September 10, 2003
OJR on the Guardian and the recall
New in OJR:
A Q&A with Guardian UK editor in chief Emily Bell, who says the success of the Guardian Unlimited didn't happen overnight. Britain's second most popular source of online news matured through consistent investment, international word-of-mouth and a commitment to innovation.
Mark Glaser on the top sites and weblogs covering the California recall election. The election has been a multimedia circus of sniping, legal action and online organizing. With nearly a month to go until the vote, here are OJR's awards for the best online efforts so far.
Dean campaign uses latest Internet tricks
Lee Gomes had this on Monday at the Wall Street Journal site (I'll reprint it here for non-subscribers as a one-time courtesy):
How Dean Staff Keeps The Candidate's Site On the Cutting Edge
Who knows what sort of president Howard Dean might be. He's already proved, though, that he's a great Internet CEO.
Now that more people are starting to pay attention to the presidential race, folks tend to know two things about the physician and former Vermont governor. First, that with a tough anti-Bush message, he has become the surprise Democrat front-runner. And second, that he has used the Internet to get that way.
Of course, candidates have been using the Web for as long as the Web has been around, and everyone running for president next year has a home page by now. The Dean Web efforts, though, are vastly more complex than the position papers and candidate pictures that make up most other political Web pages. They are, in fact, a sprawling and remarkably sophisticated online empire -- one that quickly apes anything interesting happening on the Web itself, something made clear by a tour of the site conducted last week by Nicco Mele, the campaign's 25-year-old Web master.
So far, the Web's main contribution has been in contributions. Mr. Dean had used the Web to raise far more money than any of his Democratic rivals, without, he boasts, having to grovel before special interests. That money has bought respectability in the Beltway and rising poll numbers outside it.
There is much more to the Dean Web than fund raising, though. There are Dean Friendster clones, Dean streaming videos, even an ingenious system for keeping flames off Dean blogs.
In fact, at this point in the campaign, the Dean online operation is doing to political campaigns what Amazon.com did to retailing. For example, in the old-fashioned world of bricks-and-mortar politics, campaigns would send in a crew of advance people several days before a big event to drum up crowds. Dean staffers just send out e-mails, and thousands of supporters materialize.
Mr. Mele has been with the campaign since May, and came to Mr. Dean from a job as Web master for Common Cause, the government-reform group. He has the same sort of geek-progressive rÈsumÈ as most of the other eight people on his growing staff.
One of their biggest jobs is just keeping up with rapidly growing traffic. Another is coming up with new features, like "Deanlink," which allows supporters to meet each other. It was inspired by Friendster.com, the social-networking site that is a word-of-mouth phenomenon.
Scattered throughout DeanForAmerica.com are other novelties, like a feature that lets supporters print customized campaign signs on their home printers. And there is "Troll Goal," named after the folks who post inflammatory messages on Web sites. Whenever a troll flames a Dean blog, a Dean booster donates more money. The troll realizes he is only helping the candidate, and stops.
Volunteers help, too, as with Switch2dean.com, showing Dean voters making testimonials like those in Apple Computer's famous "Switch" ad campaign.
Mr. Mele said the campaign's heavy use of the Web was a combination of predisposition and coincidence. Early this year, he said, the campaign began noticing that Dean groups were mushrooming on Web sites such as Meetup and Yahoo. Since the campaign had no money, the fact that supporters were organizing themselves online was a godsend.
Mr. Mele and other Web-savvy staffers then urged the campaign to aggressively use the Web, and were encouraged to do so by the candidate and his campaign manager, Joe Trippi. Not only is using the Web far less expensive than a traditional campaign, it also resonates with the candidate's grass-roots, insurgent themes.
Mr. Mele prides himself on being a Dean-style straightshooter. But when talking about the software he uses, he starts to get careful -- downright political. It turns out that DeanForAmerica runs on open-source software, largely because at the outset, that was all anyone could afford.
But Mr. Mele is careful to say that just because the campaign uses Linux, it doesn't mean there is anything wrong with other kinds of software. After all, the folks at Microsoft are patriotic Americans, too, and this is a campaign of inclusion.
Just as other Democratic candidates are beginning to copy some of Dean's politics, especially his slashing attacks on President Bush, so too are some beginning to copy his Web tactics, like blogs. Mr. Mele, naturally, is suspicious. He says it's not the technology that is pushing Mr. Dean forward, but the candidate, and the fact that a big chunk of Americans seem eager to hear his message.
The big challenge for Mr. Dean in the months ahead is electability. For Mr. Mele, it's scalability. In March, everything was running on a $40-a-month Web-hosting service. These days, they're about to move to an industrial-grade hosting facility, to better handle the Google-style collection of generic PCs that powers things.
Mr. Mele worries aloud about how the same setup that now handles tens of thousands of daily users may soon need to be handling untold millions. There are, of course, much worse problems he and his campaign could have.
ï Send your comments to lee.gomes@wsj.com, and check back on Friday for some selected letters at WSJ.com/Portals.
andy said:
Wes Clark might join the Dean campaign? Uh-oh, look out George W. Bush! ;)
Dreamhost hasn't been a dream
This evening my site went down for the third time this summer (and no, no blackouts here in California). I switched to Dreamhost last spring but they don't seem to be up to the task. Any other suggestions of a reliable hosting service?
anthony said:
I use for my site. It had great uptime and also un-metered disk space and un-metered transfer.
anthony said:
I meant that I use PHP Webhosting and it's great!
JD said:
Dreamhost tells me that they experienced a Denial of Service attack tonight. So can't blame them this time. Plus, I'll be out the balance of my $120 annual fee.
A candidate's spam draws fire
Mike has crossed Arianna Huffington off his potential vote list because her campaign spammed him.
Well, I don't know about that. With 1,500 to 2,000 spam emails coming to my account each week, if one or two are unsolicited emails from a candidate for governor, that seems like a small price to pay for getting a candidate's message out. (Of course, every email should contain an opt-out option to prevent further emails.)
I contributed to Arianna early on, but she's polling around 3 percent and her campaign isn't gaining traction (she's speaking in Berkeley tomorrow night). So I'll be voting for Cruz Bustamante. And I half suspect Arianna will drop out sometime in the next three weeks.
Kynn Bartlett said:
Yeah, but this is California. One or two messages from each candidate could be overwhelming! Especially to those of us with multiple addresses.
How does a spamming candidate know you live in Kowly Fornya, anyway?
One more thing, how do we know that Arianna's campaign authorized the email to Mike?
--Kynn
w.h. said:
Arianna's campaign is doing it, not some joe-jobber.
I got one of the spams. I wrote about it on:
http://www.wirewd.com/wh/entry.asp?ID=29
What looks good on TV this fall?
IWantMedia's One Question: What looks good on TV in the new season?
Profiling the music pirates
CNN/Money: A new survey finds that just 10 percent of Web users hold three quarters of downloaded music files.
Almost two-thirds of Americans with Internet access have at least one digital music file on their computer but most downloaded music is held by a relatively small group of users, according to a study released Thursday.
Plus, this: The Kazaa conundrum. The RIAA's lawsuits have split the broadband ISP industry and will likely split investors as well.
EFF: RIAA amnesty 'a sham'
Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (whom I interviewed a couple of months back for my book), has a commentary in today's LA Times: 'Amnesty' for Music File Sharing Is a Sham.
Flash Mob for Democracy
MoveOn is sponsoring a Flash Mob for Democracy this Saturday to help defeat the California recall.
andy said:
Hey, that's sorta funny. MoveOn.org, a shill for the left, supporting a failed governor. How's that Democratic? Doesn't it make sense to support the majority of voters who rather kick Gray Davis out of office?
Davis failed the people of California. He's even admitted to failing his state. Rather than bow out, he's insisting that he'll do better, that he's heard the people and will get back into regular town halls.
Sounds like another politician who sometime ago asked for forgiveness and one more chance. How appropriate that the taking points used by Davis are remarkably similiar to that of the former president who wagged his finger at us.
JD said:
I'll probably vote against the recall on principle alone -- even though I dislike Davis, this sets a terrible precedent, one that could usher in an era or retribution politics and never-ending campaigns.
I understand, though, that most Californians think about the recall on a much more practical level: Do I like the job Davis is doing, and do I think any of the others can do a better job? On that basis, I'd be more than happy if Davis lost and Bustamante took his place. And it would be just deserts for the right (let's be honest and admit that the recall began as a power grab by a right-wing millionaire).
A 'sniffer' tool for copyright infringement
Business Wire (Sept. 10, 2003): WeComply, Inc., a leading provider of online training for corporate employees, announces the release of "Copyright Law Basics," an online training program designed to help companies control digital piracy by their employees and avoid possible civil and criminal liability. The program includes a digital "sniffer" that enables employees to catalog questionable files on their computers and delete those that are unlicensed.
Parent to child chat: Do you download music?
Amy Harmon in the NY Times: New Parent-to-Child Chat: Do You Download Music?
New footage of bin Laden
AP story: The Arabic satellite channel Al-Jazeera aired video and audio tapes of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy on Wednesday. The footage -- the first video image of bin Laden in nearly two years -- was aired on the eve of the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The tapes were produced in late April or early May, the broadcaster said. ...
By the way, my friend Norman is partners in an online venture called JumpTV, which rebroadcasts on the Internet (with permission) newscasts aired by foreign outlets such as Al-Jazeera, as well as stations in Colombia, Romainia, Thailand, Turkey and elsewhere, for $9.95/month (with a free five-day trial). I just checked out Al Jazeera's live broadcast (in Arabic). Very interesting stuff.
Blog news: built for speed
In his latest E&P column, Steve Outing has another good read about how online newspapers can outpace TV outlets. "It's time to stop thinking of blogs mostly in the realm of feature and opinion content, and move the concept into breaking news."
Introducing ... ads!
You'll notice over there on the right side (halfway down) that I've added a little bit of advertising. I've probably been devoting too much time to this blog -- often three or four hours a day -- and so I'm hoping to get at least a modest revenue stream going.
Google's AdSense program is just taking off, and I suspect we'll see it appearing on many more blogs. (Steve Johnson, for instance, added Google Ads a few weeks back.) I love the idea of context-based text ads. The results are often fairly interesting, as in the current crop of wanna-be Iraq reconstruction contractors. (Sorry, dudes, Halliburton has got the country sewed up.) Only complaint is that Google needs to come up with more flexibility on these ad widths -- 120 or 300 pixels wide, but nothing in the 200 range, and you can't jimmy it to adjust the width.
Sometime in the next day I hope to add a page of ecommerce links to books, DVDs and more. (Not sure if other book sellers, besides Amazon and BN.com, have affiliate programs. And shouldn't eBay consider some sort of commission-based viral grassroots "eBay best bargains" text links?)
The Baltimore debate, and Republicans for Dean
Didn't get to see the candidates debate tonight in Baltimore. But Slate's William Saletan fills us in on the essentials of The Baltimore Debate: A field goal for Kerry, a touchdown for Dean.
Fascinating reading. Sounds like Howard Dean is finally getting media-savvy.
There's also a new blog -- Republicans forDean, believe it or not -- in which the founder writes:
I have been overwhelmed by the number of dissatisfied Republicans out there and I hope that this blog can connect us together to work for a better America.
It seems that one of the site's co-founders was a registered Democrat who was forced to quit the site after being outed by Andrew Sullivan.
Meantime, Howie Kurtz, who writes the Media Notes column in the Washington Post, has a new column out -- Bush's Worst Nightmare? -- about the Dean candidacy.
More than a few techie libertarians were puzzled when Doc Searls wrote that he was considering voting for Dean. Kurtz's article points out that Dean wowed a gathering of libertarian-minded Cato Institute types a few years back with his anti-tax, pro-free market stances.
Stephen Moore, who heads the conservative Club for Growth, recalls in the Weekly Standard how Dean showed up several years ago at Moore's other employer, the Cato Institute:"Dean charmed nearly everyone in the boardroom. He came across as erudite, policy savvy, and, believe it or not, a friend of free markets--at least by the standards of the Tom Daschle-Dick Gephardt axis of the Democratic party. Even when challenged on issues like environmentalism, where he favored a large centralized mass of intrusive regulations, Dean remained affable.
" 'You folks at Cato,' he told us, 'should really like my views because I'm economically conservative and socially laissez-faire.' Then he continued: 'Believe me, I'm no big-government liberal. I believe in balanced budgets, markets, and deregulation. Look at my record in Vermont.' He was scathing in his indictment of the 'hyper-enthusiasm for taxes' among Democrats in Washington.
"He left -- and I will never forget the nearly hypnotic reaction. The charismatic doctor had made believers of several hardened cynics. Nearly everyone agreed that we had finally found a Democrat we could work with. . . .
andy said:
Dean, Bush and others can say/do whatever they'd like. What matters is how it all filters down to the public -- yah, know, those voters who actually get to elect these politicos.
One of the biggest ways folks get their news is the nightly news delivered by the infamous troika -- Jennings, Rather and Brokaw. And, to make matters worse, what's most disturbing is the bias found in the nightly news. There happens to be an excellent piece online about this disturbing trend... See http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110003992
JD said:
Sorry, my friend, but repeating the drumbeat of "liberal media" enough times doesn't make it so. In fact, it's a laughable accusation, as the author of the article you cite unintentionally shows. (Sweden's health care system is superior to ours; what's liberal about reporting that fact? The "liberal" news media almost took down Clinton, against the wishes of the American people.)
Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart and Al Franken exchanged wonderment that it has fallen to two comedians to point out that the emperor has no clothes, because the mainstream media are too cowed to do so. Check out the most recent books by Joe Conason or Eric Alterman, which put the lie to the liberal media myth.
Perverting the war on terror
Looks like William Saletan, Slate's chief political correspondent, had the same reaction I did to President Bush's speech Sunday night:
For more than a year, President Bush has framed Iraq as part of the "war on terror." And for more than a year, he has produced no evidence for that claim. No evidence of a link between Iraq and 9/11. No evidence of an affinity between Saddam Hussein's secular tyranny and the fundamentalists of al-Qaida. No evidence of a terrorist presence in Iraq greater than in other Arab or Muslim countries. No evidence that Iraq offered weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.In his address to the nation Sunday night, Bush offered two new arguments for declaring Iraq "the central front" in the war on terror. If you buy those arguments, he's right. But before you buy them, stop and think about how far afield they would take us from the war we embarked on two years ago. ...
And this from a supporter of the Iraq war.
