The Web on the Candidates

Which candidate has the strongest stance on universal health care? Is it 53-year-old John Edwards? Or 59-year-old Hillary Clinton? How about 10-year-old Susie Flynn? Flynn is running for president on one platform, getting health insurance for the nine million uninsured children in America. While this might seem like a cutesy ploy, Susie (and her handlers) are actually quite serious -- in one video she argues that, for the amount we spend every three and half months in Iraq, every child in the U.S. could be insured. She even takes her campaign to Capitol Hill. When will another candidate adopt her platform?

Forwarded emails from right-wing activists continue to spread false rumors about the candidates; William Beutler says Stephen Colbert is popular in the blogosphere, but not as popular as other candidates; once again, is the left better at the web than the right? No, says Jon Henke, though they still have a few things to learn; a "truth-boating" video drudges up old accusations about Hillary Clinton; and Chris Dodd's Talk Clock is back! Pez!

Joshua Tauberer, wizard and chief elf behind GovTrack, has added another layer of openness to a site that is pretty much see-through already.

Here's how Heather Holdridge of Care2, the sponsor of this session, describes its focus:

It's a mad mad Web 2.0 world and hot platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are fast becoming indispensable components of most online campaigns. The echo chamber of the blogosphere is a powerful voice for amplifying your message and the potential for mobile in the US grows daily.

This session originated with a paper by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen that I saw him deliver more than a year ago at the Politics Web 2.0 held in England at the University of London, Royal Halloway. His paper was called "The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: Overcommunication, Miscommunication and Communicative Overload," and while he disguised his ethnographic field research somewhat in the paper, it was clear that he was describing the chaos of a presidential campaign in the final weeks before a big-state primary.

I get back from vacation (it was excellent -- full of sand, sun, and surf, thanks for asking) to discover that the White House's oppo folks haven't been similarly lolling about the beach, but have instead been busily countering the swirl of rumors, fear tactics, and innuendo that hang like barnacles from its push for a legislative overhaul of how we do health care here in the U.S.

Rumors tend to work because they plant a seed of doubt in our brains. Even the crazy ones...

Are you in charge of your organization's email list? Do you wonder if your list is performing up to snuff? What's a good response rate? How is the financial crisis affecting the environment for online fundraising?

This Thursday, October 1st, 1:00-2:00pm EST on the PdF Network conference call we'll be talking with two experts, Marc Ruben and Karen Matheson of M+R Strategic Services. They'll be sharing the results of their eNonprofit Benchmarks Study for 2009, done in tandem with NTEN. It's based on an analysis of online messaging, fundraising, and advocacy data from 32 leading nonprofit organizations. We'll cover topics like...