling for “vigorous moderation” of comments, which, given the overall tone of the column, comes off as a vague call for censorship. She would lead the Post down a very slippery slope.

Naturally, the piece has attracted a lot of comments. Some of them are rude, some are insipid and some are extraordinarily insightful. That’s free speech (and democracy) for you. It’s messy. I’d much rather have this messy version of the Post than one where the likes of Deborah Howell are empowered to protect us from all the unpleasantness.

Study Concludes That Many Top News Sites Don’t Do RSS Well

Many newspapers don’t include all articles in their RSS feeds, giving users incomplete information.

How the netroots became the most important mass movement in U.S. politics

Great look at rise of the netroots.

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New Wordpress Stats Plugin

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CBSNews.com Turns Off Comments on Obama Stories

Apparently comment threads on CBSNews.com have been overrun by racist comments.  Awful.

I was against promoting Ajit’s music on the blog.  But then his cover of Gnarl Barkley’s Crazy got over 10,000 views on YouTube, so I realized we needed to jump on the bandwagon and support our own.  So here’s our Senior Director in charge of Impactwatch, Ajit Verghese, singing Crazy:

Listen to Ajit.  Buy ImpactWatch. Love the Bivings Group.

The other day I stumbled across a YouTube video of pioneering journalists/programmer Adrian Holovaty playing the MacGyver theme song on guitar. (The video is on the YouTube homepage and has been viewed 750,000+ times). Seeing the video prompted me to head over to his site for the first time in awhile.

For the uninitiated, Holovaty developed the Django web framework while working at the Lawrence Journal-World, built an innovative online database of crime patterns in Chicago and currently works as editor of editorial innovations at Washingtonpost-Newsweek Interactive. He has a skill set that is unique for the journalism profession (how many journalists do you know that have written a web framework?).

Rifling through his site, Holovaty has done some awesome work at the Post. (more…)

I've been reading this morning (via CNET and TechCrunch) that Yahoo! Photos, one of the most widely used photo sharing/storage websites is shutting down in favor of its sister site, Flickr.  Yahoo! purchased Flickr in 2005, and since then, Flickr has been gaining massive popularity.  Flickr's tagging and community features are unique services that users can't find on any other site.  As a result of Flickr's popularity, traffic to Yahoo! Photos has been steadily decreasing since November of '06.

The transition from Yahoo! Photos to Flickr is coming in the wake of the Yahoo! "Peanut Butter Manifesto ", in which  Brad Garlinghouse, SVP of Yahoo, stated that Yahoo! was spreading its services too think over too many opportunities.  

"We want to do everything and be everything–to everyone. We've known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out…" the memo reads. "I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. I hate peanut butter."

For the record, I love peanut butter.  But that's beside the point. 

TechCrunch notes that Yahoo! is not going to force its users to switch to Flickr or to take their photos off the site.  Yahoo! will, however, provide tools so that former Yahoo! Photos users can easily transfer their pictures to Flickr, Snapfish, Photobucket, Kodak Gallery , Shutterfly, or other services.  In addition, TechCrunch reports this:

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I think this is the big question raised by the whole Obama MySpace mess. Let us know what you think by voting in the poll below and by leaving your thoughts in the comments.
[Poll=8]

Mark Glaser over at MediaShift had an interesting post yesterday where he published an interview with "Mr. Magazine", magazine journalism expert Samir Husni.  The interview really caught my attention because Mr. Magazine seems to be advocating the same strategies that we have been writing about here on TBR.  The interview is definitely worth reading, but I will put some of the highlights here:

Glaser: I’ve noticed that the local newspaper here, the San Francisco Chronicle, is trying to make their paper more local and use more graphics, photos and color on the front page.

Husni: Two things we have to do. We have to use more narrative and more pictures. If you look at the Financial Times that was completely redesigned last week, a lot of their stories are a full page. But you read that story and you’ll get everything you need to know about that subject. More magazines are moving toward more narrative. I tell my magazine clients we have to deepen the story and chase the photographs. For the service part, send people to the web.

The biggest mistake we’ve made in this industry is that we send people to the web, and we’ve left them there. We offered them something that’s free, that’s like a blizzard that surrounds them with information. But at no website do they ever say, ‘By the way, you need to go back to the paper to read page 20 where we have this article that you’ll only find on page 20 today.’ There’s no two-way street, we’ve created a one-way street and people get lost in the jungle [online].

Glaser: So you don’t suggest that people put magazine content online at all?

Husni: No. The biggest mistake we are doing now, and I don’t understand why, is we are duplicating magazine content and putting it online. Why would I have the exact same thing on the screen if it exists in print?

Glaser: What is your suggestion to newsweeklies? Their circulation is going down overall. Do you think it was a mistake to put all their content online?

Husni: Definitely. The day I cancelled my subscription to Newsweek was when I saw in print a snippet of an interview, and below that it said, ‘For the whole interview go to msnbc.newsweek.com.’ I am paying money and you are offering me less in print than what I can get for free on the web. That’s why I was very happy when Time reinvented itself with more in-depth [stories] and more photography. They cover two or three topics, but I still need editors to figure out what my readers want each week.

One of the ideas that we stressed in our magazine study that we published last year is that newspapers and magazines should not publish their print content online.  This sort of regurgitation of material isn't of interest to anyone.  When magazines and newspapers duplicate content in their print and online versions, they are in essence forcing consumers to make a choice to either read the content online or read it in print.  By publishing the same material in both outlets, news sources limit their readers' interest to either the website or the print version.  However, by publishing unique content online that supplements the print content, magazines and newspapers can benefit from having their readers visit the website and purchase print versions.  

With this in mind, I definitely agree with Mr. Magazine that newspapers and magazines should change their print versions from addressing the "four W's and the H (who, what, where, why, and how)" to providing more in-depth analysis on a select number of topics.  The website can then be used to disseminate important bits of digestible information quickly.  If media outlets can strike this fine balance, I think that Mr. Magazine's prediction that there is room for both print media and online media will be correct.

Way back in February, I wrote a speculative post about technologies I thought might impact the 2008 elections. One of the technologies I mentioned was Twitter. The Hotline (and David All) noted last week that House GOP leader John Boehner is twitterring (sorry). Today, I stumbled across the recently created profiles of House Whip Eric Cantor and the National Republican Congressional Committee (first committee on Twitter I think).

I know that Dem Presidential candidates have jumped on the bandwagon. Does anyone know if it is gaining traction among Dems in the House/Senate like it slowly appears to be doing with the GOP?

My Twitter profile is here.

You know those text ads on the right hand side of Google search result pages?  I wonder who is trying to cash in the 2008 US Presidential race.  Back in February Michael Bassik over at techPresident did an investigation into which 2008 Presidential candidates had purchased text-ads.  I've decided to take a brief look at any site buying ads for searches for candidate names.

Let's see who is trying to cash in on the Democrats.  Click here for the Republicans.

Read below for the ads that I found, but here's a few general trends I found: (more…)