Techcrunch Finds Obama Site Bug

Want to know why some campaign websites are so restrictive, often taking days to approve user generated content?  Check out this post on Techcrunch about a very disturbing hiccup Arrington found on the new Obama website.  Yikes.

I've seen lots of hiccups like this in my time.  I remember doing some political work a few years back and a volunteer complained about an auto-generated password we sent him. ...

Peer-to-Peer Campaigning

Common sense tells you that friends, co-workers and family members have a huge impact on the decisions you make.  Edelman's Trust Barometer has put numbers to this, finding that people trust their peers more than they trust the clergy, corporations, politicians and the government.

So it should come as no surprise that politicians have figured this out and have actively been using the web for the last few years to increase peer-to-peer contacts around their campaigns/issues.  The idea is to give volunteers tools they can use to spread the message on your behalf. ...

Mainstream Media and Web 2.0

Read/Write Web has an interesting post looking at the use of RSS and social bookmarking (Digg, del.icio.us and Newsvine) by fifteen or so mainstream media outlets.  Their post is similar in many ways to the newspaper and magazine studies we did a few months back that looked at the features on the major player's websites....

Huffington Post Launches Digg/Reddit Clone

I missed this last week, but apparently the Huffington Post has launched a Digg/Reddit style section on their site called Huffit. 

Basically, the Huffington Post is automatically ingesting RSS feeds from pre-identified blogs (including themselves) and then giving registered users the ability to vote on their favorite stories. ...

John McCain to Make Online Reality Show as Part of His Campaign

The Los Angeles Times has a great piece today about the explostion of online video in politics.  The articles looks both at how both campaigns and activists groups are using viral video to try to impact the 2008 Presidential election. 

The whole piece is worth reading, but I found this tidbit about the McCain campaign particularly interesting:

McCain is planning his own Web version of reality TV....