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. ...

Which Dem is Winning Online?

Micah Sifry over at Personal Democracy has an interesting post looking at how well Democratic Presidential candidates are doing on MySpace and at generating blog links. 

All of this should be taking with a huge grain of salt, as online buzz/support doesn’t always translate that well.  Although I would argue is is more meaningful for primary elections than general. ...

Cable TV Sites and their Use of the Web

I recently spent some time looking at the top 20 cable TV network sites, as ranked by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, in order to find out how these networks are using the Internet.

Here's what I found:

As you can see from the chart,...

Link Roundup (1/31/2007)

• 28% of Online Americans Have Used the Internet to Tag Content (PDF)
  Pew releases a new study about the use of tagging to classify content (on sites like del.icio.us and flickr).
• Spam Made Up 94% Of All E-Mail In December
  Only 94%?
• The readers strike back
  Great piece from Salon about how immediate and unfiltered feedback from readers is changing the way journalists think.
...

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....