Unassigned Topics

Back to Wordpress...

2005-07-31T11:06:00.000-04:00

With the semester over and accessibility to fellow classmates no longer the number one priority of this blog, I'm going to migrate back over to my wordpress site. I was able to import all my posts and comments from this blog over to my original site, and many thanks go to Andy Skelton for writing a great script and Catstutorials for a great walkthrough on the import. The formatting got a little screwy in parts, but the good news is that all the content got ported over--even the pictures!

Anyone who commented on this blogger site should have a login already created on my wordpress site: just use your blogger handle as the login and "password" as the password, and you should be ready to rock. Otherwise, just use the links at the top of the page to create a user profile.

That said, I'm not sure how much I'll be blogging again, though I certainly hope to at least a bit. But we'll see what happens with a new semester, maybe a new job, and who knows what else. In the meantime, I'm off to California next week for a vacation from the humidity...

Oh yeah, don't forget the new URL (and new RSS site feed):

http://www.UnassignedTopics.com

What I Learned

2005-07-26T17:07:00.000-04:00

I'd certainly have to say that I know a hell of a lot more about using new media for politics than I did ten weeks ago, and have had my eyes opened to the potential of future technologies as well. But if I had to pick just a few things that really stood out, these would be them:

Usability Rules: The concept of usability was one I had never even considered before learning about it in this class. But, after learning about it, it makes all the sense in the world. How effective could your website be, no matter how awesome your content, if users don't know how to use it?

Enable the Influentials: This is another concept that just makes intuitive sense. A small percentage of the population influences the rest, and these Influentials are overrepresented online. Factoring them into any on-line plan is a must, as they can be the initiators of...

Create Viral Content: If your message spreads itself, you'll maximize your resources and be able to simply sit back and watch voters come to your side. While there's certainly no magic formula yet for creating such self-perpetuating content, there are important guidelines to follow. And definitely add a tell-a-friend link to everything!

Obviously, we learned much more than this over the semester, but these are three major concepts (two if you consider the last two one in the same, which in many ways they are) that I will certainly remember when planning any political website (much less any non-political site). And with that, how about one more cat photo? For whatever reason, both Isis and Penelope love to sleep in upside-down chairs. Weirdos.

Copyright and NY Times Editorials

2005-07-24T15:45:00.000-04:00

Reading the final chapter in Vaidhyanathan's book and thinking a bit more about Lessig's speech got me thinking about how these topics affect blogs in particular. In my opinion, blogs have their greatest use in being a place where information from different sources can be synthesized. Bloggers will never be able to pursue a single story to the lengths that a Sy Hersch can, but they can look at reporting from several different sources and combine it in a way that makes a new and valuable point.

But what if the news sources stopped allowing bloggers to reference their sites? Certainly they'll never have a problem with blogs simply linking to their web pages, but what about excerpts? Most of the time excerpts are kept to at most a few paragraphs, and--like showing a clip from an interview that was conducted on another network or referencing a quote that showed up in a competing newspaper--this is probably considered fair use. But what about subscription sites?

Currently, the Wall Street Journal restricts their online news content to subscribers only, and the New York Times is about to do the same with their editorial page content. In the WSJ's case, they probably don't mind seeing a paragraph or two of a news item on their site showing up elsewhere (it would probably make buying a subscription seem more attractive to a reader, as she can see what she's missing), but it will be interested to see if the NYT takes the same approach.

The amount of content that will be offered under their new subscription system will actually be quite low, just a few articles a day. Considering that I'd probably be interested only in Krugman's and Rich's columns, and a conservative might just want to read what Brooks and that new hack Tierney have to say, that's just 3-4 articles a week. In such a case, seeing the juiciest paragraphs from these few articles excerpted on a blog might alleviate the need to pay $40 a year or whatever it will be to read the whole articles. Therefore, might the NYT crack down on excerpts--much less full articles--being posted on blogs? Certainly seems like they might.

If so, it would truly be a shame (of course, I think the entire idea of setting up a pay wall is pretty lame in the first place). Blogs are a medium that creates real political value for the country, and much of that is based on using copyrighted content as a springboard to explore new ideas. Some may belittle blogs' contribution or decry the rank partisanship that infuses most of these sites, but I think their net contribution to our political system is positive. This contribution moves even further into the black when existing ideas can be expanded upon, and restricting the content that can be excerpted would certainly diminish this. So let's hope the NYT continues to allow fair use excerpts; if not, it could be the first step in closing a promising new avenue for increased civic participation.

The Squeaky Wheel Gets The Oil

2005-07-23T16:07:00.000-04:00

I just finished watching/listening to Lawrence Lessig's fascinating lecture on the challenges facing copyright law in the modern era, and it brought to my mind a topic that has a high degree of relevance to politics.

This topic concerns the first lesson of interest group economics that I learned back in my undergraduate days: a small group that is strongly affected by a particular law or regulation will have a much greater impact on shaping the rules than a much, much larger group that isn't affected as strongly on an individual level.

For example, the National Beer Wholesalers Assocation has been one of the leading proponents of killing the estate/death tax. Their membership really, really cares about this issue because many of these wholesalers are family owned, and would stand to gain an incredible amount of money if the tax were repealed. While this is an incredibly small proportion of the country, this group (and similarly motivated wealthy families) have been successful in almost completely eliminating this tax.

On the other side of the ledger are the 99%+ of the population that will never have to pay this tax, and would probably see it as a fair way for the government to realize the capital gains taxes that are never paid because the owner dies before cashing in. In addition, the approximately $30 billion a year in tax revenue the estate/death tax generates each year will need to be made up somewhere, much of it from those who do not face the likelihood of paying this tax.

However, most Americans care little if at all about this tax; it is thought of most often in the context of conservatives opposing it as an unfair tax, but still in a very superficial way. This is unsurprising: if one person stands to lose tens of millions of dollars from the tax and another stands to lose perhaps a thousand or two over many years, who do you think is going to make noise about it?

There are countless other examples of interest group economics, and I think our current copyright status in this country certainly qualifies as one of them. Before watching/listening to Lessig's speech, I had really only thought of it in terms of sharing music online, since that was really the only way that I had been exposed to it.

I've had a few experiences with music copyrights--basically using copyrighted music as a backing track to a video, a topic we discussed in class a bit last night--and those experiences were certainly more relevant to the stifling of creativity aspect discussed in the speech. For example, I think web video is enhanced considerably by being able to use popular music; it's a damn shame that it is basically impossible given the royalty structures most popular works fall under.

Going back to the interest group economics topic, the copyright holders--in particular the labels, publishers, producers, and distribution companies--are obviously the ones that are affected most by copyright issues. Time-Warner is going to care a hell of a lot more about this than I ever will. Thus it is no surprise that we are where we are today, with a digital space that has eclipsed all fair and unregulated use of media, and a burgeoning guerilla war against private citizens for at most a 5% drop in sales.

I certainly have hope that we'll figure this out over the coming years, but it is clear that this issue needs to be made more relevant to normal people's lives. As Lessig says, the copyright holders have effectively framed this debate in a simple way as one revolving around property; it will not be an easy to task to shift that frame towards one of creativity. But there's always hope; and it's nice to know that there are some very smart minds working on this issue...

My Wife Is Awesome

2005-07-22T10:07:00.000-04:00

Look what I get to bring in to work today:

Regaining Strength

2005-07-21T12:05:00.000-04:00

Still in recovery mode after the awesome event last night.

Fair Use?

2005-07-18T17:12:00.000-04:00

The excerpt from Laurence Lessig's "Future of Ideas" paints a disturbing picture of the"generic-ization" of movies as a result of applying copyright laws:

“Ten years ago,” Guggenheim explains, “if incidental artwork . . . was recognized by a common person,” then you would have to clear its copyright. Today, things are very different. Now “if any piece of artwork is recognizable by anybody . . . then you have to clear the rights of that and pay” to use the work. “[A]lmost every piece of artwork, any piece of furniture, or sculpture, has to be cleared before you can use it.”

The question I have is, what ever happened to fair use? News organizations and others have long been able to use relatively small segments of copyrighted works in their reporting, I assume because showing one question from an interview or news report hardly violates the rights of the copyright holder. So why is it now such a big problem for movie makers to include a fleeting glance of the coca-cola symbol?

I would have to imagine that part of the problem is that for-profit companies not only work incredibly hard to protect their brands, but also attempt to make money in any way they can. There was certainly a time when movie makers could create a film without worrying about this issue, but once the floodgates opened to challenging this use it snowballed. In addition, corporate brands probably fall under a different statute than creative works in terms of fair use.

I think Lessig is ultimately right that property rights need to be reevaluated in light of the recent technological changes our society has faced. There needs to be an understanding of fair use of copyrighted works that makes sense. I'm not sure exactly what these changes would involve (that would probably require reading the rest of Lessig's book, for starters), but it's pretty clear from the examples he presents that the current situation is strangling creativity in movie making, much less in other mediums.

Ethics and Political Web Videos

2005-07-17T12:26:00.000-04:00

After reading the assigned chapter on the ethics of persuasive technologies in B.J. Fogg's book, I'd like to expand a bit on what I wrote about yesterday regarding web video. As the IPDI authors make quite clear, the lack of accountability for web video authors has allowed many unethical videos to be distributed. They predict that as the quantity of videos out there goes up, the number of unethical and manipulative videos will rise as well. I explained a bit of my reasoning yesterday for disagreeing with IPDI's major worry--that unethical web videos will come to have a major impact on the coming electoral cycles--and after reading Fogg's chapter I have a bit more to add.

In discussing the ways that technology can be used to unethically persuade, Fogg lists six different ways in which this commonly happens. I think the first is applicable to the current status of political web videos:

Ethical issues are especially prominent when computer technology uses novelty as a distraction to increase persuasion. When dealing with a novel experience, people not only lack expertise but they are distracted by the experience, which impeded their ability to focus on the content presented. (p.215)

I think this is exactly the way that some of the political web videos of the last cycle were able to cross the ethical line. Ten years ago, professionally edited video almost always came from credible, established sources. As a result, it was rare that video was used for outright manipulation. But today, it is easy for almost anyone to make such videos, and I think that in some ways the public hasn't caught up to this fact.

When a user views one of these videos--especially if the overall message of the video is something he or she is inclined to believe--the newness and uniqueness of the experience short-circuits the normal fact-checking region of the brain. Instead of asking whether the content shown was perhaps taken out of context, the viewer walks away simply believing that Cheney is incredibly mean or that John Kerry sat on stage with Jane Fonda at an anti-war rally. After all, it was in the video!

I think this was particularly the case with the Jib-Jab video, and the authors of that piece certainly could have gotten away with much, much more dishonest content. As mentioned in the IPDI piece, animated web videos often can get away with more extreme content, with the report suggesting that humor is the way they are able to do so. I agree that humor helps, but I also think that it is because watching such a Flash video is such a new experience for most people. They've never seen anything like it, so their reaction isn't to parse it for accuracy, but to simply enjoy it.

But will this always be the case? I'd like to think that the number of people who click on the irritating pop-up ads designed to look like system messages for your computer has gone down as people have become more familiar with the fact that it's a dishonest manipulation, and the same will likely happen with political web video. As the newness of the concept wears out and viewers become more familiar with the medium, they'll take a more critical eye to the actual content of the videos.

Today, political web video makers can get away with a lot of dishonesty, because many of the viewers are still blinded by the science of it all. And there will always be those videos that get made and distributed by highly partisan Influentials, given the lower ethical threshhold, say, an anti-Bush voter will have for anti-Bush content. But as political web videos become less of a novelty and more of an expected part of the political communications process, authors will have to clear a higher ethical bar. In the end, as I said yesterday, it will be the responsible, high quality, effective web videos that end up being the difference makers.

White Stripes Mix

2005-07-16T19:15:00.000-04:00

I've had a few weeks now to digest the White Stripes' latest, "Get Behind Me Satan," and I think it's a very good album. Certainly not their best; "White Blood Cells" and "Elephant"--in that order--share that honor. But it is very good: it has such a laid back, easy quality to it, that I don't mind that it is somewhat half-formed.

But the more important question is: What does this do to my "Ultimate White Stripes Mix"? Satan has a few contributions (how crazy a clause is that?), but the rest of their catalogue still dominates. So, since I love to make mixed CDs and tell everyone about it (could there be a more perfect use for a blog?), here's what I take to be the best 80-minutes the White Stripes' catalogue currently has to offer:

Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground
Hello Operator
The Air Near my Fingers
My Doorbell
Offend in Every Way
I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother's Heart
Fell in Love With a Girl
I'm Bound to Pack It Up
Take, Take, Take
Lord, Send Me An Angel
I'm Finding it Harder to be a Gentleman
Rated X
Apple Blossom
You've Got Her In Your Pocket
Jolene
Little Ghost
The Union Forever
The Denial Twist
Hotel Yorba
Truth Doesn't Make a Noise
Hypnotize
The Same Boy You've Always Known
It's True That We Love One Another
Now Mary
Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)
We're Going To Be Friends
Your Southern Can is Mine

Definitely let me know what I've missed...

UPDATE: What the hell? Blogger ate the track numbers. So imagine this list in sequence, because that's what I burned for my car...

Potter

2005-07-16T18:51:00.000-04:00

Amazon came through on their promise and the new Harry Potter book arrived today. I'm certainly psyched to read it; however, being that it's the end of the semester for me, Kelly's going to get the first crack at it. She can keep a secret well--we did it in the same order last time, and she didn't reveal anything.

One thing that I thought of as the book came was how much I've forgotten from the earlier books, especially the last two (probably in particular since there haven't been movies of them yet). But more than that, I think it's because I read them so damn fast; like all the Dan Brown books, once I get going on a Harry Potter book I just tear through it like butter. It's not like it's reading Patterson, after all. One of these days I'll get around to re-reading the earlier books, but in the meantime I just hope the ending isn't ruined for me before I get to it...

Oh, and did anyone catch Rob Cordry's attempt to impersonate JK Rowling on the Daily Show the other night? Hilarious...

The Future of Political Web Videos

2005-07-16T13:52:00.000-04:00

The IPDI report on Online Political Videos in the 2004 election provides a nice overview of the current state of political web videos. While the idea that they are commonly quite partisan and even ethically dishonest at times was no surprise, the point that I had not really considered was just how cheap it has become to make such videos. Given this low barrier to entry, IPDI posits that these videos will increase the level of partisanship in political debate:

We are at the beginning of an era in which disturbing and powerful videos can be produced by anyone with $1000 worth of equipment and software and moderate technical skills. Judging by the current crop of independently- produced political videos, their likely effect will be to further exacerbate the partisanship of an already polarized electorate.

As someone who is an aspiring video maker*, I fully anticipate creating political web videos in the future (hopefully in the context of working on a campaign, though it could be an amateur thing as well). In that hope I am sure I am not alone, and IPDI predicts (rightly, in my opinion) that we will be deluged with such videos over the coming electoral cycles.

But will these videos continue to occupy the outer fringes of the partisan divide in their content? I think the result of an increase in quantity of these videos could in fact be a tempering of the overall extremism that the category "political web video" emits.

There will certainly always be a ton of extreme videos. And I'll be that there will also be a large increase in the number of dishonest and otherwise ethically challenged videos out there.

But there will also likely be an increase of more moderate videos. By moderate, I don't mean some milquetoast version of ostensibly non-partisan opinion, but just not bat-shit crazy. The quality level of many of these videos will increase, and thus the extremism will cease to be the number one selling point--effectiveness will enter the picture as well.

An increase in the quantity of such videos out there will also increase the need for guidance. Certainly Influentials will continue to be a primary catalyst for promoting these videos, but groups that need to protect their reputations will also begin to serve more of a purpose as far as directing visitors to videos they deem worth seeing. As the media attention paid to these videos increase, these reputable groups will need to be more careful in the videos they choose to promote.

There will also be a ton of crazy extreme political web videos out there. In fact, their number will probably increase substantially over the next few years. But as web video rises in both importance and viewership, a market will be created for responsible web videos that can still be quite powerful. MoveOn certainly learned their lesson from the Hitler video mishap, and other organizations will choose carefully when singling out video for their visitors. In the end, I like to think that relatively responsible, high quality, effective web videos will ultimately rise above their more extremism-based brothers and become what we first think about when "online political video" is discussed.

*Some of you may remember my recent query for advice on buying a video camera. I ended up getting the second-to-the-bottom of the line Panasonic, and after buying Final Cut Express for the excellent student price I am capable of creating decent web videos for less than $500. In theory, at least...I still have to work on making them good. But it does go to show just how cheap it can be to "enter the market," so to speak.

Friday Cat Blogging

2005-07-15T14:32:00.000-04:00

I think these two pictures represent the unique personalities of our cats quite well. To begin with, we have Penelope playing in haphazardly stacked boxes--one of her favorite pastimes, along with chewing on anything plastic.

And second, we have Isis doing what she does best (aside from waking us up in the morning), getting ready to sleep awesomely.

BONUS: Friday Dogblogging. Here's a video I put together starring my office-mate's over-eager bassett hound (her name is Maggie, thus the choice of song)

So, What's Your Take on Rove?

2005-07-13T17:41:00.000-04:00

My feeling is that he's in a world of trouble, but if things stay the same he'll be okay (and by "okay," I mean that he'll keep his position and not become radioactive to any candidate he works for).

The real question regards the grand jury testimony. If only we had Ken Star's team to feed Susan Schmidt all the juicy good stuff! Perhaps Isikoff will get something out of there in the coming weeks; so far, he's the only one who has gotten anything out of the investigation, but his source is probably with Time and not the prosecutor. The bottom line though is that testimony was given back when Rove thought Cooper was going to carry his water and keep his silence; could there be a little bit of perjury in there?

My prediction is that this story still has a massive twist yet to reveal itself. Perhaps Miller was the one who carried Plame's name from the Pentagon to the White House in the first place; maybe Rove and Novak set up a cover story which has been discovered as false; maybe John Bolton is the one who leaked the name (wouldn't that be fun?).

So what's your take? I say this continues to be a major problem, and the only thing capable of knocking it out of the press (provided there are continuing revelations) is the Supreme Court. And even that might not be enough if more damning info is released on Rove.

I for one will anxiously await Fitzgerald's findings; it may be until then before we really know what the hell happened here.

Stella!

2005-07-13T16:39:00.000-04:00

So I'm not sure how many people out there have been watching the new show Stella on Comedy Central, but I think it finally kicked into gear last night. It's definitely a bizarre show; bizarreness that I don't think we've seen since the Strangers With Candy-Upright Citizens Brigade power hour of bizarreness back when I was in college. It stars three The State alumns playing...themselves, I guess, but in a really cracked-out kind of way. The first two weeks were funny, but it was such a unique concept that I don't think I was able to totally wrap my brain around it.

But all the changed last night with the third episode. Maybe it's that I've finally figured out that the show essentially makes no sense, or maybe this was just the best version yet, but I laughed harder than I have at a TV show in a while. So if you haven't seen it yet--and you like crazy comedy--definitely try to catch this week's episode in repeats (it's the Office Party episode). It's nuts.

UPDATE: Looks like this was actually the fifth episode. Gonna have to catch up!

It's All About The Viral Marketing

2005-07-13T11:53:00.000-04:00

Our discussion in class last night on online influentials and the possible exploitation of the media exemption by bloggers and anyone else who wants to claim the title "journalist," combined with some of our earlier class topics, really made one point clear to me: it's all about viral messages. Online Influentials (I suppose I need to put a copyright sign next to that word thanks to Roeper; how lame is that?) are valuable to a campaign in no small part because they will actively spread the campaign's message, and we've seen how the self-perpetuating nature of an effective viral message can spread a campaign message at no cost to the campaign itself. The need to win over these online influential also makes me skeptical that a corporation could simply buy effectiveness on the internet, but that's a subject for another post later this week.

Influentials are valuable to a campaign because they spread the message. They forward emails to their friends, tell their fishing buddies who to vote for, and generally act as a repeater station for the campaign's signal. This is true whether the influential is online or not: they key is winning over that influential, because once you do, she'll take on moving your message to her friends and associates.

One can easily see the value of this in the context of a campaign, especially for smaller campaigns with smaller communications budgets but also for larger campaigns that need to find an effective way to cut through the clutter. As the Bush campaign showed us, hearing a message from a friend of neighbor is much more effective than hearing it through the TV or from outsiders (especially if they are wearing bright orange hats).

I doubt the concept of winning over influentials is anything new in the world of campaigning; after all, isn't that what the old block captains were back in the day? But reaching these influentials takes work, and any new technique that lessens the effort needed to reach these individuals is welcome.

That's where IPDI's work on this topic is so important. It makes all the sense in the world that campaign website visitors would be more likely to be influentials, but six times more likely than the public at large? That's phenomenal! And to combine this easy way to find influentials with the low-cost nature of the web makes this discovery like a gold mine. Using the web to target influentials is an absolute no brainer, no matter the size of the campaign. These are your viral marketers, and any campaign that ignores this self-powered outlet for their message deserves to lose.

News Crawl on the Campaign Site?

2005-07-11T16:43:00.000-04:00

The IPDI report on putting online influentials to work notes that most of these valuable site visitors are news junkies, and one way that campaigns can attract them is by feeding this need:

One of the ways you can engage Influentials in your campaign is by feeding them information through your Web site. For example, one of the interesting features of Congressman Bernie SandersÂ (I-VT) Web site is that the latest campaign headlines scroll across the front. The scroll includes both news articles from local papers and press releases from the campaign.

It seems that most campaign websites feed this need with a static list of recent articles on the candidate or campaign, press releases, or recentannouncementss by the candidate. But too often the presentation is incredibly boring: the listing will only have headlines that don't fully tell what the article is about, or the content is never updated.

The blurb about Sanders' site got me wondering if something similar to the newscrawl that the cable news networks constantly employ could be adapted to a campaign website. It would likely need to be modified--perhaps a single item could appear at a time in a box on the right hand side of the home page about the size of a typical Blogad, and visitors could click on the headline to be taken to the in-depth item. A handful of news items could be rotated through, and a double-arrow navigation button could allow users to either jump forward in the list or back to an item they just missed but want to investigate further.

In this way, the sites could attract users to the latest news in a more interactive way than simply listing the five most recent headlines somewhere on the page. And items that aren't specifically related to campaign news could be cycled through as well: there could be a fundraising appeal somewhere on the reel, a call to sign up for the email list, or appeals to volunteer could all be items that rotate through the list. The campaign could also use the format to promote items on the campaign blog, using teasers like, "Sanders makes waves in campaign appearance today. Read about it at the Sanders Blog" or something like that.

Of course, the trick is to make sure it isn't overwhelming, but using such a rotating system could be a great way to catch the user's eye (especially if he or she happens to be an online influential), further promote the fundraising and volunteering arms of the web operation, and keep the content fresh.

Lower-Literacy Users: Relevant to a Campaign?

2005-07-10T12:56:00.000-04:00

Jakob Nielsen's article on lower-literacy users raises some interesting questions for political operatives putting together a campaign website. The first that comes to mind is, should we care? Do lower-literacy users visit campaign websites? Given that web users have above average literacy to begin with and the on-line influentials a campaign website needs to target probably raise the average even more, should lower-literacy users even be a concern?

After reading the article and doing some thinking, I think the questions is clearly "Yes, we should care." Just because I and just about everyone I know around here would be considered a high-literacy user (we are in a master's program, after all), that certainly doesn't mean every potential user of a site is the same way. Making the assumption that everyone is just like you or your close friends is certainly a good way to quickly find yourself out of touch with reality.

Nielsen estimates that "30% of Web users have low literacy," so this is clearly a demographic that needs to be considered. This is especially true for a presidential or other high-visibility campaign that would be likely to draw more casual users to their sites, but smaller campaigns should keep lower-literacy accessibility in mind as well. While lower-literacy users are probably less likely to be politically active, a local campaign that strikes a nerve with such a voter could be exactly what gets him or her interested in politics, and having an accessible website could be what ultimately draws them in or drives them away.

As Nielsen notes, there are certainly circumstances where it is appropriate to target higher-literacy users, and there will certainly be sections on a campaign website, such as the issues page, that do just that. For a detailed policy brief that is targeted at the media, interest groups, and super political junkies, a higher reading level is acceptable. But the site should also include a summary version, perhaps in the form of bullet points, that is accessible to lower-literacy viewers. Place this summary at the top of each issue page (making sure it's in the first 800x600 so the user doesn't have to scroll), and the section can now be helpful for lower-literacy users while retaining the more specific and detailed aspects for more "serious" users.

While sections like the issues pages can appropriately user a higher reading level, the home page in particular should be made as accessible as possible. Catering to lower-literacy users on this page will also serve to enhance the general usability of the site, and make it accessible for the largest audience possible. Perhaps lower-literacy users will rarely make it past this page, which gives all the more reason to make the home page as accessible as possible. The home page should certainly be designed to reach the lowest common denominator (and I truly mean that in the non-perjorative sense), with the literacy level being ratcheted up when appropriate in deeper pages on the site.

Also, it should be noted that a government-funded website such as an elected official's website should be almost entirely designed with lower-literacy users in mind. Whereas a campaign website presents strategic reasons to increase the accessibility for these users, a government-funded website really should be accessible to as many constituents as possible. And that certainly includes lower-literacy and disabled users.

246 Assignment Ruining My Day

2005-07-09T13:29:00.000-04:00

Friday Cat Blogging

2005-07-08T12:24:00.000-04:00

Special "Dark Side" of the cats edition:

Penelope in her "Big Pimpin'" mode. Who'd fuck with her?

And you thought only dogs did this...

It's Not About You

2005-07-06T14:53:00.000-04:00

As detailed in Dr. Johnson's Congress Online Project, many elected officials make a common mistake in designing their website that was first brought to our attention by Vincent Flanders in week two: they make the website with their own needs in mind, rather than those of their visitors. As Flanders says, there are two things to remember when designing a website:

1. The only reason my web site exists is to solve my customers' problems.

2. What problems does the page I'm looking at solve?

While Flanders had corporate sites in mind, these rules certainly apply to elected officials' websites as well. The website exists for the purpose of providing important information and solving constituent problems, and should be designed with that in mind.

As Johnson describes it, the typical congressional website is primarily updated by the press secretary or chief of staff, and very little thought is given to posting information constituents want (p. 126). As we saw last night, accountability is typically at the top of the list for the average constituent, whereas the candidate often prefers to provide "soft" content like his or her biography.

Elected officials should concentrate more on giving the people what they want, and not only because these sites are paid for with taxpayer dollars. By providing a website that helps constituents solve their problems, the elected official will build up good will that will ultimately translate to votes in the next election. Candidates are elected because they ostensibly show they will be the better man or woman for the job; having a helpful website is a great way to show that to be the case.

If You Release It, You Can Spin It

2005-07-04T12:50:00.000-04:00

Dennis Johnson makes an interesting point in Congress Online about the reluctance of some members to put information on their voting record on their congressional website:

One complaint was that legislators do not want to give ammunition to potential campaign challengers by providing ready-made research on their voting record. This, however, was a false rationale. As a formerr candidate and opposition researcher, I could simply say that any researcher worth his or he salt could easily obtain far more complete information about voting records, impact of votes, cost of programs, and other vital information from sources not even remotely connected to the legislator's official website (p. 136).

I'd certainly have to agree with Denny J on this one: an elected official isn't going to stop many opposition researchers simply by refusing to post information that is available elsewhere in the public record. "Bad" votes will be discovered and publicized regardless of how easy the elected official makes it to find the information.

But perhaps more importantly, by attempting to hide such information the elected official loses the ability to spin the information in advance of a potential campaign. By giving an explaination of why the elected official voted as she did when the actual vote occurs, she is able to frame her vote in advantageous terms; and by getting the information out quickly, she can influence contemporary accounts of the vote and help set the conventional wisdom as to why she voted the way she did.

It will always be better for campaigning purposes if a vote is spun before it becomes an issue rather than after an opponent makes a big deal of it. If a campaign staff is put on the defensive and is made to defend a vote that has never really been addressed by the candidate, suspicion will arise that the current justification is being made up at the current time. But if the elected official released her reasons for voting for the bill when the vote occured, the campaign staff will be able to look back at this advantageously-framed justification and its prior existence will legitimize it.

Johnson also makes a good point about posting the elected official's schedule: by describing her schedule in advantagous terms, constituents will be less likely to think that the official is living easy on the voters' dime.

While some officials may worry about presenting too much information, they should take advantage of the fact that all of this information will come from them, rather than ouside sources that cannot be influenced. Most of this information will get out there anyway, so you might as well couch it in a positive light from the very beginning.

Chap Petersen: New Content, But Who Are You?

2005-07-03T10:34:00.000-04:00

For our upcoming strategic plan for a candidate or organization's web operation, I am assigned to Lieutenant Governor candidate Chap Petersen, who recently finished third out of four for the Democratic nomination.

While I archived the entire site before the June 14th primary, he has thankfully left most of the site up at www.petersen2005.com (and note how well he has handled his loss on the website: he's gracious about his loss, but states his intent to again be a factor). While most of his static content (bio, issues, etc) remains the same, the more timely content has been displaced, so at times I'll refer and link to screenshots I took when the race was still in progress.

What The Campaign Did Well: Provide New Content on a Regular Schedule
I was most impressed by the campaign's focus on adding timely content to the website. From what I could tell, the campaign added new content every single day over the closing months of the campaign. On the day before the primary when I archived the site, the top item on the home page was a countdown to the primary and an update on what was happening that day:

While the homepage seemed to always have the most recent piece of news posted prominently above Chap's welcome (which accompanies the photo of Chap and his family that you can see at the bottom of the screen above), the campaign also had two long running "tours" which had daily updates that were organized into their own sections on the site. The first was his "Uniting All Virginia RV Tour" which ran during the entire month of May. Updates were posted daily (As I recall, the most recent entry was posted on the home page with a link to the rest), and the entire tour was archived into its own page (which is still up here). Here's a screen shot:

In addition to the month-long RV Tour, the campaign started a "Travel Diary" the day after the RV Tour ended. This diary was updated daily until the primary two weeks later, and each daily entry had an update on the events of the day and a few words on where Chap would be heading the next morning. Here's another another screen shot:

So why is this such a good thing? Well, as we've discussed in class, one of the best ways to encourage return visits to a campaign site is to provide new content. With 1 out of 100 visitors on the average making a donation, the more visits the better.

Having a daily update is also a better way to get return visits than haphazard updates, even if the total quantity of new content ends up being roughly the same. For the reasoning behind this, elementary behaviorism will do the trick. If the website is updated with new content daily, then it is presenting a Fixed Interval reinforcement schedule to the user. The user knows that she will be rewarded with new content roughly every 24 hours, and can depend on getting that reward at that time.

On the other hand, if content is updated every couple of days or some other seemingly random schedule, then it represents a Variable Interval reinforcement schedule. While in some instances this can be just as powerful as a Fixed Interval schedule, in the case of campaign websites I think it's fair to say that visitors will get discouraged if they can't tell when and why the site is updated, and will be less inclined to visit.

By having a daily update on the site, Petersen's campaign gave supporters and casual visitors alike a reason to visit the site every day. More visits means more informed supporters, increased connection with those who visit, and potentially increased online donations. The campaign did a good job in providing new content on a regular schedule.

What The Campaign Did Poorly: Where's The Message?

While the campaign did a good job in giving visitors a reason to return regularly, it was less effective in telling these visitors exactly what message(s) the candidate was running on. The home page is a case in point (this is the same pic as above):

We can see the timely news (election day fast approaching!), we can see his great logo, we can see prominent links to contribute or volunteer for the campaign, we can see links to the travel diaries, but we see nothing about what Petersen would do if elected. There's no overriding message as to what the campaign is about. For that matter, there are no messages period as to what the campaign is about. The least he could do is include a meaningless slogan on the home page, a la Jerry Kilgore, but Petersen didn't even do that.

Delving deeper into the site, it is still difficult to determine the theme of Petersen's campaign. The issues section details Chap's positions on various issues, but still lacks any coherence:

I like the title of the section ("Chap's Vision" is much more personable than the standard "Issues"), but it isn't a single vision; instead, it's multiple visions on different topics that never meet. Instead of a candidate with a vision, I see a candidate who has ideas on seven issues, and that's it.

I should also note that the diary entries I laud above read more like itineraries that give the "who" "what" and "where" but not the "why." Instead of sticking mostly to recounting what he did that day, the diary entries could have shown where each campaign stop fit into Chap's vision for improving the commonwealth.

After digging through the site and speaking with someone who worked for the campaign, it seemed that their theme was a combination of "Uniting all Virginia" and "A Positive Vision." The welcome message currently on his site includes the following passage:

The goal of my campaign was to promote a positive message for Virginia and the Democratic Party -- and to expand the Party's appeal around the Commonwealth.

For my strategic plan, I took this and crafted the slogan "A Positive Vision for All Virginians." While I'd prefer something more specific (As Ron Faucheux would say, "Why can't the other candidate offer a positive vision for all Virginians?"), at least this captures his philosophy and presents a coherent message. At least some visitors, if asked, would be able to characterize him as a "positive moderate," which is more than they would take away from the site as it was.

Perhaps the lack of any coherent message was part of the campaign's strategy: as a conservative Democrat, perhaps Chap wanted to conceal his moderate side until after the primary. But as the past two Democratic presidential nominees have shown, it's very difficult to win on individual issues without an overriding message. There are many euphemistic ways to dress up moderation in a primary, and this campaign would have been well served to make such an attempt rather than present their candidate as a cipher. And if the lack of a message on the site was an oversight, then it was a very big oversight indeed.

Tivo, Satellite Radio, and Narrowcasting

2005-07-02T12:15:00.000-04:00

I had a few experiences over the past week or two that made me want to write one last post on narrowcasting, as I think future technologies will allow much more specific targeting. As the Campaign Audit article on narrowcasting put current capabilities,

Narrowcasting is a technique employed by corporate marketers and increasingly by political campaigns. It involves tailoring an influential message for a targeted interest group. Typically, members of the interest group are identified using a mixture of demographic profiling, polling and self-selection.

Self-selected narrowcasting will obviously ensure that your message reaches a good target, as a potential voter who signs up to receive email updates from a campaign is by definition interested. There is almost no waste in the message distribution, but it will always be a limited way to narrowcast.

For targeting non self-selected potential voters, polling can help to identify broad groups that will generally be receptive to your message, but the samples can become so small in the subgroups that the data becomes somewhat meaningless when you try to get specific. A cross-tab of 40 voters isn't going to tell you much.

That leaves demographic profiling as the remaining way to target messages to potential voters in a non-broadcast way, and technological advances in both processing power and consumer research continues to improve the efficacy of this process. But no matter how small the subgroups become (African-American mothers age 25-29 who subscribe to gossip mags and whose husbands work in car manufacturing), we are still fundamentally looking at groups, and not individuals.

Would it be possible to gain more information on individual voters, and thus fine-tune a campaign's predictive power and increase the efficiency of their narrowcasting efforts? I wonder if Tivo might be the answer.

Tivo tracks your television watching and keeps a record of all the shows you watch, how long you watch for, what you decide to record, everything. While most Tivo users are at least somewhat aware of this (since the machine records "suggested shows" based on the other shows the user watches), from what I recall it's a pretty comprehensive record. From an article I read several years ago (sorry, can't even come close to remembering where), Tivo wanted to use this information to eventually provide targeted advertising. If a user always fast forwards through beer commercials, it would make much more sense to give her other commercials that she would actually be inclined to watch. Get enough data, rule out enough types of commercials, and eventually the user would only be seeing a very targeted set of advertising.

While we obviously aren't at this point yet (and Tivo's continued declining market share as a result of the low-budget DVRs pushed by local cable companies may ultimately preclude it), one could see how this could increase the power of narrowcasting. Instead of distributing your message to a group of potential voters who are considered likely to receive it, a campaign can distribute their message to individuals who like to watch political commercials. With more data, perhaps the targeting could even be increased to individuals who like watching political commercials on the outdoor life network, and would therefore be a good target for gun issue commercials.

I'm not sure where this technology will move in the future: is this a viable system? Could viewing data from one medium be extrapolated to other narrowcast mediums (mail, web, even radio)? Would there be a backlash?

Even more interesting, I wonder whether satellite radio has the same tracking mechanisms. A cursory google search this morning didn't turn up much other than this press release from two years ago announcing that Nielsen will start tracking listening on XM; this suggests that statistics can at least be tracked in the aggregate, and I'd assume that, as a recently developed technology, individual listening statistics would have been built in from the beginning. With the amazing growth in this medium, this could ultimately be the playing ground upon which different users first receive different advertisements depending on their preferences.

Perhaps this type of targeting will never be viable, but if it ever does, it could provide a way to distribute broadcast-style messages to narrowcast audiences. Now wouldn't that be the best of both worlds?

Friday Cat Blogging: Lazy Cat Edition

2005-07-02T12:10:00.000-04:00

[Special Saturday Edition]

Isis chilling out in front of my record collection.

Penelope getting her sleep on.

Helping Volunteers Communicate

2005-06-30T16:43:00.000-04:00

One of the first things I learned in this program was the importance of messaging in a campaign. Given the average American attention span and the sheer amount of clutter out there that a campaign has to cut through, it's critical to distill your campaign down into a clear message that voters can latch onto.

While a clear message will obviously help increase the impact of advertisements, speeches, and quotes in the press, it also can have a major impact on the effectiveness of your volunteer communications. When volunteers phone bank or go door to door, they are ostensibly there to persuade potential voters. But oftentimes campaigns don't give them any training on what are convincing messages, and the effectiveness of the volunteer efforts can be wasted.

The Bush campaign clearly had a more coherent message than the Kerry team in this last campaign (of course, that's almost by default, since Kerry didn't even have a message), and one could see how that would make the job of canvassers easier; it is much easier to say "We need steady leadership during these times of change" than "Well, Kerry wouldn't have gone to Iraq in the way Bush did, and wouldn't have put us into debt with tax giveaways to the rich, and..."

On top of that, Matt Taibi's article described how the Bush campaign also distributed a "message of the day" that volunteers could use in their communications with potential voters. In addition to giving the volunteers a subject to focus on (which I think is incredible useful, especially for neophyte canvassers), the campaign used the instant distribution power of the internet to coordinate the message across the entire campaign. Talk about your synergy!

As the fall campaign approaches, someone in Arlington will flip a switch, and the suction will change direction; information will now move primarily from headquarters down to the volunteers. Canvassers in each county will await the message of the day from the campaign, and then, like suburban Paul Reveres, they'll be off to get the word out, by foot or by phone.

Modern presidencies have long used a "message of the day" format to give the press something "new" each day that also helps promote the president's agenda, but this takes it to a whole new level. A voter may get canvassed and listen to the volunteer praise the virtues of the prescription drugs bill, and then later on the evening news see video from a speech by the president on the very same topic. As any media consultant will tell you, repitition is good.

James Verini's article on his experience with the Kerry campaign also brings up another way that a campaign can use the internet to improve its volunteer communications. Verini recounts the almost complete lack of statistics that canvassers had:

No one bothered to brief the ground troops on how to be persuasive or to even get sufficient fact-sheets into their hands. And they didn't take it upon themselves to get educated. I routinely toured neighborhoods with canvassers who were struck dumb when a door opened and an undecided voter asked for specifics.

"But what does Kerry want to do about unemployment, exactly?"

"Um, ah, um..."

"How many people have lost their jobs in the last four years?"

"Ah, um, oh..."

Of course, there were answers to those questions. Kerry proposed tax credits for new jobs created by manufacturers. He wanted to introduce Buy American guidelines in the defense industry and penalize American companies outsourcing jobs overseas. Bush oversaw the loss of about 1.2 million private-sector jobs and allowed 4 million Americans to descend below the poverty line. These facts, which took about two minutes to find out, had the power to sway undecided voters -- I know, because I swayed many with them.

I'm not sure that you could come up with a better example on the importance of giving volunteers the information they need to make a persuasive case. In a campaign the size of Kerry's, there's absolutely no excuse for not getting this info to the volunteers. All it would take would be a few dedicated staffers who can put together a volunteer packet that can be distributed through the web site in a similar way as on-line press packets. Like most intellectual property, the reproduction cost of this information once posted would be zilch, and it would increase the effectiveness of the volunteers substantially.

Sending volunteers out with nothing to say is a waste of resources; volunteers may have all the passion in the world, but if they were natural political communicators they'd probably be getting a paycheck for that talent somewhere. As a result, anything the campaign can do to help them could make a big difference, and crafting a clear and coherent campaign message is a great start (and should obviously be done anyway). Beyond that, the Internet offers a great distribution system for spreading a campaign's messages through its volunteers. From a message of the day to basic facts and talking points that can be used again and again, it's pretty clear that a campaign can benefit from using the volunteer section on its website for more than just capturing contact information.

Contradiction Will Still Get You

2005-06-28T19:17:00.000-04:00

As we've discussed narrowcasting in our class, there's been a fair bit of emphasis on the ability new technology offers to say different things to different audiences. A Campaign could tailor one message for one particular audience, and deliver it through such means as targeted emails, text messages, or other narrowcast communications in a way that other audiences would not be exposed to it.

This raised the concern among many that politicians would be able to deliver contradictory messages to different groups. Joe Candidate could send one message to a pro-gun group stressing his absolute 2nd amendment support, but send another message to concerned urban mothers stressing his opposition to unfettered gun access. If the messages were sent via a medium that was sufficiently below the radar--and new technologies seem to be expanding the roster of such mediums--it seems that the candidate could get away with that highest of political crimes, flip-flopping.

But will that really happen? While narrowcasting technologies have no doubt improved over the past few years, it's still hardly a perfect science: there will always be a few pro-lifers accidentally included in pro-choice lists. Combined with any type of physical record of the message--and in today's day and age that "physical" record could be a saved email, photographed cell phone screen, or any other type of digital preservation--there will exist a record of what the candidate (or her campaign) said and a few people who will be glad to draw attention to it.

(Of course, the point was made in class that a campaign could send a white supremacist to knock on doors of other white supremacist and engage in some retail white supremacy far below the political radar, but for any type of mass communications there will likely be a record).

In today's media landscape, there is such a high premium placed on proving a candidate to be a flip-flopper that distributing contradictory messages will often come back to bite you. But that doesn't mean you can't emphasize different aspects of your message to different groups. In the above example, Joe Candidate could certainly proclaim his fundamental support for the right to bear arms to the pro-gun group, but stress gun education, training, and safety devices to the concerned urban mothers. There's no contradiction there, and if pressed the candidate could easily fess up to supporting both messages under a "supporting responsible gun ownership" umbrella.

This is where narrowcasting has its power, and arguably its greatest benefit to the political process. Being able to target voters more specifically on the issues they care about increases the chance that they will engage with the campaign. If the first, second, and third concern of a mother is local schools, then it makes sense to send her messages that focus on this issue.

Some could certainly argue that this will lead to a more fragmented political process where voters will get an incomplete picture of the candidate's platform, but that is where the broadcast messages fill in the rest of the picture. If a candidate is running on an incoherent platform that has as its core principle "Tell people what they want to hear," he'll never survive on the broader stage. But a candidate with a reasoned governing strategy who supplements her broadcast messages with narrowcast appeals to voters on the subjects they are interested in will likely see success, and bring more voters into the process as well.

Sure They Had Time, But They Used It Well

2005-06-27T09:58:00.000-04:00

One point that I think is often overlooked when the Kerry and Bush campaigns are compared is the insane amount of time the incumbent's team had to prepare for the race. From January 2001 on, they were essentially preparing for the 2004 election, and the complexity and scale of their multi-level marketing plan for volunteers is a testament to that. As mentioned in Matt Bai's article, the Bush operation in Ohio not only had 91 county chairs established by February of 2004, but full steering committees as well. At this point in the campaign, Kerry was the clear frontrunner but hardly was done with the primaries, and I think it's a fairly safe bet that he didn't have his ground game in place yet.

Whereas the Bush campaign had the luxury of several years with which to plan their general election strategy, Kerry had to completely remake his campaign in the fall of 2003, and really didn't even begin to gain any momentum until the Iowa caucuses. After winning the primary on his "most electable" platform, he had to change his strategy to one appropriate for the general election and begin his nationwide campaign. While a smart campaign may have been able to keep a coherent strategy throughout both the primaries and general election that would have enabled it to plan ahead in the way the Bush campaign did (and it will be interesting to see if Hillary Clinton will be able to do just that in 2008), for the most part it's natural for a campaign to focus first on the primary and then change their strategy for the general.

Does this mean that challenger campaigns can't put together as complex a volunteer strategy as the Bush team did? Hardly. But it does take an almost superhuman effort, and above all a well managed campaign. The volunteer plan needs to be discussed at the very first planning meetings for the campaign; timetables need to be laid out that allow enough time for the volunteer operation to be put in place; and resources need to be devoted to the GOTV effort from the very beginning. The internet provides a great tool for helping such a process along, but it is no substitute for a well defined plan.

A newly-elected president has more time to prepare for his re-election campaign than any other type of candidate, but the Bush campaign also took full advantage of this opportunity. They saw what their weakness was in 2000, they developed a solution to the problem, and the executed their strategic plan and gave it the time that it needed. Most campaigns obviously operate on a smaller scale than a presidential campaign, so four years is hardly necessary; but a strong strategic plan is, and if it isn't discussed at the start of the campaign, it's unlikely that the plan will ever fully flourish.

Amway, Control, and the Web

2005-06-26T16:35:00.000-04:00

As someone who didn't pay close attention to the Bush campaign's volunteer operation in 2004, I found Matt Bai's April 2004 article in the NY Times Magazine to be very fascinating. I had heard a bit about the various components of their strategy, both in this class and elsewhere, but it was nice to see it all put together in one place. Ultimately, I think it's fair to say that Rove et. al. came up with a plan that will be emulated in large races for years to come.

In a small campaign--say, for state representative--the district might be small enough or geographically concentrated to the point that the entire volunteer operation can be centrally managed from the campaign office. But in a statewide race or a geographically dispersed congressional district there needs to be a way to manage the volunteers from a central location said volunteers will probably never visit. The BC'04 campaign's "Amway" strategy appears to be a very effective way of empowering volunteers to take control of the operation while retaining ultimate control over their actions.

Sounds contradictory? That's because in some ways there's a fundamental conflict between the desire of a campaign to delegate responsibility for certain volunteer operations but maintain control over exactly what is being done. The Bush campaign overcame this contradiction by making their Team Leaders feel empowered, even though they were in many ways just cogs in the machine.

The Bush campaign gave their hardest working volunteers an autonomous-sounding title--"Team Leader"--but gave them a very well defined set of tasks that they needed to accomplish to show their "leadership." No shooting from the hip was rewarded in this machine, no doubt. One way that technology was leveraged to improve the control the campaign held over the volunteers (something I hope to cover in another post later this week) was in making the website the place where volunteers could log their accomplishments, check their progress, and search for new tasks. The campaign was able to get data back immediately on what had been accomplished, and retained the ability to change the task list at any time.

I also liked the way they rewarded volunteers for accomplishing certain tasks:

On this morning, the colonel had come, clipboard under his arm, with the goal of registering 10 new voters, which would count toward the goal of 6,450 that the campaign had set for the county. (Volunteers get points for every voter they register, and these points can be redeemed on the Bush campaign Web site for hats or mugs.)

What a great idea! Nothing motivates Americans more than tangible rewards--even if they are ideologically wed to the candidate they are volunteering for--so why not give away low-cost rewards that might make all the difference to the volunteer? And it provides one more reason for volunteers to log their accomplishments, sending precious data back to the campaign headquarters.

The combination of the Amway method along with the use of the website as a personalized communications device with the various volunteers helped the Bush campaign close the GOTV gap with their opponents (and some would argue pull ahead), and it's something that I expect to see used often in large campaigns going forward. The problem with delegating responsibility to a widely distributed volunteer corps is that it opens the campaign up to losing control of its message on the ground (something that appears to have happened with the Democratic volunteers who went door to door); taking advantage of the tools available through the web to provide clear goals and harvest the data from the volunteers presents a great means of overcoming this control problem. It will be very interesting to see if any campaigns take advantage of such a strategy in 2006, much less 2008...

A Final Post on Targeting Email Newsletters

2005-06-25T14:37:00.000-04:00

I had been working on this in an effort to post it sometime last week when it would be a bit more timely with regards to our reading schedule (I generally think of things as resetting to the next week's topics on Saturday), but with the recent lightening of our blogging load it got pushed back to now. That said, I wanted to put together one final post on targeting email newsletters that summarizes some of the better ideas I've seen and/or thought of over the past week.

I was first drawn to the idea of targeting campaign emails to voters' interests by Peter's post on the issue from last week. Different voters have different interests, and while some may want to get every email on every topic that the campaign sends out, others may only want emails that cover the candidate's statements on jobs or schools. Even the smallest campaigns run on a platform that encompasses several issues, and all should provide a way for voters to choose what information they would like to receive.

One way the campaign could go about this would be to have a base newsletter that everyone would receive. This newsletter might take the form of a "Wednesday Update" (since we've seen that emails sent in the middle of the week have the greatest chance of being read) that gives a general news update on a regular schedule (which makes recipients feel less overwhelmed). This base newsletter list would also get the most critical news updates and fundraising appeals, but it would be important not to overuse it for these items lest the recipients grow weary of too much email.

In addition to this base list, additional lists could be created that allow voters to receive updates targeted to specific issues. It is important not to create too many specific lists unless you're a presidential-level campaign, if only for the practical reason that a smaller campaign probably wouldn't make enough news to provide content for a high number of micro-targeted lists. Instead, the campaign should stick with lists that cover the main message points that the candidate is running on (better schools, transportation improvements, improving access to health care, etc), and should always take care in the names chosen for the list: instead of an "Abortion Info" list, a pro-choice candidate could title such a list "Women's Health Issues."

In essence, providing targeted newsletters like this would be similar to un-bundling a newspaper. While there are certainly some individuals who read the entire newspaper and would similarly sign up for every update the campaign sends out (and there should be a check box to receive every newsletter for just these people), most read just one or two sections. While a lazy campaign could certainly assume that their newsletter recipients will just skip the items they are not interested in, the nature of email is such that if a recipient is feeling overwhelmed, he or she will just opt-out of the entire list. By providing just the info they want (in addition to the basic campaign updates through the base list), the recipients will be, in the words of Peter in his above linked post,

More likely to read the email
More likely to act upon the information in the email

That certainly seems like a state of affairs to strive for. And one more point about opting out: if a recipient clicks the link in the email to opt-out of the list, they could be given a final appeal to only receive the base email that comes at a scheduled time. This could be enough to keep the voter from removing her email from the system entirely.

Campaigns going the targeted newsletter route should take advantage of the different sections of their websites to enroll interested individuals to their email lists. On the "Issues" page, there could be an appeal to "Sign up for our Issues updates." Depending on how deeply the campaign breaks down the issues, there could be links to the "Jobs Updates" or "Health Care Updates" newsletters on the appropriate issues pages. The "Press" section could have a link to the "News Updates" newsletter, "Volunteer" section the "Activists Newsletter," and so on. People reading these pages probably have an interest in the topic, which makes it a great way to make a targeted appeal. Of course, anyone who signs up through such a link will also receive the base newsletter, growing the overall email list.

Finally, it is important to make clear in the "Subject" line of the emails which newsletter the recipient is receiving. A recent example for the Kaine campaign could be "TRANSPORTATION UPDATE: Kaine announces plan to protect funding." That way the recipient knows the general subject of the email, but also gets a taste of the specific issue that will be covered. Either part of the subject (the newsletter identifier or the specific description) could be what makes a recipient actually read the email.

Sorry this post went a little long, but I think it's important to think about how all these different aspects could work together to produce a more effective newsletter operation. There are obviously many different levels such a targeted strategy could go to; perhaps there will only be three different lists for a smaller campaign, and a presidential campaign could have an extremely well targeted newsletter operation that takes into account zip code, religion, etc. The bottom line though is that if recipients are primarily getting updates on topics they are interested in, they are more likely to read and retain the information and less likely to opt-out because the emails seem irrelevant. This is a very cheap way to get your message directly to voters on the issues they care about, so it makes sense to do all you can to get them the information they want and not overwhelm them.

Friday Cat Blogging

2005-06-24T11:07:00.000-04:00

Just to give a little back story and "humanize" our two cats, we got both of them from the local animal shelter back in Northern California almost two years ago. They're sisters, and as far as we know they've only been apart for an hour total in their entire lives (when we had to take Penelope to the vet once). That said, it often seems they couldn't be more different. Penelope (the grey and white one) is huge and lanky, and acts more like a dog than a cat. Isis, the darker one, is much more petite, and enjoys simply watching us and stalking our feet from underneath the bed. Both of them are champion sleepers, easily attaining the 18 hours a day the average cat logs to claim the mantle of "World's Sleepiest Mammal."

And with that, the pics:

Isis ready to pounce on something...probably a piece of food.

Penelope hiding in a sheet. No doubt ready to attack at a moment's notice.

UPDATE: Bonus Friday (Video) Cat Blogging

TOC To The Rescue

2005-06-23T12:53:00.000-04:00

Our professors bring up a very good idea for longer newsletters in Winning Campaigns Online, stressing the importance of using a table of contents at the top of the letter. While single topic emails--like Kerry's numerous fundraising appeals (it never gets old bashing his campaign, does it?)--don't really need a TOC, it can make a multiple topic email much more accessible.

I could see this being very important for smaller campaigns that might send out a true newsletter (meaning a digest of campaign news as opposed to a single news announcement) perhaps once a week. Such a newsletter is obviously a great way for smaller campaigns to stay in touch with supporters, while avoiding the overkill that a down-ballot race needs to be very careful of staying away from.

But the point the authors make about the reasoning for having a TOC is very true: if presented with full length news items in sequence, recipients will stop reading if they get to a section they are not interested in. The Hotline is a very good example of this; I might read through the entire National Briefing and perhaps the items on 2008 candidates, but after that I strictly check the TOC and read the items I am interested in. It certainly ups the usability quotient.

Presenting recipients with an "In This Issue" TOC in a campaign newsletter will make sure they are made aware of items near the bottom of the issue that they have interest in, but wouldn't necessarily see if they just started reading the newsletter and stopped when they got bored. And with more and more recipients able to view HTML emails, campaigns can make it as easy as one click to skip right down to the section one is interested in reading.

One final point about using a TOC in this way is that it likely makes the newsletter seem more professional to the recipient. Instead of simply a list of info that the recipient probably never would read all of, it will have a more coherent look and will likely feel like a real newsletter that one could hold in her hand. The bottom line is that it's one of the many best practices for the web operation that would cost next to nothing to implement, but could make a big difference it terms of usability. So why not?

Ouch

2005-06-21T11:38:00.000-04:00

This is unbelievably horrible:

Let this toothpick be a warning for picnickers. Accidentally swallowed by a 67-year-old woman at a barbeque, the toothpick apparently pierced her gastric wall, passed through her diaphragm and perforated the right coronary artery...Removing it required open heart surgery, three Italian doctors told the New England Journal of Medicine in May.

One four-year study cited in the report counted 8,176 U.S. toothpick-related injuries. In 5 percent of the cases, swallowed toothpicks injured the bladder, small intestine and other internal organs. But cases of toothpicks piercing major blood vessels are rare. In his decade in the emergency room, said Eric Glasser, assistant chief of Georgetown University Hospital's ER, he has yet to see one so extreme. While toothpicks occasionally get lodged in the throat, he said, most adults remove them from appetizers and such before swallowing. [emphasis mine]

Wow.

Generating Voter-to-Voter Contact

2005-06-21T09:51:00.000-04:00

In his article comparing the Bush and Kerry newsletters, Jakob Nielsen makes a point that is relevant not only to newsletters and our Politics and New Media class in general, but to the issue of political persuasion as a whole:

How many people change their vote on the basis of a TV commercial? Probably fewer than change their vote (or decide to vote to begin with) because of a trusted friend's convincing argument. Email newsletters offer a direct line to such every-day influencers around the country.

Too often in our profession, it seems the emphasis in communicating political messages is placed entirely on getting the message to the voter, and the reception of said message is totally ignored.

That's an overstatement, of course; ever since The Responsive Chord television ads have been designed to grip the viewer's attention, direct mail is written in a way that at least gets the recipient to read the piece, and sound bites are crafted in a way that allows them to cut through the clutter. But too often the way the message is received by the recipient does not get the attention it deserves. The importance of voter-to-voter contact is often overlooked by detatched consultants--especially, it seems, on the Democratic side--which ignores a great opportunity to get your message to an undecided voter through a trusted messenger.

The Bush campaign did a far better job in using their Internet presence to enable supporters to spread the word for them. The numbers certainly bear that out, and the website (from what I remember of it) was set up in a way that placed a strong emphasis on enlisting "Team Leaders" who could get active in their local communities.

Using newsletters to promote this aspect of the web presence has obvious benefits. Perhaps a typical Kerry email inspired one out of a hundred recipients to donate $100; that would buy maybe 50 direct mail pieces or a couple of points in a medium sized market. Compare that to the result if the same percentage of recipients--1%--on the Bush list took the time after reading an email to phone 5 friends and tell them why she was voting for Bush. I'd certainly take the latter if I were the campaign manager.

Voter-to-voter contact can make a big difference, and, as Nielsen points out, the email newsletter is a great way to directly impact the type of influencers who initiate such contact. Kudos to the Bush campaign for using this medium to generate such contact, though I'm sure its use could even still be improved. Instead of simply using the newsletter as a cash machine with precipitously declining marginal returns, campaign managers would be wise to think two steps ahead to what the money will ultimately be used for--persuading voters--and take advantage of the newsletter's ability to do just that.

Email Solicitation

2005-06-20T13:41:00.000-04:00

I think most of us agree at this point that the Kerry camp sent out way too many fundraising emails to their list, especially near the end of the race. This resulted in many recipients getting burned out by the constant solicitations; I know that I stopped reading the emails, and I've seen several other people in the class say the same thing on their blogs. The mention of two solicitation emails sent out in one day by the campaign was particularly egregious.

One point I don't think I've seen mentioned yet is that if you can get email recipients to visit the site, that visit alone might lead them to make a donation. As mentioned in Winning Campaigns Online, a pretty constant percentage of website visitors make donations (one out of a hundred or so), so if you can use the newsletter to drive recipients to the site, you can increase your online donations without having to constantly make explicit fundraising appeals.

I don't recall seeing any statistics on yield rates for fundraising emails, so perhaps they are much higher than the 1% or so of website visitors who donate. But one thing is for sure: once you get to a certain point, sending out more fundraising emails will definitely lower this rate. By saving your fundraising emails until the most opportune moments (a big issue in the news, a dirty attack from an opponent, etc) and not simply sending one out every day regardless of the circumstances, you'll definitely have higher yields rates.

This allows you to focus your energies in the rest of your emails to keeping recipients informed, getting them involved in the campaign, and giving them good reasons to visit the website, all of which could lead them to make a donation anyway. Doing so would certainly keep more people actually reading the emails...

Blogs: The Court of Appeals

2005-06-19T13:16:00.000-04:00

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has a great essay up on his blog that discusses the way that blogs have become something of a court of appeals for the mainstream media:

"News stories," Joshua Marshall once said, "have a 24 hour audition on the news stage, and if they don’t catch fire in that 24 hours, there’s no second chance." His observation appears in the Harvard Kennedy School case study on the fall of Trent Lott (published in March 2004, a pdf.)

But that's not the way world works anymore. The 24-hour audition still happens, and the big winners are still big news. But now there is a Court of Appeal in the State of Supreme News Judgment, and everyone knows the initial verdict can be reversed. Reversal on appeal came last week for the Downing Street Memo (now memos, plural) about 45 days after the first story broke...

What journalists call news judgment used to be king. If the press ruled against you, you just weren't news. But if you weren't news how would anyone know enough about you (or care) to contest the ruling? That's what having singular influence was all about. The way it works today, the World Wide Web is the sovereign force, and journalists live and work according to its rules.

Now if there's something newsworthy coming out of the U.K. but neglected in America the political blogs in America and other activists online keep talking about it. Quickly the story's unjust obscurity will reach a political player who can change that by acting in a newsworthy way, lending fresh facts and additional reason to cover the story...

I think this is a very accurate way to portray the influence that blogs have. They aren't going to replace the mainstream media; as I've noted before, they simply don't have the resources to cover the multitude of events that are worthy of coverage, regardless of many more bloggers there are than traditional journalists. But what they can do is influence editorial judgement, something that I would argue is exceedingly important today with media consolidation narrowing the ranks of those who actually decide what news is.

This is not to say that Leonard Downie should read the blogs every morning to determine what will go in the next day's Post, but if a significant enough uproar emerges regarding the non-coverage of a story, it is probably at least worth a look. While some establishment news editors still cavalierly dismiss "bloggers sitting around in their underwear" (see Bob Somerby's inimitable skewering of Michael Kinsley's recent condescending dismissal of the Downing Street Memo for a prime example), the results speak for themselves; without blogs, we wouldn't have had Trent Lott's demotion, Dan Rather's humiliation, and now the Downing Street Memo.

It is certainly not a perfect process: oftentimes the volume of a complaint substitutes for substance. But if the complaint has enough merit, it will quickly gain a critical mass and barrel forward on the backs of viral communications until it breaks into the mainstream. It's still a messy process, but, to continue Rosen's analogy, I'd rather have a messy court of appeals when it comes to mainstream news judgement than no appeal at all.

RSS Feed Newsletters

2005-06-18T18:19:00.000-04:00

As we head into the email newsletter week of this course, it seems like a good time to breach a topic I've been thinking about for a bit. When Safari 2.0 came out with the new Mac operating system, it was the first time I'd ever really used an RSS feed (RSS funtionality is built into the browser). My dabbling turned into very heavy usage as this class started and I began reading the RSS feeds for 30-odd blogs, switched to NetNewsReader Lite, and have since heavily relied on RSS readers instead of cycling through most of the sites I read every day.

While RSS feeds work great for blogs, they can be a bit unwieldy for larger sites like most of the major newspapers. Many of the major newspapers are hopping on the RSS bandwagon, breaking up their different sections into different feeds, and the Washington Post even offers RSS feeds for just about every columnist that writes for either the dead tree or online versions of the paper (by far the best RSS offering that I've seen).

This is ultimately a long-winded way of saying that I think campaigns could take advantage of RSS feeds in order to distribute content to users as they do through email newsletters. Obviously, the email newsletter will remain the primary vehicle for such information distribution, if only because the installed base is orders of magnitudes larger (I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but I had never used an RSS feed until just a few months ago). That said, why not offer RSS feeds in addition to email newsletters?

Using RSS would also allow campaigns to create more targeted RSS feeds, following the good advice that Peter gave the other day. In the same way that newsletters can and should be customized to better interact with voters' interests, different RSS feeds can be offered to better sync with the content users actually want.

It would probably take a relatively large campaign to take advantage of splitting content into different RSS feeds, as it seems some campaigns have enough trouble creating enough content to fit even one such feed. But as RSS readers become more popular (and I think they will since it is such great technology), it's certainly seems like an avenue for content distribution that campaigns should look into.

Some voters may prefer not to give out their email and prefer getting serialized content through an RSS feed, so why not allow them to do so if they'd otherwise not get the content at all? Who knows, they could be opinion leaders, and it would be a shame for them to lose touch with the campaign simply because they've had bad experiences with email newsletters in the past.

Friday Cat Blogging

2005-06-17T18:07:00.000-04:00

Hanging in the Closet

Bonus "When they were young" edition:

Training Activists Through The Web

2005-06-17T09:11:00.000-04:00

Jeff Jarvis points to a new feature on the BBC website that essentially provides a training course for shooting good video for news reports. Jarvis sees this as a great use of the web, and beneficial for journalism in general:

How smart of them. This is what the future of news is about: sharing.

By teaching those who care to learn, the BBC is building an army of news-gatherers in the world. One of them could be there when the huge story happens. One of them will be inspired to go out and report a story. And that video will end up on the air -- on the BBC or on the internet or elsewhere -- and we're all better informed.

I certainly agree, and got to thinking about using a similar rich-media training system for both campaigns and issue groups. I spent a bit of time going through the BBC course, and it's a very good use of the medium. The course is broken up into modules, and it keeps track of your progress so you can leave and then come back to the same place. There's a mixture of text describing techniques, along with video segments used as examples; most of the segments I looked at can be viewed both in their original form and with a commentary that walks the viewer through the technique being used. Overall it's very informative, intelligent, and--perhaps most important--it makes you want to continue using it.

Could such a system be used to train volunteers over the web? I certainly think so. Setting aside the issue of cost (which is sure to only decrease in the future), an online training center could be placed on the candidate or advocacy group's website that contains modules for different forms of activism: house parties, letters to the editor, engaging friends, or any other technique that is generally better communicated by face-to-face communication than by the written word. If presented in an engaging manner, it could encourage activists to become more effective.

The overall result not only would benefit the particular candidate or issue campaign, but would ultimately create a more engaged electorate. Similar to Jarvis' conclusion about training individuals to better cover news, we'd all be better informed. Individuals would feel more empowered to take action that could make a difference, and the "sitting on the sidelines" feeling that so many have could be decreased--at least a little bit.

At this point in time, it's probably unlikely that your average small campaign could put together a module as ambitious as the BBC course, but it certainly seems possible for a presidential campaign. I'm a big believer in the ability of rich media to communicate information more efficiently than text or video alone, so I think this format has potential. Of course, there's nothing to stop the other side from taking advantage of techniques that are rarely confined to one side of the political spectrum in terms of their effectiveness, but I think it hardly should be looked at as a zero sum game; if individuals on both sides become more effective participants in the political process, then that's great (but hopefully the side that paid for it gets at least a little bit more in order to preserve the incentive to develop the technology).

e-Rangers

2005-06-16T19:00:00.000-04:00

There's one more item from the fundraising section in Winning Campaigns Online that I'd like to cover. On page 161, the authors describe the importance of building a team:

Find a role on your fundraising team for every new person who comes to your campaign via the Internet. Perhaps give them a goal of an amount to be raised from friends and associates, or ask them to forward email funding requests to people on their personal email lists.

In traditional offline fundraising, the importance of hosting committees for events can hardly be understated. When individuals are given ownership of an event, it not only gives them more of an incentive to badger their friends to give money, but it provides a point of contact for said friends that is often more persuasive than a call or letter from the fundraising department (assuming the candidate doesn't have the time to contact each potential donor personally). The hosts make the event; without them, the campaign oftentimes wouldn't even know who to invite, much less have a personal point of contact to invite through.

Reading the above excerpt got me thinking as to how the host concept (or the closely related bundling concept, which may or may not involve an actual event but certainly places the onus for the fundraising on the individual--and singles him or her out as a reward) can be applied to online fundraising. The money raised will never equal that of an actual hosted event, but in enabling individuals and giving them ownership of the process, a campaign can get people outside of the fundraising department to do the raising, and maybe locate some new givers as well.

But how to do it? Creating different levels of being an e-Host (those that raise $500, $2000, or $5000, for example) could be enough, with a final reward of meeting the candidate at a special e-Host event providing an additional incentive. Or perhaps something along the lines of the House Parties that seemed ubiquitous throughout the Dean campaign, where a simple event is held at the host's home and the candidate participates through a conference call.

At some point, the money becomes large enough that moving into the traditional fundraising structure--with invitations through the mail, multiple event hosts, and an appearance by the candidate--just makes more sense (you'll always be able to raise more if the donors get to meet the candidate). But perhaps there is a certain sweet spot where giving low-dollar donors a bit of ownership in the process will lead to more giving. I'm not sure exactly what the best way to go about it is (feel free to enlighten me in comments if you've got a sweet approach), but it seems that a well designed e-Host program could provide another way that taking advantage of the Internet could give the campaign some extra return with very little investment--and create more loyal supporters as well.

Could They Possibly Be More Different?

2005-06-15T22:00:00.000-04:00

I've been a big fan of cooking shows ever since Food Network saved me from reality in the aftermath of the 2000 election (everything is always wonderful in Food Network Land), so I was definitely looking forward to both Hell's Kitchen on Fox and The Next Food Network Star on, you guessed it, the Food Network. But, good god, could they possibly be any more different?

One pits a verbally abusive chef tormenting contestants in the way that only a Fox reality based show can, and the other features super nice contestants and super nice (but ultimately judgmental) judges trying to make magic in Food Network Land. I'll have to admit, I certainly love both (and I'd love to see the uncensored version of Hell's Kitchen), but to think that we've waited so long for a cooking-based reality show and then we get two diametrically opposed versions at the same time? Crazy.

But, more importantly, who will win? I'll take Michael on Hell's Kitchen (I think he'll ultimately make better dishes than Ralph, and Ramsey just hates Christopher) and Dan & Steve on Food Network. But that's subject to change, of course...

Who?

2005-06-15T21:55:00.000-04:00

So with Destiny's Child breaking up, who's looking forward to Michelle's solo album?

That's right, NOBODY.

Anyone Know Anything About Camcorders?

2005-06-15T18:33:00.000-04:00

So I'm looking into getting a camcorder as a belated birthday gift (I love how once you reach a certain age everyone just gives you money so you can get that one thing you really want), and figured I'd try to harness the power of the blogosphere (or our class, at least) and see if anyone had any sage advice. I'd like to keep the price as low as possible, but I don't want something that I'll want to throw away in a year.

I plan on using it mostly for screwing around, recording the District, our cats, friends, etc, but it would be great if I could use it out on the campaign trail at some point to create some video that could at least be put up on a website. I've worked with video a bit in the past, and know that I definitely want a mic in and headphone out jack, as well as a firewire jack so I can export it to Final Cut (and use it for iChat). I definitely plan on brushing up on my video editing skills, even if it's just for sophomoric stuff.

At this point, I'm thinking about the Panasonic PV-GS65 or PC-GS150. The 3CCD chip setup that both have is really attractive, and both have the mic, headphone, and DV ports that I need. Between these two, the question is whether the GS150 is worth $85 extra for an intelligent accessory show, the Leica Dicomar lens, and slightly better video.

I'd totally appreciate any advice that anyone can give on deciding between these two, another brand, or anything else at all you think I should think about before I buy. It's between this or getting an iPod, so I'd love to know that I'm getting something great if I skip over something I know I'd love!

Anything for More Money

2005-06-15T16:48:00.000-04:00

Throughout this class, I'd heard the idea of online checks brought up from time to time, so it was nice to finally get some details in "Winning Campaigns Online." The number one reason to use an online check system, as I see it, is all about the money: until we can get ATM terminals attached to every potential donor's computer, this seems to be the best way to avoid credit card fees.

I'd be curious to see some statistics from campaigns that used an online check system. I'd have to assume that it was used alongside a standard CC donation system (so as not to scare away any potential donations), and it would be interesting to examine what percentage of online donors chose to use the check system instead of their CC. Also, were there any signs that donors became more comfortable with the online check process over time?

It seems as though the biggest sticking point with such a system would simply be getting donors to use it. I think they best way to drive people to use an online check system that they were unfamiliar with would be to simply describe why it's being used in the first place: it saves the campaign money!

It's hard for donors to get excited when their money is going towards keeping the lights on at the campaign office or topping off the last guy in the candidate's entourage's gas tank, but how much do you think they enjoy their money going towards credit card fees? Putting a big "HELP THE CAMPAIGN SAVE MONEY!!" button up directing donors to the online check system--along with making it as easy to use as is humany possible--would probably get at least a few converts. I know I'd certainly rather more of my donation went towards "real" expenses, even if it is just gasoline...

Opening Doors

2005-06-14T13:27:00.000-04:00

I think Gautam hits on a good point as he discusses Chris Bowers' post over at MyDD. Bowers points out that the liberal side of the blogosphere, which previously lagged far behind the right in terms of traffic, has been far outpacing the other side in terms of growth over the past two years and now has 65% more traffic. However, the right side of the blogosphere still has quite a few more blogs numerically. Gautam points to one of Bowers' findings:

Bowers finds that of the top 5 conservative blogs, only LGF even allows comments (let alone diaries, polls, etc). Contrast this with blogs like DailyKos, Atrios, MyDD, etc. which encourage (indeed, are even based on) full user participation.

Bowers suggests that the community oriented nature of the major blogs on the left has led to this higher growth, as users have many more reasons to visit than simply see what the master has written. I think this makes perfect sense; content is obviously king, and that will always draw me to a site even if it isn't a Scoop site (Matt Yglesias is an example of a pure content producer), but the ability to actively participate can be almost as powerful. And there are many visitors who get much more involved than I ever do in the diaries and commenting systems on the major liberal blogs.

The diary system in particular seems to be a great way to grow the ranks, as it is in many ways easier to gain popularity by posting quality diaries on Kos than posting to a quality blog that no one reads. In fact, I really don't know how you'd ever gain readers without at least being able to comment on other blogs unless you're famous already. Allowing users to comment and interact or even create their own posts allows talented writers to hone their blogging skills, gain attention, and eventually be able to head out on their own. There are certainly conservative blogs that allows comments, but the lack of that function on the major blogs certainly has to serve as a bottleneck for growing the audience (because participators will always create higher traffic than passive users).

This also got me thinking about the current state of the Democratic establishment class, which I think bears some similarity to the conservative blogosphere in that there is an aristocracy of sorts that up and comers can't break into without an invitation, and the base isn't cultivated in a way that encourages new voices. Today there was a report on the summer internship program at the Heritage foundation. The conservative think tank is spending over half a million dollars a year to cultivate future Republican leaders, an investment that will surely pay off in the future. By bringing young conservatives into the fold, conservative organizations (and there are many that similarly invest in young people) do great things for the future of conservatism.

Contrast this with the liberal side, where dinosaurs like Robert Shrum stick along well past their prime and new voices often seem stifled. Perhaps the openness of the liberal blogosphere will eventually make a difference in this regard (after the recent election many on the left vented their displeasure with the job done by the Democratic consultants, and similarly praised those who had run smart campaigns), as the Dem establishment could certainly learn a lot from the recent success of the liberal blogosphere; if they just stopped dismissing them as cranks in pajamas they might learn a thing or two...

Viral Marketing, Humor, and Facts

2005-06-13T10:45:00.000-04:00

Continuing the theme of yesterday's post on ideaviruses, Larry Purpuro's article in the IPDI Online Fundraising Primer on viral marketing again shows the value of an idea that screams out to be spread. When you consider how much money is spent in a typical campaign broadcast a message to voters who may start noticing it the tenth time around, one can see the value of a message that spreads on its own and has a much higher acceptance rate.

Of course, coming up with the sure-fire idea is the hard part. Purpuro refers to several ways to make your message fit for a viral campaign, with humor of course being a great base. While not something that was started by a particular campaign, the JibJab spoof shows just how far such a message can spread. An example of this style that was put out by a campaign was the John Kerry Flip-Flop Olympics that the Bush campaign produced. While I never saw any stats on how well it spread, this seems like the perfect way to knock your opponent while using humor to propagate the message.

Purpuro references the importance of good copy, and I certainly agree. An effective and well written appeal that connects with the target audience will always be at least partially successful. But I got to wondering if that would be enough to get voters to actively spread the message: certainly that could be successful in some instances, but I think humor would be a more consistent way to produce a viral message, since it is easy to make the overall appearance seem different; even the best copy all looks the same at first glance after you've seen a few iterations.

So is there a way to consistently produce ideaviruses that will spread on their own and help your campaign without always using humor? One avenue that seems promising is to provide facts: whether it is a set of statistics on a given issue (tailored to be meaningful to the recipient, such as comparing the benefits of the tax cuts using examples of Lexuses and mufflers), a collection of quotes that are particularly damning (Billmon's collection of WMD quotes from administration officials that he produced after they started downplaying that justification for the war is the gold standard of this style, in my opinion; what liberal wouldn't pass that on to her friends?), or even a link to a handy interactive element on the candidate website (such as Gephardt's health-savings calculator), it seems that voters would be more interested in passing on the e-mail if it contains meaningful information.

Viral marketing is a tactic that all campaigns should at least try; the ROI is just too substantial to pass up. I think humor will always be the most effective engine for driving your message through cyberspace, but I'd be interested to see the effectiveness of providing well-presented information to your audience.

Politics and Ideaviruses

2005-06-12T15:11:00.000-04:00

While Seth Godin's fascinating article on the concept of an ideavirus seems to be primarily directed at the private sector, it certainly has implications for those of us working in politics.

A successful ideavirus has many similarities to the concept of political buzz; in fact, you could probably argue that political buzz is nothing more than a politically oriented ideavirus. Howard Dean's presidential campaign certainly reached ideavirus status in 2003, as word of his opposition to the war and the Meetup phenomenon spread like wildfire through the liberal side of the political spectrum. However, if you had described his campaign's momentum as resulting from an ideavirus, most people following politics would have said, "Huh?" But if you said his campaign had buzz, few would have disagreed and all would have known what you were talking about, even though it's essentially the same thing.

Several other aspects of the article caught my attention in how they can be applied to the political world. One regards my hobby-horse, tell-a-friend functions for a political website, and is described in the "Answer These Three Questions" section:

2. How smooth is your ideavirus?

In addition to being persistent and cool, an ideavirus needs to be smooth if it's going to spread quickly. If you make it easy for the virus to spread, it's more likely to spread

You can have a message that lights people up, but if you make it difficult for individuals to pass it on to their friends you won't be able to maximize your impact. Making it easy for website visitors to e-mail pages to their friends, see the latest JibJab cartoon, or even potentially send MMS political messages to one another can only help the ideavirus spread. It's tough enough to come up with an idea powerful enough to spread on its own; removing as much friction as possible from its pathways should be the easy part.

A final point from the article that caught my attention is very relevant to the 2004 presidential campaign:

When a sneezer [someone who wants to spread your ideavirus far and wide] is ready to spread your ideavirus, what should he say?

It sounds like a simple, silly question, but it gets at the core issue of making your virus smooth. If you give sneezers easy-to-follow, effective instructions, they're likely to follow them, because, after all, their goal is to spread the virus.

In terms of political ideaviruses, this is critically important. The passion that many partisans feel towards a political idea lowers the bar for the quality of the idea needed to get people interested in the first place (as opposed to ideas individuals didn't even know they'd ever be interested in), so less than optimized ideas can still spread. However, both their progress and their effectiveness can be hindered by an unfocused idea--or message--something we saw in 2004.

George W. Bush clearly had a more focused message than John Kerry, and I think that made it much easier for his supporters across the country to spread the gospel of George. I recall reading after the election about how much peer-to-peer contact there was on the Republican side, with neighbors speaking directly to neighbors (as opposed to outsiders--like Dean's squad in Iowa--or paid canvasers).

Obviously, being spoken to on your doorstep by a neighbor will be much more persuasive than almost any other form of direct voter contact, but the canvaser needs to be able to deliver a coherent message. If the campaign can't even put forth such a message--and Kerry certainly never did--then that makes the job of the neighborly canvaser much more difficult. I certainly don't have any hard data to back this up, but I would assume the neighbor-to-neighbor contact was much more effective on the Republican side in large part because the message was clearer and easier to deliver.

(It should be noted that the amount of such contact for each side obviously matters as well, and there was probably more passion for Bush on the right than there was for Kerry on the left--as opposed to against Bush. But the clarity of the message could only have helped)

The bottom line is that there are some very good recommendations for enhancing the effectiveness of an ideavirus in the article, many of which translate directly into politics. Well worth checking out.

It's My Birthday and I'll Blog if I Want To

2005-06-11T16:49:00.000-04:00

I think Carolina girl started a wonderful tradition yesterday of half-assed birthday blogging, so I'm going to follow suit on what marks my 26th year around here:

So it seems that we've come to a consensus that usability is critical when your goal is to convince consumers to buy your product or vote for your candidate, but there are certainly circumstances where Jakob Neilsen can be tossed out the window. Most notably, as Kathie has pointed out, in musician websites.

On that note, here's one of my favorites for an almost unusable site, but that fits in perfectly with the artist it is designed to promote: Radiohead. Be sure to click the "Scrapbook" button once you make it past the splash page. Bizarre.

Friday Cat Blogging

2005-06-10T17:07:00.000-04:00

My first contribution to one of the finer traditions in blogging. This week's theme: cats in things

This is Isis enjoying a shopping bag. I hope she doesn't think that thing will actually provide any protection...

Here Penelope is showing how unbelievably classy she is. I guess she takes after me...

A Threatening Email or a Threatened Boycott?

2005-06-10T13:43:00.000-04:00

So I was going to write a post on how the diary and comment rating system on DailyKos represents an anarchist peer-to-peer situation as Siva Vaidhyanathan would describe it, since the entire community is involved in determining whether or not a user's comment is removed rather than one primary actor, but it seems that other DailyKos-related events are the topic du jour.

The commentors over at Kathie's are pretty much universal in their condemnation of Kos, and while I agree that he certainly could have been more professional in his comments, I certainly wouldn't go as far as many of them do in disparaging him. Here's his email in full:

Matthew,

Carol Darr and you guys fucked up with your FEC comments.

I am going to do everything in my power to make sure you don't get a single netroots individual at your conference next year. Just thought I'd let you know.

Have a good day.
Markos Moulitsas
Daily Kos

Classy? No. Professional? Hardly. But to call this a "threatening e-mail" implies connotations that I don't think are warranted; this isn't a threat to inflict some sort of bodily harm, it's a threatened boycott, the right to which I think everyone should have (it's often the most effective way to enact change, and it's hard to put together an effective boycott without a persuasive message).

I think Politiae makes a good point in her comment to the post:

As was so wonderfully discussed here earlier, it's tough to understand a person's meaning simply by reading their words on a screen. Saying something like, "I'm gonna get you for that" can have so many different meanings, depending on the body language we attach to it that we often forget the words truly can be abusive.

I certainly don't want to put words in her mouth on this one, but I think her point helps to explain why I interpreted his response with less of a "what will we tell the children!" mindset than others. That way I see it, he's basically saying, "Hey, I think you guys are way wrong, so wrong that I'll recommend to anyone that wants to hear my opinion that they shouldn't attend your conference next year, so heads up." I think his use of "fucked up" really changed the dynamic to one that is very beligerent, which of course can change one's entire interpretation of a written message (and the fact that, as most people who know me can attest, I use that word on a fairly regular basis probably allowed me to move right on past it). I'd be interested to see what the reaction would have been had he used softer language to make the point. Would it still be characterized as a "threatening e-mail?"

This is certainly not meant to completely excuse Markos; there was no need to send the email directly to Matthew, and certainly no need to put his point in such coarse terms. But at the same time, I think describing this as some sort of nefarious threat continues the overreaction cycle. Kos disagreed with Darr in no uncertain terms, she felt he didn't give her a forum to explain her views, yada yada yada, they hate each other, and they'll probably never ever get along from here on out. Good for them.

But this is exactly the sort of thing that happens in real life all the time, it's just that we get to see this one up close since it's happening live on the internet. Markos shouldn't have written the email, but he shouldn't lose all credibility until the end of time, either. So he popped off; big deal. I'd rather get true opinions that cross the line from time to time than an endless string of "he-said, she-said" from the MSM.

MMS "Tell-a-Friend" Political Advertising

2005-06-09T18:05:00.000-04:00

Another interesting aspect of the future of mobile communications covered in the Economist survey is multimedia messaging (MMS). While hardly something that will revolutionize the face of political advertising as we know it, it seems that this protocol could offer a serious improvement in at least one area.

The "Tell-a-Friend" type function on a candidate website is something that I've been harping on a bit in this space, as I think it represents one of the best ways to use a candidate site for persuasion. MMS messaging could provide a new avenue for such word-of-mouth elements. Instead of sending an e-mail to a friend with a link to the specific page or video, an individual could send an MMS version to a friend. The format is industry standard (or at least will be), and the PC-to-Mobile ability makes it possible to send the message directly to a friend's phone when browsing the website.

Obviously, there are possible pay application for this technology as well, but I certainly think it would certainly be an improvement over the current system for tell-a-friend functions. No more connectivity problems, no needing to download the latest media player, no need to be at your computer (or even own one!). Like current tell-a-friend functions, the message is ostensibly from your friend and not the campaign, so the possibility for backlash is much lower than with an unsolicited message. Specialists would be enlisted to take full advantage of the medium, and the end result would ultimately be more exposure to the candidate or issue campaign.

I'm sure there are also some potential downsides (one that comes to mind is the fact that the recipient won't be able to hang around and see the rest of the website after viewing the video or issue page her friend directed her to), but it certainly seems like something worth exploring.

POSTSCRIPT: though I didn't delve too deeply into the pay side of using this format for political communications, I think it's pretty obvious that it could be very effective; certainly more so than banner ads...

Downing Street Redux

2005-06-08T19:53:00.000-04:00

There isn't a ton that's relevant to our class here, but if you're curious about the current state of the Downing Street Memo story, Columbia Journalism Review's blog has a good rundown. Looks like it at least has a chance of breaking out into the mainstream. If so, a good deal of credit will be due the liberal blogosphere...but we'll see.

The Way We Were

2005-06-08T19:36:00.000-04:00

Doesn't this seem like a long time ago?

Blog Tag: Book Edition!

2005-06-08T15:15:00.000-04:00

My good friend and fellow GSPMer Lanny hit me with a round of blog tag, and though I normally hate this kind of stuff (mostly for laziness reasons), this one is on a good topic: books. So here goes:

Number of Books I Own
Quite a few, especially since I stopped selling my books back during my sophomore year of college. I'm going to be very exact and say that I have a few bookshelves worth.

Last Book I Bought
Anarchist in the Library. So far, very fascinating.

Last Book I Read
Not counting books for class, the last book I read was A Vast Conspiracy by Jeffrey Toobin. A fascinating look at the three strands that combined to create the Clinton impeachment: Paula Jones, Linda Tripp-Monica Lewinsky, and Clinton-Lewinsky. Books on this topic always fascinate me, as I didn't really start paying attention to politics until the 2000 election and really missed quite a doozy with this saga. This is by far the best treatment of this issue that I've read; highly recommended if you can get your hands on a copy.

Five Books that Mean a Lot to Me
Like Lanny, I'm not going to call this my definitive top 5 books ever, but they're all meaningful to me.

Justice as Fairness by John Rawls. The final and most accessible iteration of Rawls' political philosophy, much of what is in this book underscores my outlook on life. If you've never heard of the Orginial Position and the two principles of justice, be sure to at least give the wiki article a skimming. This book also introduced me to the concept of what Rawls calls "comprehensive doctrines"--the outlook you choose to take that gives life meaning, most commonly a religion or other belief system--and the reasons why no society could have only one without government coercion

Influence by Robert B. Cialdini. This was assigned for an intro to Psychology class I took, and it basically takes a look at all the ways that marketers take advantage of human psychology to sell you stuff. Reading this will definitely save you some money.

What Liberal Media by Eric Alterman. A comprehensive look at our modern media that really does put to rest the claim that the media is ferociously biased towards liberals. From the selection of pundits booked on the cable nets (how much more of Bob Novak do you see than Paul Krugman?) to the treatment of economic issues (employees get more money--that's horrible!) to the treatment of Al Gore in 2000 (Love Story, anyone?), you'll see why I scoff when people claim that mere surface aspects of reporting such as labeling protestors as "conservative" proves the media to be liberal.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. My favorite work of fiction, this irreverent look at war succeeds in showing the outright craziness of our world. From the dead man in Yossarian's tent to Milo's chocolate dipped cotton--with the seeds still in it--all the way to Snowden's dreary secret, no book has tackled war in quite the same way. And how great of a word to use is the title?

1984 by George Orwell. It's somewhat cliched to point to this book in these times, but it remains a powerfully relevant piece of work. The most fascinating aspect to me remains the use of language in the book ("Newspeak"), as today's poll-testing of every word used in our public debates often seems to be pushing us in this direction. It's certainly a famous book for a reason.

I'm not going to tag anyone specific, but everyone should feel free to chime in with your own opinions!

Who Is Your Audience?

2005-06-08T12:17:00.000-04:00

Idealist brings up a very good point in a post today on the accessibility of most blog writing (or lack thereof):

They say that a newspaper is written at the 6th grade level. In the best articles, the writing is simple and immediately easy to grasp. The style does not cut people out, in general, but has always been held as a kind of universal, accessible style.

I don't feel this is the case with a lot of blogs, and I think it may hurt them in recruiting new readers. The Daily Kos site writes with a kind of tone that implies that the reader is a long-time loyal fan. The non-traditional grammar gets in the way of easy reading, I think, and the references to "Kossaks" or to contributors by their web names is awkward. I find the style exclusionary...

When I first started blogging a while back, one of my biggest struggles was with determining what audience I was writing to. Was I writing to political neophytes? People who read other blogs and were up to date on all the latest scuttlebut? Or, to paraphrase on of my Philosophy professors from my undergrad days, a reader of above average intelligence who knows absolutely nothing about the subject at hand?

Part of the problem comes of course from determining what you are trying to do with your blog. I started out writing in a way that assumed my audience knew nothing about politics other than the basics, and I was trying to educate them. However, that really puts a damper on how deep you can get into a certain topic. Should moderate Dems in the Senate be weary of working out a compromise with moderate Repubs because the House will dominate the conference committe and the moderate Repubs will buckle when a more conservative bill comes back? Not exactly the type of question you can address in only a paragraph if you assume your audience doesn't even know what the conference committe is.

I think most major bloggers work on the assumption that mostly political junkies read their blogs, and while that's certainly great for those of us who have been following them for a while, it can make it very hard to get up to speed for a newcomer, even one very familiar with politics.

In the end, I think it's better that most major bloggers work on the assumption that their audience will understand their shorthand, as it allows us readers to get a lot more bang (information) for our buck (time spent reading). The navel-gazing can certainly get out of hand at times, but I guess with half a million hits a day you're allowed a bit of that. I totally understand how it can feel exclusionary at first, and I certainly hope that the more time spent reading the easier--or at least more predictable--it gets!

Gattaca

2005-06-07T12:44:00.000-04:00

Russel Buckley's The Death Knell of Privacy raises some alarming possibilities for privacy invasion through future technologies. From tracking employee locations to make sure they aren't slacking off, to sophisticated reputation databases that could allow some employees to be permanently blackballed, one can see the obvious benefits to the company owners but the Big Brother-like lifestyle change for employees. There are certainly different levels what I would call privacy invasion (and shareholders might call "efficiency increases"), and the little stuff doesn't bother me as much; it's the big stuff that is really scary.

The major danger I see mirrors the movie Gattaca. While that scenario was somewhat more focused on genetic testing, the overall situation is similar to some of what Buckley envisions: a loss of privacy for employees, a set course that the individual can do nothing to change, and the stripping away of our humanity in order to make us better fitting cogs in the machine.

I do wonder, however, if things will ever reach that point, even if the technology makes it possible. I for one question whether treating employees like machine parts is the best way to maximize their productivity (and the author points to studies that seem to confirm that point); I know that I certainly work harder when I have at least some degree of trust placed in me. While there will always be companies eager to embrace new technologies that promise increased efficiency at the expense of privacy, I'm not so sure they'll always see major gains as a result.

The other reason I question whether we'll ever reach Gattaca-level is that, frankly, most people wouldn't like it. Having a universal system like that in Gattaca requires just that--universality. Everyone needs to participate, or else the system would break down. Think everyone will easily embrace such privacy invasions? I doubt it. We'd see protest campaigns, boycotts of companies that participate, and the embrace of products with the "We trust our employees" badge on them.

It feels at times like all the momentum right now is towards less privacy, but it seems that we're getting close to reaching a critical mass where we'll see a rejection of the more extreme forms of privacy invasion. It's scary to think about having my career path set by my DNA or receiving a phone call if I stray from my employer-approved route for more than a few seconds, but I like to think that we as a society won't ever settle for that. Time will tell...

Spoon!

2005-06-06T14:15:00.000-04:00

Went and saw Spoon at the 9:30 club last friday, and they put on a hell of a show. If you've never heard of the band, their new album Gimme Fiction is great, and their previous effort, Kill the Moonlight, is definitely one of the best albums of our current decade. It remains to be seen whether or not they'll make the Modest Mouse-style jump out of the indy ranks and into the mainstream, but in any case they certainly are deserving. Definitely worth a listen...

"Good" Advertising

2005-06-06T11:26:00.000-04:00

The mobile internet survey from the Economist raises quite a few interesting questions, and one that immediately stuck out regards advertising:

The appeal of mobile phones to advertisers is obvious: they are personal devices, they spend all day with their owners, and their whereabouts are known. Proponents of location-based marketing see all sorts of mouth-watering opportunities. Someone walking down the street might be alerted by his phone to special offers from nearby shops; or everyone attending a pop concert might have a coupon offering a discount on CDs sent to their phones. Frost & Sullivan, a consultancy, predicts that by 2005 some 37 billion advertisements and alerts will be sent to mobile devices in Europe, and that 65% of users will be prepared to receive ads in this way. Such messages are expected to be worth $7.4 billion in revenues.

1. Now, my first reaction is to be petrified; I make a huge effort to protect my e-mail address from spammers, but now I could be bombarded on my cell phone? The image I get is from that scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise is walking through the mall and every single store he passes calls out to him by name with personalized appeals (after identifying him through an eye-scan, of course; thankfully we're nowhere near there--right?).

But then there is another part of me that wouldn't mind the advertising, provided it were helpful. I remember reading an article on TIVO a few years back (no idea where though, so sorry for no link), and one point that stuck was that TIVO was hoping that after recording the viewing habits of a typical user, they could direct advertising to the user that was only on products he or she was interested in. One could see how advertisers would drool over such a concept, as they could target much more specifically than the broad demographics they currently use.

Similarly to the Economist article, my first reaction was somewhat outraged; what about privacy? But then I thought about how nice it would be to no longer see ads for products I would never, ever buy. So long, Ditech!

2. The rise of opt-in advertising is another corollary to the phone-advertising concept. Every wednesday I get an e-mail from Harris Teeter showing my the items I normally buy that are on sale this week. To get it, I had to sign up at their website and use my VIC card when I shop. It's a little weird thinking about how they know everything I've bought over the past year, but in the end I think it's worth it: I find out easily when there are sales on items I normally buy, and it's not like they're going to steal my identify with the info they collect. So they know what brand of pasta I buy. Big deal.

So perhaps mobile advertising could have an upside if it were controlled properly. I'd have to imagine that there would be a massive consumer revolt if our cell phones were completely opened up to any and all advertising, so hopefully an opt-in system could be standardized. Advertising can be a good thing when it introduces you to something you want and/or need, so I just hope the greed of the advertisers could be managed in a way that allows all sides to win from the exchange. Of course, most people would probably opt-out of political advertisements on their cell phone, but they'd probably just write in an exception for political messages like they do with the do-not-call list.

Hell Freezes Over

2005-06-06T11:06:00.000-04:00

It appears that in his keynote speech today at WWDC, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will announce that the company will be switching from IBM processors to Intel.

While there are no doubt several reasons for the switch, it appears that IBM's inability to create a G5 chip cool enough to run inside of a PowerBook was among the biggest. From looking around the classroom I've seen quite a few Apple computer owners, so I was wondering if anyone had any strong feelings about this move?

I bought my first Mac last summer, so I hardly have a long history with the brand and am down with anything that allows them to make a faster laptop. But judging from this thread, there are quite a few people who have some strong opinions on this...

Exhibit A

2005-06-05T15:33:00.000-04:00

When I wrote my post on the limits that often cause traditional media outlets to ignore important issues, I had not yet read the assigned readings on John Conyer's recent efforts to publicize the Downing Street Memo. I think it's a perfect example of an issue that the media has largely ignored for several reasons:

It's a complicated issue that would take several minutes to thoroughly explain on television
The story broke in the UK, and the few US media outlets with bureaus in the area were already overstretched covering the election
It's controversial in that Republicans would claim bias from any outlet that focused attention on it
There isn't a current news item to peg it to; the only initial reporting on the memo came in news items on the British elections, which were covered in this country for about a day

So the bottom line is that space and resources were the major culprits involved in keeping this story out of the news, with a splash of "fear-of-bias paralysis" thrown in. Which makes it a perfect story for blogs to cover!

Many blogs--mostly of the liberal persuasion--hit the story hard; thanks to the internet and the plentiful reporting across the pond, there was actually quite a bit of information available. Congressman Conyers and the House Democrats who sent the letter to the White House asking for answers gave the story a bit of a jump start as well, as the best way into the establishment media remains using establishment newsmakers.

Conyers' use of the diary system on DailyKos is particularly interesting; at almost 1100 words his post is far longer than anything he could expect to have published on an Op/Ed page, and he knew that his message would get out unedited and unfiltered. Hundred of thousands of opinion makers would see his message, and the ability of the blogosphere to rapidly distribute a powerful message provided the potential to spread this letter even further.

While this story is hardly making the front pages, it has gained quite a bit of momentum and could ultimately resurface in a major way: the New York Times' new ombudsman Byron Calame dedicated a post to the issue on his web journal (no direct link, it's the last entry near the bottom) before he had even officially started his tenure, and Ken Mehlman was peppered with a few question on the topic from Tim Russert on Meet the Press this morning.

If it does break out into the open, some credit will definitely be due the bloggers that kept this story moving. As I mentioned yesterday, I doubt we'll ever see the day when blogs spur traditional media outlets to cover every important issue they ignore due to their structural biases, but they can certainly help. The Downing Street Memo issue is certainly worthy of additional coverage (that Scott McLellan can get away with saying he "didn't know about the specific memo" is astonishing but unsurprising given that hardly anyone has been informed about it), and it's good to see it get some ink somewhere, even if it is virtual ink.

Space and Time

2005-06-04T18:46:00.000-04:00

Idealist over at Idealist Action asks an interesting question about why blogs seem to cover some issues in more depth than other mediums:

Why is it that the mainstream media fails to cover so many important stories that the blogs do cover? Is that they are afraid of upsetting someone, or of losing access to key sources? Is it that they have a lack of resources and therefore don't search for the stories, or don't go after stories that may be difficult? Is it that they have to use their resources on commercial stories - the Jackson trials and the runaway bride, stories that sell? While it is significant that blogs cover the difficult, important stories, the majority of people are not getting their information that way.

Having read a hell of a lot about the way the media operates over the past two semesters, I'd say the answer is a mix of economics and entrenched habits. By sticking to the stories that are already in the news, media outlets don't need to waste time and resources in educating the public about a new issue; and the way the media beats are set up (another cost saving move), reporters are more likely to to stick to typical news items (such as a presidential speech) and to use establishment sources for stories, who are unlikely to push new issues. And, of course, there's the "if we cover that issue we'll bore our audience to tears" mindset, which in today's day and age certainly overules the "serving the public interest" concept.

Of course, there is also the issue of space available: broadcast news has 22 minutes or so, a newspaper a well defined number of column inches, and even the cable news nets generally run the same stories every hour. But the internet doesn't have this problem, as the sheer number of issues raised by various bloggers shows. Whereas a mainstream media outlet may not find tackling a new issue to be worth it in terms of either resources or space needed (or both), there are many bloggers who have plenty of space available and are willing to put in the time to really tackle an uncovered issue.

I think this is especially the case for the numerous specialty blogs that have sprung up, such as Talk Left (legal issues) or Brad DeLong (economics). The authors writing these blogs are able to use their sizable body of knowledge on a specific issue and really help to interpret the issues that fall under their area of expertise. In addition, there are many other specialists around who are able to contribute to the investigation of a given issue just through the comments on a typical blog, or through writing diaries on a Scoop site such as DailyKos.

There will always be a need for news judgement in traditional news outlets, simply because they don't have unlimited space. Combined with the realities of news organization economics (and the fear of producing biased reporting that can paralyze news organizations at times, especially when deciding whether or not to cover controversial issues), we can never expect traditional media sources to give every worthy issue the coverage it deserves. But it does seem that blogs can help to direct mainstream news coverage when a major issue is overlooked, such as with the 60 Minutes national guard documents, the Jeff Gannon/James Guckert saga, and the Trent Lott affair.

While it's certainly foolish to expect blogs to ultimately "fix" this problem (the issues they successfully push into mainstream news tend to be the simpler and more explosive kind; the genocide in Darfur is certainly an issue worthy of major coverage and has been pushed heavily in many blogs, yet it still gets zero coverage from major news organizations), the seemingly endless availability of both space and resources (mostly in the form of time) certainly allows them to help. At least a few people will get some info on these issues...

Primary Voters--More Persuadable Through the Internet?

2005-06-03T08:55:00.000-04:00

Blusher over at Blushing in a Blue State thinks that the experience of the Dean campaign shows that the internet cannot persuade:

One HUGE fact is missing from the discussion of the Internet's persuasiveness in a political campaign. The big pink donkey (not elephant) in the middle of the room, Howard Dean. What we had was a presidential candidate that was (and still is) given a lot of credit for his creative use of the Internet and technology during his campaign. But, he didn't win the presidency; he didn't even win his party's nomination! I'd say this hurts the theory that the Internet is a persuasive tool when the poster boy can't do what it all comes down to at the end of the day...WIN!

While I'd certainly agree that winning is the number one goal for a campaign, I don't think Dean's failure to even win the nomination shows the inability of the internet to persuade (I think it says more about Dean's inability to get along with the press and the campaign's red-hat field overkill in Iowa); in fact, I think the rise of Dean is in fact exhibit A in internet persuasion.

When Dean started his run for the presidency, few Democrats even knew who he was, much less supported his candidacy. Yet at his peak, he was polling near 50% of Democrats as I recall in some of the early primary states, and he still received nearly 20% of the vote at the Iowa Caucus. Not too bad for someone who started the race with zero name recognition.

Compare him to Lieberman, who started with nearly universal name recognition and a great deal of sympathy from Democrats after the 2000 election, yet Dean trounced him at every stop. Clearly, the Dean campaign was able to do some persuading.

The question remains as to how big a part his internet operation played as a persuasion mechanism, but I think it's fair to say that it certainly played a major part in Dean's rise. I know that I was moved to support him after learning about him in depth through his website, and the meetup and blog fever certainly added to his cache. True, he didn't win, but he led one of the most successful outsider campaigns in years, and persuading Democrats through his web site certainly played a major part in that.

Perhaps a candidate website has much more persuasion potential during a primary, when most of the voters are more politically active than your average general election voter?

Opinion Makers

2005-06-02T19:06:00.000-04:00

Politiae has an interesting post up today that he/she (damn androgynous handles) is planning on following up soon:

The survey was among the first to reveal what many of us take for granted now (or what some of use are just beginning to realize, a little behind the curve)--that those who can afford the luxury of spending free time and money on surfing the Web (and in particular visiting blogs daily) are highly involved already. Indeed, they are not really the sort who need to be persuaded to vote, and they are especially not the sort who can be persuaded to vote for a particular candidate.

This is all leading up to a post about why I don't think the Internet can be used to persuade undecided voters, which you'll find in a few days, for those of you who care to come back.

I'm not sure I agree with his/her ultimate claim, but I'm going to wait to see the argument before I simply dismiss it out of hand. In the meantime, I think the description of web users in this post raises an interesting point that falls somewhat outside of the reinforcement/persuasion dichotomy: while most of the visitiors to a campaign's website are highly likely to vote regardless of the messages they receive through the site, they are also likely to be opinion makers and are a great target to court.

The degree of influence these opinion makers have can certainly vary strongly; many will simply be the "political guy" in their family or group of friends, but they can definitely make a difference. I'm sure many of us would be considered the opinion makers in our group of friends back home, and oftentimes we talk with people who know nothing about a given issue or candidate and our friends listen to us. Some may influence a handful of people; some many more.

I guess my point is that regardless of the persuasion side, the already-supporters who visit a candidate website just might be the best supporters a campaign will have. That's why I think putting talking points or other packages on-line for visitors to use when they talk to their friends, or even just having "e-mail this page to a friend" links easily available are so valuable. If someone wants to spread the word for you, it certainly makes sense to make it as easy as possible for her to do so.

RSS: Ruining the Experience?

2005-06-02T11:07:00.000-04:00

One interesting thing I've noticed with the widespread adoption of RSS readers in this class is the way that it changes the user experience. When I write posts, I generally try to optimize them for my blog, not the RSS reader; the result is that the vast majority of the people who read the post do so in a forum where some of my formatting is lost. One example is with blockquotes: I use them quite often to offset text that I'm citing, but when reading through an RSS reader (at least the ones I've used) the indent disappears.

Seeing the posts with their templates swapped out for a plain white background can also be a bit disheartening; I like to think that all of us put at least a little thought into the templates we chose for our blogs, so it's too bad that--at least for me--the first time I read most posts is sans template.

Perhaps the worst consequence (from an egotistical point of view) of using RSS readers is that instead of seeing our hit counts rise at a torrid pace (30 captive viewers will do that), we only gain stats when classmates ultimately click through and visit our actual blogs.

(By the way, I'd definitely recommend Sitemeter for a hit counter, as it's free, easy to use (it has detailed instructions for adding a counter to a blogger site), and provides some pretty cool stats. The counter I have on the sidebar below the links is through them, and you can click on it to see some of the stats it provides.)

I'm certainly not suggesting that we should throw all our RSS readers in a pile and burn them, especially since we need to keep track of so many blogs on a daily basis. I know that I certainly love the fact that I can read everyone's new content from one easy place. But, in a perfect world, I'd probably prefer people read my posts on my actual site, Anyone else feel the same way?

Why Not Do Both?

2005-06-01T17:26:00.000-04:00

On the question of persuasion versus reinforcement in terms of political internet sites, I think it's important to remember that this is hardly a one-or-the-other distinction. Certainly, reinforcement will likely be the primary function of political websites for many years to come (at least until there is some sort of fundamental change in the way such sites function), but that hardly means the persuasion side should be dismissed.

One great thing about political websites is that even if you build one with reinforcement in mind, many of the elements that would serve to reinforce likely supporters (on-line videos, issue pages, bio, etc) can also be persuasive. If one of your reinforced supporters likes what she sees on a particular issue page and sends it to an undecided friend, that exact same element can now serve to persuade. No extra coding or resources are needed; the same element serves both sides of the equasion.

Granted, the ability of a website to persuade is dependent on undecided voters choosing to visit, but once they are there just about anything on the website could be the magic item that will persuade that particular voter. While some specifically persuadable elements could be built into the site (an 'undecided voters' section with candidate comparisons, for example), for the most part a site designed to reinforce can be perfectly capable of persuading as well.

By taking care of basic functions that can make it easy for an undecided voter to be driven towards persuasive elements ("mail to a friend" links on important pages, clear navigation, etc.), a campaign can focus on making the website as reinforcing as possible (putting most of their energy into volunteer sign-up, donations, and press), yet still retain the site's ability to persuade. Why not? It's certainly cheaper than buying another 1200 points...

Best Take on the Deep Throat Revelation

2005-06-01T09:45:00.000-04:00

From the Last Call!:

Will this mean Carl Bernstein's 15 minutes are finally up?

New Public Discussion Blog

2005-05-31T14:07:00.000-04:00

If you're still looking for a good blog to start fulfilling your weekly public discussion blog post requirement on, TPM Cafe, an expansion of Josh Marshall's excellent Talking Points Memo blog, opened its cyber-doors today. Like DailyKos (probably the best place for a Dem to start until TPM Cafe gets the kinks worked out), the site is based on Scoop and allows you to do a ton of neat stuff. Should be a great place to post.

Time is Money

2005-05-31T12:44:00.000-04:00

The chapters focusing on campaign databases in Ireland & Nash's book really hit home, since I currently do a lot of work out of a campaign database. While I'm not exactly sure how the database interacts with the campaign website (though I suspect it doesn't), I'm very familiar with the reports it runs and am not very impressed.

We access the database using remote desktop, so that alone makes it more difficult to use than a web-based interface. Getting the reports out of remote desktop is a big pain (probably even more so for me, since I run it on a Mac and thus have the bizarre Windows-inside-a-Mac phenomenon going on), as I have to export the data to an excel spreadsheet, then copy and paste the data into a spreadsheet on my desktop. While a major pain, at least it's possible to get the data into a usable format.

However, the biggest problem occurs in the original exporting out of the database, as there are only a few types of reports that can even be run. Instead of getting to choose which fields will be part of the output, I need to use the pre-determined reports and then manually enter the additional fields I need.

For example, I can run a report on all the contributors to a specific event in order to make thank you letters through a merge, but I can only get the full name and need to manually enter the salutation for every entry.

The bottom line is: What a pain in the ass! Many hours would be saved with a more customizable output ability, not to mention an interface that would allow me to quickly get the data to my desktop. A few extra bucks up front would have saved a lot of time (and therefore $$$) down the road. Hardly a unique occurence in the world of campaigns though, I'm sure.

Sourcing

2005-05-31T10:29:00.000-04:00

Via Jay Rosen, I came across Matt Taibbi's take on the recent Newsweek Quran scandal. He makes a great point about the use of unnamed sources:

It's funny. The only time anyone thinks to blast the use of "unnamed sources" is when the mistake occurs in that rarest of phenomena in mainstream journalism: the dissenting piece of investigative journalism.

The reality is that unnamed sources are used about 10,000 times a day by the more patriotic and upstanding members of our working press, only they're not used to wonder about the goings-on at places like Guantanamo Bay. Instead, they're used to kiss ass and make icons out of morons—to turn George Bush into Winston Churchill, Dick Gephardt into Eugene Debs, Tom Clancy into Tolstoy.

...No one bitched at [Newsweek] magazine on January 24 of this year, for instance, when reporter Richard Wolffe wrote a slobbering cover profile on the "Bush you don't know" that was filthy with unnamed sources...

...In another part of the story, Wolffe quotes an unnamed "Republican senator" on the matter of Bush's command of detail:

When he wants to be, he's a real stickler for details," says one Republican senator. "When he calls you to talk about a bill, he knows the nitty-gritty. You don't get the sense he's been reading the Cliffs Notes guide to an issue.

So you think Newsweek didn't work hard enough to confirm the Quran-toilet story? How hard do you think Richard Wolffe worked to confirm that George Bush "knows the nitty-gritty"? I bet he burned up the phone lines working on that one.

Right on, though you hardly saw much hand-wringing in the press about this type of sourcing. Taibbi makes the argument that sourcing only seems to matter when it involves a threat to the establishment, though an exception certainly is made for anything involving the Clintons; there was hardly a two-source rule in effect during the Lewinsky scandal, and today we get this gem in the adaptation from John F. Harris's upcoming book on the Clinton presidency that was splashed across the front page of the Washington Post this morning:

In 1993, White House aide Rahm Emanuel -- now a Democratic House member from Illinois -- planned an event inviting prominent Republicans to a White House dinner as a way of garnering support for the North American Free Trade Agreement. He assumed he would win praise for a clever tactical maneuver. Instead, the first lady was infuriated. "What are you doing inviting these people in my home?" she said, according to people familiar with the episode. Nearly sobbing with anger, she told him: "These people are our enemies. They are trying to destroy us." [emphasis mine]

"Nearly sobbing with anger," eh? That's quite a colorful description, though I'm not sure I've ever witnessed someone "nearly sobbing with anger." In fact, this description is on par with the typical Thomas Friedman "man-on-the-street" analogy with fits perfectly into the overarching narrative of one of his columns: while it sure does fit in well with the piece, it doesn't quite seem real. As Taibbi would say, I'm sure Harris worked hard to verify the fact that Hillary was "nearly sobbing with anger." But I doubt we'll get much outrage on this one...

Priorities

2005-05-30T16:20:00.000-04:00

Bimber and Davis make some very interesting points with regards to candidate sites acting more as a reinforcement mechanism than a persuasion one. Just given the fact that users have to choose to view a candidate's site suggests that the majority of users will already be true believers.

In the context of Burdman's project management guide for web projects, this certainly has a substantial impact when evaluating the potential users of a campaign website. While persuasion elements should certainly be included, reinforcing and enabling those who are already willing to spread the word for you are arguably more important functions given your expected audience.

A campaign website that doesn't provide tools for supporters--from talking points and other downloads to volunteer sign-up forms to a donation page--is wasting a massive opportunity, and it's hard to argue that there is another facet of the site deserving of more attention given the expected audience (aside from sections geared towards the press, perhaps).

This is hardly to say that persuasion elements should be ignored, but to ignore the reinforcement side--especially early in a campaign, when supporters will likely make up the vast majority of your audience--is just a total waste of resources. As the authors point out, a campaign website will never have the broadcast persuasion strength of television; a campaign website can feel capable of almost anything, but it certainly makes sense to start with what it will have the most success at accomplishing.

PSA: New To HTML?

2005-05-28T14:53:00.000-04:00

If you're curious as to what the hell a tag actually is or just can't remember exactly which tag does this, this,

this

~~or this~~, I'd highly recommend Webmonkey's intro to HTML section. It's really basic, will help you get the idea of what basic HTML is, and I still use their cheat sheet on a regular basis. Definitely a nice, easy resource.

Also, don't forget the "View Source" option available in the "View" tab of most browsers. If you're curious how to replicate something you see on someone else's site, this is a great way to look at the code and see what they did (though you have to wade through a lot of wildness to find it). I'm certainly planning on stealing the list of classmate links from Emi Ireland's blog when she has it all complete so I don't have to hand code each of them...

Ruminations on Design

2005-05-28T14:33:00.000-04:00

Design is one of those things I never really "got" until recently, and I still have a tough time wrapping my head around all of its implications. I remember a cover story on design in Newsweek from a while back, but the only thing I really noted from it was an illustration of what a well designed home would look like, contrasted with the typical unit which was designed with the sole purpose of filling a block with as many as possible. Needless to say, the two looked nothing alike.

That said, design is one of those things that you encounter all the time, from the timing of the stoplights to the horrid navigation system on Comcast's DVRs. Good design is rarely noted, but bad design almost always is. And little annoys me more than bad design.

Several of the articles for next week do a great job of underscoring the importance of good design on the web. As Jakob Nielsen succinctly puts it, "If a website is difficult to use, people leave." Reading through both Nielsen's Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design and Vincent Flander's similar list, it amazes me how some major websites make basic usability mistakes that were no doubt first identified years ago.

Now, granted, I hadn't specifically put my finger on the problem of, say, mystery meat navigation, but after reading the description I can recall being frustrated by such a navigation system in the past, and I'll definitely notice it right away in the future.

I'm sure some designers see the trade off between usability and the look of a site as a zero sum game, but a good looking site will be worthless if you can't get around it. Perhaps many of the bad sites I've seen aren't exactly designed by pros, or the resources simply weren't there. Of course, many political websites don't exactly have a lot of money behind them, so I'm sure this is a problem area where they are overrepresented with wasteful results. Definitely something to look for...

The Hillary Factor

2005-05-27T15:48:00.000-04:00

Since the moment that John Kerry conceded Ohio and thus the presidency, it's been hard not to steal looks at the '08 race, even 3+ years away. My first reaction to a Clinton run was "No way." After the savaging Kerry took in the final months of the campaign, I was too burned out to even think about what it would be like were she to run.

But, slowly but surely, I've been coming around to her candidacy.

The chief reason for my reversal, as far as I've been able to determine, is that she would run a smart campaign. The only thing more frustrating than the results of the Gore and Kerry campaigns were the ways in which the campaigns were run.

Clinton would certainly cover the seemingly obvious bases of having a coherent message and covering traditional Dem weak spots like national security, but the question does remain as to whether that would be enough to overcome the high negatives she'd enter the race with. As someone who has made professional politics my career choice, it's probably no surprise that I think a smartly run campaign can overcome almost anything--just look at Nixon in '68!

On that note, Greg Sargent's profile of the Senator in this week's The Nation paints a portrait of a very well run campaign:

"We're seeing the slow and steady erosion of what made America great in the twentieth century," Clinton told her audience in an even tone. "When I got to the Senate I asked myself, What's going on here? At first I thought the President just wanted to undo everything my husband had done." Clinton waited a beat, then added, "And I did take that personally."

The audience laughed. "But then I thought, Wait a minute. It's not just about turning the clock back on the 1990s.... They want to turn the clock back on most of the twentieth century. They want to turn the clock all the way back beyond Franklin Roosevelt. Back beyond Teddy Roosevelt. That's why they're trying to undo Social Security. Make no mistake about it.

"What I see happening in Washington," Clinton continued, "is a concerted effort by the Administration and the leadership in Congress to really create absolute power. They want to control the judiciary so they can have all three branches of government. I really don't care what party you are--that's not in the American tradition.... Right now young men and women are putting their lives on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting for the America we revere. And that is a country where nobody has all the answers--and nobody should have all the power.... We all need to stand up for what made America great--what created a wonderful set of values that we revere, that we exported and tried to really inculcate in people around the world!"

Wild applause rolled over Clinton now, although it was unclear whether the crowd had appreciated the political subtleties of what they'd witnessed. She had offered a critique of the GOP sharp enough for any progressive--even as she'd given an approving nod to American exceptionalism and a paean to US troops defending our "values" abroad. She'd stoked the partisan passions of her audience--even as she'd sounded an above-partisanship note of concern about the state of the Republic. Indeed, she'd managed to pull off what many Democrats struggle to do these days: She'd weaved her criticisms into a larger narrative about America's past and future, criticizing the GOP leadership without sounding as if she wanted America to fail--when she said she was "worried" about America, you believed her.

I'd recommend the entire article to anyone interested in the topic of Hillary in '08, and, really, who isn't? With the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released today showing that 53% of people surveyed would likely vote for Clinton were she to run for president, this is something that will certainly be sticking with us for a while.

Between the Poles

2005-05-26T15:46:00.000-04:00

Cass Sunstein raises a credible point in his article "The Daily We" on the increased polarization that the growth of the Internet may represent. As individuals are given more choice in the communications they receive, their exposure to differing viewpoints will decrease:

If the public is balkanized, and if different groups design their own preferred communications packages, the consequence will be further balkanization, as group members move one another toward more extreme points in line with their initial tendencies.

I think his broader point is undeniably true, that as individuals restrict the sources of information they are exposed to in order to hear "what they want to hear," they will indeed become more extreme and will have a reduced sense of understanding for individuals in other groups.

However, the big question regards just how sealed off from others with differing opinions individuals may become. While the extreme examples of live-in cults do exist (and have since long before the Internet), most of us are exposed to a wide variety of viewpoints during the normal course of our daily lives--regardless of our internet communications preferences. Henry Jenkins argues in his reply to Sunstein that many individuals are members of multiple groups that cut across each other, and Peter points to one area where most of us lack the ability to choose the ideological makeup,

...when sitting at my desk in London, my colleagues would regularly discuss issues in the news, challenging any opinions I may have already formed.

The fact is that Americans share many experiences, whether it be items in the popular culture, the piece of news that editors across the country think is the top story because it was the biggest headline across the fold in the New York Times that morning, or a national or world event that grips our attention. We are hardly nearing a point where we will be completely segregated by ideology.

That said, I do agree with Sunstein that the Internet increases our ability to choose the communications we receive, and I think there is certainly an argument to be made that this leads to increased polarization. In my case, look at the sidebar on this blog. All of the Blogroll links and most of the Press links are to liberals of varying degrees. I read liberal blogs on a regular basis; I never go to conservative blogs on my own. The internet does increase the chance that I will reach across the aisle since it is so easy now: in the old days, I'd have to go and buy a conservative opinion magazine or even meet with a group of Republicans, but these days one link on a blog I read will usually send me across the great divide (for example, a link from Kevin Drum sent me over to The Corner today to read this post).

So I guess I'm in the squishy middle on this one. I don't think the world that Sunstein paints necessarily exists, but I think the rise of "Choose the facts you want to hear" via the internet and other narrowcast communications mediums does threaten to chart us on that course. But just as bloggers won't be replacing journalism (who's going to make the phone calls? Work the sources?), narrowcast media likely won't replace broadcast media but rather will work alongside each other and "interact in complex ways," as Jenkins writes. We as a society should certainly be on the watch for an increased in segmented media watching and increased polarization, but at the current point in time Americans share enough experiences that a major problem is hardly upon us.