Keyes Loses Constitution Party Nod

Alan Keyes was not selected as the far-right Constitution Party's nominee for president over the weekend. I think there's a couple of interesting points here. First, the fact that this is getting covered at all may be a web difference. At least according to a Google News search, no one is covering this except the blogs.

A second interesting point is this thread on Keyes's site. A supporter posts a message about trying to get Keyes on the ballot as an independent, hears back from the moderator asking if he's volunteering, and then gets input from other posters as well. I'm not saying it's going to work (As I've said before, I'm pretty doubtful about third parties in general), but I think its interesting.

Women and political blogs

There's an interesting discussion going on right now about female political bloggers. It began with this post on Glamour's blog titled "Why are all the big political bloggers men?" MissLaura of Daily Kos responds here. I'm not sure what I think about this. Half the time, I don't know whether the bloggers I'm reading are men or women. And for every Markos or Josh Marshall, there's a Arianna Huffington or Ana Marie Cox. What do you think?

Bloggers on the Web Effect on Politics and Government

On April 4th, 2008 there was a discussion at NYU discussing the web's effect on politics. GroundReport has a full length video of the panel, under New York Documentary entitled "How the Web is Changing American Politics".

Some of the topics highlighted in the discussion were

• Success based on candidate's social network strategies
• Polls can no longer be trusted
• Bottom up approach (Power moving from the elite to the masses)
• Democratization of the media by blogging
• Utilization of the web by campaigns in the future

Taking the community from online to physical world

This story is pretty interesting. A group of Ron Paul supporters is trying to create several gated communities that consist entirely of people who believe in their ideals. At least according to posts on their forum, some participants hope to build a large enough base of support to be control the county government and perhaps elect a representative to the state house. I doubt this will be that successful - while Paul has a fair number of supporters online, it is something else entirely to move your family to an isolated part of Texas for your political ideals. But it is interesting to see someone try to take an online political community based around a single candidate and try to make it into a physical community.

Getting in on the Act

Looking to American websites as a model, British campaigners have begun to recognize the potential in developing more innovative online political communities.  Current traffic on mainstream political party websites in the UK lags that on other politically-oriented pages.  The possible culprit? Visitors lack the ability to "get involved."  As the major candidate sites in the 2008 Presidential race exemplify, providing supporters with ways to network and connect with fellow voters has become a mainstay of Internet campaigning for U.S. candidates.  One imagines that U.S. voters are not the only ones seeking a sense of online community in the political realm.

Farfallegate

There's a story today in the New York Times about recipes attributed to Mrs. McCain on John McCain's site being lifted from the Food Network and Rachel Ray. There's lots of web effects here - the recipes came from one website and were posted on another, the duplication was found by a person searching the web, and it was reported on initially by a website, The Huffington Post (a lot of interesting stories from them lately). While the "blame the intern" defense is getting some flack, I kind of buy it. Various studies have reported that plagiarism is up on college campuses in the internet age. And in the campaign sphere, where it is good staff work to find things your supporters have created and promote them, it seems easy to believe the line could have been crossed.

Online Ads Are Still Behind Mailings, Radio and TV

Almost everyday, a new story comes out discussing a candidate's online ad campaign, today's is concerning Hillary Clinton. Candidates are expected to spend $5.5 million on advertisements before election day, but less than 1 percent will be spent on online ads. Most money will be spent in the traditional outlets, TV, radio and mailings, according to a Marketplace podcast. The fact that online ads are cheaper than traditional outlets is only a minor factor in this discrepancy, given the disparity of the percentage. Online ads are considered important for different reasons; they are gateways to information, a community of supporters and fundraising tools, whereas traditional outlets are used to inform.