bytes and ballots

Here's the promised link to the February 2007 Wired Magazine story on Joost.

The LA Times has a story this morning, "O.C. candidate has serious image problem." The story is about a candidate running for an Orange County (CA) supervisorial seat; someone in his campaign, or associated somehow with his campaign, doctored a photo so that the candidate (Trung Nguyen) is shown right behind Governor Schwarzenegger. I just wonder how often this sort of thing happens these days with campaign photos like this.

There is this interesting piece in the Denver Post, by that paper's TV critic, "Politics tuning TV out." Here's a short snip, reflecting something I have written about earlier:

This election year we're seeing a seismic shift in the way TV interacts with politics and politicians. After decades of setting the agenda - influencing how campaigns operate, even defining the choices presented to voters - television is being snubbed in the run-up to 2008.

The Internet is stealing the thunder from the old rabbit ears, forcing the networks to play catch-up.

So far, two Democratic candidates for the nation's highest office have chosen to announce their bids via the Internet. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both streamed video on the Web, in essence becoming their own broadcasters for the moment, making a high-tech end run around old media.

And in a similar vein, there is a piece in the NY Times, "In Politics, the Camera Never Blinks (or Nods)".

There's an interesting story in Macleans.ca, "The Going Negative Myth: No Matter How Many Attack Ads, You Can't Go Somewhere You Already Are." It's got some interesting information in it regarding negativity in Canadian politics.

This is on ZDNet today, "Hillary TV: Will User Generated Politics Get Clinton to the White House?"

The LA Times has a story today, "Attack ads go online and underground."

Political blogsites are proliferating; even candidates running for local level offices have them these days!

But an open research question is who reads political blogsites.

There is an interesting study from Joseph Graf, published by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, "The Audience for Political Blogs: New Research on Blog Readership" on this question.

The study used a list of registered voters with matched email addresses in California (apparently about 2.3 million registered voters in the state), who were emailed, and asked to participate in their study of political blogsite readers. They were able to get 7,863 respondents, many of whom reported reading blogs. Here is a quote from the report's executive summary regarding their key results:

• While many Internet users have seen blogs, a much smaller proportion of them are regular readers of political blogs. Of the sample gathered here, 9% said they look at a political blog “almost every day.”
• Daily readers of political blogs see blogs as a news source and an alternative to the mainstream media, which they despise. Daily blog readers get almost all of their news online.
• The audience for political blogs appears to be fairly concentrated across dozens of blogs, not thousands. Daily readers visit the most popular blogs.
• Daily readers are disproportionately men, are not younger than other Internet users, but claim greater household income than other Internet users.
• Daily readers are more likely to place themselves at the ends of the political spectrum. They are also more likely to take strong positions on social issues, especially those who consider themselves Democrats.
• Daily readers are heavily involved in politics, and they respond to efforts by bloggers to participate. Daily readers forward news stories, sign petitions and e-mail politicians at the prompting of political blogs.
• Daily readers think that blogs encourage and improve political discussion.

It's an interesting attempt to study the use of political blogsites. As the report acknowledges, it is very difficult to study the readers and producers of political blogs, because they are still relatively few active writers and readers of political blogs. I wasn't able to find exact details as to what the contact email looked like, nor was I able to find the exact questionnaire (if I do find this info, I'll post it here); I wonder whether or not the contact email or questionnaire was worded in a way that might attract users of political blogs, or even politically active individuals, because the basic data on political activitiy reported here does seem a bit skewed.

Methodological questions aside, this is an interesting report, and an interesting study ... we'll certainly be seeing political campaigns increase their use of tools like blogsites in the next cycle.

There is a good article in the new issue of Wired Magazine, that presents a lot of detail about Joost. There is some discussion in the Wired piece (which when it is available online I'll link to) about how advertisers are excited about Joost, and the new possibilities it presents for precise targeting of advertising to specific Joost subscribers, and the content they are watching.

But I am struck by the synergy between Joost's technology and the current use of "microtargeting" by political campaigns, and wonder about whether, if Joost (or something like Joost) eventually takes hold, when campaigns will start using it to precisely target political messages. It would be possible to get campaign video right to the eyeballs of specific voters, and to even allow for interactivity between the campaign message and specific voters. These new technologies certainly bear watching, as they present new and unprecedented opportunities for the targeting of political messages to individual voters.

More on Joost later ...

In a sign of how national candidates are viewing new technology as a campaign medium, I found it quite interesting to see that Hillary Clinton last week used the Internet to announce her initial interest in running for president on the Internet. She follows both Barack Obama and John Edwards in using the Internet to announce their intentions. I suspect this signals what will be a heightened use of the Internet in the 2008 presidential campaign. There's was a short story in the Los Angeles Times yesterday that talked about Clinton's use of the Internet.

Exactly why the Internet is become such a popular forum for announcing presidential intentions is not clear: perhaps it has something to do with the ability to get the word into the hands of targeted supporters, and perhaps it has something to do with staying away from the free media and their propensity to ask questions that candidates don't want to answer. But I do suspect this will signal an increased Internet presence for all presidential hopefuls in the 2008 cycle.

The New Politics Institute has a series on the transformation of video, and they have an interesting report out called "Viral Video in Politics". Peter Leyden of NDN has a nice summary of this report on his blog.

Wired has this story about how the anti-spam software Blue Frog is being transformed into a software application for political activism. The vision behind this new tool, Collactive, is discussed in the story:

Now founders Aran Reshef and Amir Hirsh are reincarnating their software to turn armies of internet users into political activists. Their new Collactive platform takes the drudgery out of grass-roots action, letting armchair activists fill out online petitions, file comments in rule-making proceedings, send letters to their representatives in Congress and seed collaborative web forums with sympathetic news items -- all with the push of a button.

The Collactive software is offered as a generic distribution to organizations, who then configure it for a particular political issue and give it to users as a downloadable software package or Firefox plug-in.

Once it's installed, the organizers can send alerts to users or update the software with scripts that know how to take particular actions, such as automatically filling in feedback forms on a politician's website. End users can also forward e-mail alerts to their friends, who have the option of installing the software themselves and joining the network.

Here's a link to Collactive.

According to this LA Times story, investigation by the California Attorney General's office has found that no crime was committed by the Angelides campaign when they obtained audiotapes of Schwarzenegger's conversations from a computer in the Governor's office:

In late August, Angelides campaign aides plucked the audio from the governor's website. Portions of the recording were published by The Times in early September, two months before the election.

The files contained a casual conversation in which Schwarzenegger told aides that Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia (R-Cathedral City) has a "hot" personality, and attributed her temperament to mixed blood.

Several weeks later, with the governor's race still underway, CHP investigators consulted state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer's office and were told that proving a crime with the evidence in hand would be impossible.

"You don't break and enter a business by walking in an open door during business hours," said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for the attorney general's office.

The governor's computer system appeared to have been "quasi-open," he said. "That makes it very difficult to put together a prosecutable case."