The Web on the Candidates

Mitt Romney's appearance in YouTube's Spotlight series has been a a big success, writes the TubeMogul blog. His video views have skyrocketed -- "looking at Mitt’s own YouTube views, it almost looks as if he wasn’t online prior to that video – he went from about 3K views a day to 125K on 4/13!" It's interesting that although Romney's videos have peaked at around 125,000 views, they've since fallen to around 40,000 views a day. "From a little analysis you can find that the majority of Romney’s views were for his one video asking for information, not on videos where planks of his platform are espoused. Will Mitt be able to continue the debate on YouTube with the energy he just started?," TubeMogul writes.

At the National Association of Broadcasters/Radio Television News Directors Association in Las Vegas, Jeff Jarvis heard some interesting news about the state of political advertising on television and online. At a panel on which he appeared, a "political media man" said that while he was used to spending 80 percent of his money on TV, he was now spending 60 percent online. And at the same session, Joe Trippi "said that the Hillary Clinton 1984 commercial was viewed 4 million times on YouTube but probably 50-60 million times with broadcast included. A message that clicks can be made for nothing and seen by the nation."

What's a little traffic inflation amongst friends? When you are in the news and advertising business it's a big deal. In fact, as Conrad M. Black and the Chicago Sun-Times can tell you it can also be a very expensive deal as well.

I ran across an item over at ValleyWag.com that discussed the traffic statistics of The Drudge Report and compared them to other popular news outlets such as The Washington Post and Reuters.

It appears that Matt Drudge is artificially inflating his traffic statistics by using a small bit of HTML, specifically this piece of HTML: META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="175".

There was an interesting article in CNet today about Microsoft's new "i'm" initiative, which has the

While many sites like RealClearPolitics do a great job of contextualizing campaigns with poll numbers and links to articles, they are often governed by a top-down structure that reflects an editorial vision. That's okay, but sites that rely on user-generated content can often benefit from the collective intelligence of their users. Allowing local readers to contribute to coverage of a campaign can allow for random bits of information that, when glued together, can provide a comprehensive look at a campaign.

Three sites have recently emerged that are taking on this approach in three novel ways.

Open Source Radio recently launched a section on their wiki that will cover 38 hotly contested races across the country. It's a great idea that could create an open, democratic database of candidates in races around the country. The only stumbling block is getting every congressional race adequately covered.

My friends at New York's Working Families Party have launched a smart way to engage their members in a very net-centric way of rolling out their online advertising this fall--they've emailed about 18,000 of the most active members of their 58,000 state list to ask their help in picking the best Google search terms to use in focusing attention on Congressional campaigns.

Writes WFP online organizer Steve Perez, "We want help shaping our strategy. We need to know what phrases people are likely to use when they search for election information. So here's the question - if you wanted to know more about the Congressional race where you live, what would you type into Google?"

Perez is smart; he's tapping into the power of his activist network to fight a net-war for attention. And at the same time he's educating his activist base about a new tool in modern media battles, the search engine. He writes:

As a close personal friend of Joe Trippi (OK, as someone who has exchanged email with him at some time in the past), I just received this interesting message:

An interesting use of the internet as a way to communicate with voters is happening in the California primary election. Steve Westly, Democratic candidate for Governor, has recorded a three and a half minute message to voters and posted it on YouTube for everyone to view and share.

Watch the message

Already over 1,300+ people have watched the video this morning. With the primary election happening tomorrow, the stakes are high - can YouTube affect the election for California's next Governor?

I believe that the internet is a tool for communication that can be used to make politics better by replacing things like the thirty second TV ad with authentic messages and better dialogue. If this works, other campaigns will follow the Westly campaign's lead and the internet will become even more important to political campaigns. See the video for yourself and decide if this could be a better way to connect our politics.

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It's possible that this is a brilliant reverse-marketing move aimed at getting lots of bloggers to pass around an online video (and don't forget, pictures do speak louder than words), but right now my guess is that Chevy Tahoe isn't all that happy that they're not screening the ads that people are submitting to their "Apprentice" contest.

The site Gather has announced a contest for two $1000 scholarships to two full-time journalism students, one undergraduate student and one graduate student whose articles best represent citizen journalism.

This is the kind of thing there needs to be lots more of to establish a culture where people realize that they can do real reporting and distribute it on the Net.

Arianna Huffington, whose name will help distribute news of the contest, shall be the judge. I wonder what it is beyond her name though. While she is a leading pundit and the face of a massively popular news links/superblog site, I haven't seen much in the way of citizen journalism from her quarters.

I can think of three other online journalism figures who are better equiped to judge: Dan Gillmor, who wrote the book on Citizen Journalism -- "We the Media" -- or two of the real-time living pioneers of citizen journalism: John Byrne of Raw Story, or Josh Marshall of his TPM mini empire.

The House reform proposal to extend the exemption of Internet communications from those pesky campaign finance laws got the cold shoulder from Democrats Wednesday, according to an 11/2 CNET story. More than three-quarters of congressional Dems opposed the Online Freedom of Speech Act which needed a 2/3 majority to pass in order to accelerate the process. Final tally: 225 to 182. However, the bill could be up for vote again under normal procedures requiring a majority only.

Left-leaning groups, The Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, Democracy 21, Public Citizen and US PIRG sent a letter of gratitude to House Dems, particularly Representatives Christopher Shays (R-CT) and Marty Meehan (D-MA) for "leading the House battle for campaign finance laws that protect citizens against corruption in government."