TechPresident: Tracking Candidate Use of MySpace, YouTube, AdSense

practical uses of splashcast are always allowed marshall

interesting tracker

myspace obviously has a sizeable user base of young adults - a demographic definitely not to be ignored

if that tracker is any indication of the turnout of this election, then it looks like young adults greatly favor the democratic party - with obama leading the pack, and eventually becoming president of the usa

obama appeals to the young adults - he has presence and personality’; hilary on the otherhand, is like the strict mom that’s always against you going out - lol

I’m also keeping a close eye on the candidates’ use of social software in their campaigns.

Today I wrote a post on John Edwards’ presence in Second Life.

Like the drumming for the rowers on a sinking boat, this is still pretty lame.

There are a lot more people in middle America then there are on along the coasts who live and breathe technology to this level. As if adding Barack to your MySpace top 8 is the same commitment as registering, understanding the issues/platform, and voting. In actuality, if you’re a hardcore MySpace user, please don’t vote in the election.

Good job too on a third rate candidate pandering to NO BODY in Second Life. Who is John Edwards going to incite to vote for him? The legions of avatars that don’t exist on Second Life? He might as well set up a WoW Guild and get a better turn out.

YAY! I think all of us in the internet/tech space have of course been anticipating the 2008 election to be a big one on the web - but seeing it start to roll out finally is so exciting! i can’t wait to see how companies leverage the opportunity the election is brining in!

What a very cool tool to create - very smart!

This is not on-topic, but perhaps it’s a story lead.

After reading Michael’s post on PowerSet, I also heard a short segment on the WSJ podcast about PowerSet today. The claim was that Google wasn’t able to pull up the answer to “Who did IBM acquire in 1996?” correctly, but PowerSet did.

Michael is probably familiar with LexisNexis and Westlaw from his lawyer days. Anyway, I typed in “Who did IBM acquire in 1996?” in Lexis’s natural language search of all English news and was able to find the answer very easily (within the top 3 hits). I don’t know what dataset PowerSet is using, but this is a pretty large (and controlled) dataset that Lexis is searching in.

This makes me wonder - if they’re licensing the technology from Xerox, what’s so different to make it great? The legal community has been developing natural language search and if Xerox has this technology why haven’t they (or have they) licensed it to Lexis and Westlaw.

I run DailyPrez.com, a blog devoted to the Presidential Election. I’ve used Tech President quite a bit - its a very helpful tool for political bloggers. Great job - keep it up!

“Milt” Romney in ‘08!

milt? i mean, seriously ; )

This is great stuff. Now let’s take it one step further: American Idol-type process (but not requiring tv or a manipulating network) to select an alternative “web” candidate, not required to fulfill any obligations to a major party or interest. I’ve got a few details at my own visitorless ghost town of a blog, but it would be video-based (i.e. youtube), with total unknowns making their cases to us, the web-savvy masses. They would fill out questionnaires at a single website that are detailed in their stances on micro issues as well as the intractable ones (war, poverty, healthcare, etc.), so that people could make an informed decision based on who stands for the little fixable things that a particular individual cares about deeply. POP LITERATURE/WEB BUZZ WARNING: it’d be a combo Wisdom of Crowds/The Long Tail/Youtube experiment in not electing from a group of 2, but in CHOOSING who gets to be part of the group to elect from. Let the VC (or heck, Rupert Murdoch) money roll in and fund a warchest for whomever our eventual internet candidate(s) is (are).

I hope the candidates are obstaining from any and all Cigar Play.
Check this out http://www.techcrunchme.com

Cool tool. If you think about it, this helps to aggregate the ongoing globalization of the U.S. presidential elections. Sure, people on the coasts are the main audience but just about everyone in the world with an interest in who gets to the White House will use TechPresident. For younger voters it’s also a way to see plainly who’s with it and who ain’t. Spread the word, enjoy the goodness.

http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=5282

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Hello, nice article, but this website is nice resource too.

Hello, nice article, but this website is nice resource too.

Hello, nice article, but this website is nice resource too.

Thanks for the mention Marshall…Splash Cast rocks! We will definitely get it up on campaigno8 blog.
Marianne

On second thoughts I am going to qualify my endorsement. I just tried posting a video of the Mitt Romney flub on Iran to TechPresident and it didn’t work. The link went live for five minutes and then disappeared. It disappeared from TP’s front page and from MYnewly created blog space on TP’s site.

Great cosmetics, but the blog function needs fine tuning. Either that or little green men from the Romney campaign are stopping embarrassing video downloads.

From the site: “Four Republicans (Romney, McCain, Giuliani, and Tancredo) are using search to reach voters compared to two Democrats (Vilsack and Richardson).”

Do a search for Barack Obama and a sponsored link paid for by barackobama.com comes up second. Why is everyone reporting that he is not, and do not even bother to check? If they are paying for a sponsored link, it seems like they are using search to reach potential voters to me. Everyone seems to just jump on the bandwagon without taking two minutes to check.

@SorenG, I think you’re right on the money. I looked closely at the site and though it’s slickly packaged the editorial end doesn’t hold up TechPresident needs better fact-checking and editing.

Here’s how their editing operation works:

No sooner had I posted my last message than I got a damage control e-mail (note they did not engage me in an open thread) from TechPresident’s edtor Michah Sifry stating “unfortunately, I had to take your post (of the flubbed Romney video) down because we are not an open site.”

Not true. Why else does TechPresident give its members a blog function and a Digg-like form to link and introduce stories? Or at least it did till two hours ago. Sure, you don’t have to be open thread (as this blog is) but in that case you should at least include a note to users saying posts are moderated. Duh!

Three tips since this is obviously a learning curve for these guys (and I still like their site):

1. Fess up when you mess up.
2. Don’t make excuses.
3. NEVER try to control an open thread conversation, especially about a new product, through backdoor e-mails.

Hasan–
Thank you for spotting two problems with TechPresident’s user permissions. The site is a group blog, not an open site where any user can blog. Comments are definitely open thread, but as of now we are not allowing random visitors to create blog posts or stories. We have the same policy at PersonalDemocracy.com, and frankly I had thought that’s what our developers had installed for TP (it’s on the same platform). I apologize for deleting your post instead of leaving it up and using it as an opportunity to talk about our editorial approach.
That said, you raise an intriguing point–perhaps we should allow registered users to blog and put all posts in a moderation queue. Right now I give our core group of contributing bloggers free rein to post at will because I know them, we’ve discussed editorial policy, and I’m confident they will be responsible. If we opened the site to anyone who wanted to blog on it, I have an immediate worry that people will start using it to score partisan points for or against particular candidates, which is what most people want to do on political blogs, and which I think will really detract from TechPresident’s purpose. So then I get into moderating posts all day long.
There’s a middle ground I think, which is to grow the site’s blogging community by reading people’s comments (on the site and on other blogs) and inviting new people in as it becomes clear that they grok what we’re trying to do.
What do you think?
Micah

I’ve put a fuller post on this topic here: http://www.techpresident.com/node/54

Hi Michah -

Thank you for responding, The phased approach sounds great, so long as it is clearly spelled out to your community. When users create content they should know the terms. I agree you shouldn’t yourself have to moderate posts all day long, but perhaps you could enlist a group of volunteers to share the work with you.

Best Wishes,

Hasan

Seeking leading bloggers from across the political spectrum for Politics 2.0 - The Convergence of Politics and Web 2.0. Join one Presidential candidate and other leading contributors. Send writing samples to me at hscpub@aol.com for immediate consideration.

Did anybody else notice that the Contact page on techpresident.com is broken and doesn’t show any useful information?

It’s a misnomer to call them the “Democratic” party. The individual politicians are not Democratics. They are Democrats; thus, a Democrat party. We don’t call the opposing party the Republicanics. It’s a weak attempt for them to sound more like the only party supporting equality and fairness.

Is it true that obama’s middle name is hussien?

One of our employees includes tracking of 2008 Presidential Candidates at http://www.peopleTrender.com The Summary Heat Map is at: http://www.peopletrender.com/C.....at-Map.htm