Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner Wants to Tweet
This afternoon I attended the Conservative Bloggers Briefing during which The Heritage Foundation's President Ed Feulner discussed the current state of conservatism.
I expected to hear that Feulner is optimistic, but I was pleasantly surprised to listen to him extol the importance of new and social media. He spoke about how often he hears congressmen and women mention that they were thrilled to receive a flood of e-mails urging them to vote one way or another on a piece of legislation and ignore the potential to use those e-mail addresses to promote action and improve constituent relationships. Obama's use of e-mail and text messaging was an example of he would like to see more conservatives harness grassroot action.
However, Feulner seems to do more than merely talk the talk when it comes to social media. He did attend a luncheon for bloggers and new media strategists that was broadcast on The Heritage Foundation's BlogTalkRadio channel today. He has a Facebook profile as well. Further, at the end after speaking with someone, he yelled across the room to Rob Bluey, who runs the Bloggers Briefings for Heritage, something to the effect of: "Rob, can I Twitter, too?"
It is interesting to see the attitude change among conservatives towards social media; it was a lot different a year and a half ago when I moved to the DC area a year and half ago. Of course, this is helpful for the conservatives to answer the left's strong use of the Internet, but using social media also boosts transparency in politics. That's why I'm excited to see more politicos — of all ideological positions — embrace social media.
The Stalking of Barack Obama
Dan Farber of CNet has a good blog post up on what he calls the “lifestreaming” of Barack Obama. He writes:
Barack Obama will be the most shadowed president in history, and it won’t be just the Secret Service and press corps surrounding him. Citizens and paparazzi armed with camera phones and a variety of other multimedia devices will chronicle every movement he makes in public and post it online.
In the article, Farber points to Politico 44, a micro-site by the Politico about the Presidential transition. The site contains a feature that tracks Obama’s activities day-by-day and minute-by-minute. Mind you they aren’t just highlighting the big stuff, they are literally tracking Obama’s every movement in real time. Here are some sample entries to whet your appetite:
10:07 am on November 22: “Obama worked out at the gym for 78 minutes and was back home by 11:30 EST.”
9:38 am on November 21: “Obama arrives back home to change clothes.”
6:35 pm on November 20: “The motorcade leaves the transition office and heads to Regents Park apartments, where Obama reportedly has his haircut at the apartment of his friend, Mike Signator.”
7:11 pm on November 19: “Obama is inside the Lookinglass Theatre in downtown Chicago.”
The feature reminds me of Gawker Stalker, a controversial feature on Gawker.com that allows users to submit celebrity information on encounters with celebrities. I don’t really have any big point here, other than that the unprecedented interest in Obama himself combined with the rapid sharing of information brought on by the Internet will make Obama probably the most scrutinized and tracked person in the history of time.
The level of transparency this will bring is exciting, but it is hard not to worry that things are going to be taken way too far.
Papa Johns Brings Couponing to Facebook
Papa Johns Pizza is currently running one of the cleverest Facebook promotions I’ve seen. Between now and December 1, if you sign up to be a fan of of Papa Johns on Facebook you will receive a coupon for a free medium pizza (fineprint: you must first purchase a pizza online, which insinuates this is really a buy one get one free type of things).
The promotion appears to be working, as Papa Johns has gone from 10,000 fans to 168,509 fans in a matter of days.
Not bad, particularly when you consider the coupon isn’t any different from the ones the pizza chain mails out and offers on their website every day.
Mark Zuckerberg: Man of the Year?
As if being named "[the] youngest self-made billionaire" by Forbes wasn't enough, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and creator of Facebook, was recently named one of GQ's coveted Men of the Year for 2008. It just goes to show that being a hacker and a dropout can still lead to an awesome fiscal future.
Some of the members of this list are obvious (Barrack Obama, Michael Phelps, Ted Kennedy, etc.) but others a little more obscure (apparently Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares is more popular than I thought…). Still, it's interesting to note that Zuckerberg is the only member of the list that is noted for achievement in technology, and looking back at past winners, he seems to be the one most social media-savvy as well. He almost seems a little out of place among all the actors, athletes, and politicians, even though his moniker of "Boy Genius" suits him well.
Read the entire list of winners here and see if you agree with me. Does he deserve to be on this list?
Time’s Person of the Year Poll Has Been Hacked
Time Magazine is running a poll on their website in conjunction with their annual naming of the Time Person of the Year. Twenty five finalists are presented, and users are encouraged to rank each person on a ten point scale. Following in a time honored tradition, supporters of scientist Douglas Melton have apparently hacked the poll, as Melton currently has an average ranking of twelve on the ten point scale. Well done.
Update: Melton’s average ranking has now dropped to a more resonable ten, probably due to Time finding and fixing the problem, or the Melton supporters realizing they’d gone to far and covering their tracks a bit. Note Obama’s number is also suspiciously high.
Update 2: One of our developers here, Brandon Savage, weighs in on how the poll was probably hacked:
“I took a look at the process of voting with a very basic set of tools on Firefox: Firebug and LiveHTTPHeaders. What I found is that when you submit the rating, it calls another page and passes a key, the rating, and the poll information through the URL to the page, like so:
Theoretically, then, you could hit this page as many times as you wanted with any rating you wanted, and drive up a candidates’ score. Though one would expect that Time would have figured that anyone could game the system, it’s easy for a programmer to forget that what they don’t intend for public viewing may still be visible, and that they always need to check to ensure that the data they expect is the data they are getting.”