Matt Rosenberg over at Organic had a good post on Internet-politik in his post entitled, DNC Looks to UGC to Nail GOP. (Although it looks like some candidates don’t need users to get them in trouble.)

See, the Democratic National Committee has little nice little site called FlipperTV. Playing on the fact that each side has "trackers" who shoot hours of video of each other, looking for that key moment to exploit and turn into campaign propaganda, they turn footage over to the user – so that they might become an abuser, I guess. Rosenberg labels it a rather "non-partisan effort" considering that GOP supporters can also use the footage to "put halos over their candidates’ heads
just as easily as Dems can demonize them." You know, just like Lindsey Lohan in Cannes. Photoshop is not just for 17-year-old boys anymore. Publicists and agents seeking damage control know how to to use it too – or at least how to hire a 17-year-old boy to do it for them.

MR gives the campaign paparazzi a shout-out, wondering if the "Macaca-moment" makers will share any of the spotlight. No?

It’s too much to think that the trackers themselves will again become
the story, and equally easy to think that knowing of this effort will
inspire rival camps and freelance haters to try and create gaffes, but
what really bears watching is whether any of the videos that users
create out of these raw materials has an effect on an election.

So ultimately, we can’t yet predict the true impact of user-generated content is going to have on the 2008 presidential campaign. The political world will have to wait and see.

In the meantime, the Internet has already gotten it’s number written in the financial books. NASDAQ rocks!

Even if you weren’t one of the gazillions affected by last month’s sub-prime mortgage crisis, the repercussions might grab you where it hurts. Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget reacts to Oppenheimer analyst Sandeep Aggarwal’s "cautiously optimistic" conclusion on the impact it will have on the online advertising industry:

In our experience, once estimates start going down, they usually keep
going down.  We believe the mortgage crisis will have a ripple effect
on other industries, such as broader financial services and retailing.
We believe the full effect will take at least a year or two to play out
and could be severe enough to cause Google, et al, to miss estimates in
Q4.

The question is, will other sectors, like automotive, consumer electronics
manufacturers, etc. and the major events of the coming year (Olympics and Presidential election) "pick up some of the slack" that the mortgage and financial sector – currently one-third of all interactive ad spend – is going to leave? That’s a question for someone with more economic foresight than yours truly. I can’t even predict rebajas week in Spain. Why not check out what "Jerry" has to say about lead gen and upped sales.

Too many financials? How about some depressing news about the social state of our country? At the 2007 Miss Teen USA Pageant, they asked Miss South Carolina why one-fifth of Americans could not locate the United States on a world map. View her answer here.

In related news, America’s obsession with microwave popcorn and fake butter is now linked to a nasty lung disease. “When
he broke open the bags, after the steam came out, he would often inhale
the fragrance because he liked it so much,” a victim’s doctor revealed yesterday.

Even if we do experience a downturn in ad revenue as a result of the mortgage crisis, hey, at least we don’t have bronchiolitis obliterans – or a case of teen pageantry. And it’s still a free country. Whew.

From health care to global warming, social security to Iraq, the questions of CNN/YouTube Democratic debate really ran the entire spectrum. Normally, I can’t stay awake for debates – especially the last one I saw which was the Berlusconi-Prodi battle that took place in Italy last year. (I’ll put it this way: you can’t impose a 3-minute time limit on an Italian politician.)

But this one was no snoozer. In fact, I would go so far as to call it interesting. As observed on  Online Video Watch, "Ordinary Americans are far more interesting than politicians. And the
draw became not duels of words but the question of how to best improve
the United States."

True. There was little room for running off on tangents or candidate-bashing. Contenders Sens. Joseph Biden, Chris Dodd, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and  John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson were all lined up like sitting ducks on the stage at the Citadel and had to answer questions like, "Will you be different than do-nothing officials who can’t do their jobs?" (See here for a complete transcript.)

The questions were submitted on YouTube
- about 3,000 of them were received – and narrowed down to about 50
which were then presented on the big screen by moderator Anderson
Cooper of CNN. I was skeptical at first at the abiIity of CNN to do
this "filtering" but then I remembered – the content is still
user-generated and therefore a more real voice. There were, however, a few that didn’t make the cut.

A Not-So-Complete List of What You Didn’t See
Bjorn Svenson, who is dressed as a Viking and claims to be originally from Norway, wanted to know what the candidates plan to do about illegal immigration.
A San Rafael woman dressed like an outlaw and asked what will be done to stop predatory lending.
Groucho from Los Angeles inquiring into the problems of home ownership affordability.
And my favorite, a question about telephone outsourcing, sung by a woman in a pink bathrobe.

But even with these questions left unaired, the entire event was still rather lighthearted. CNN commentators noted that the format worked well. "I got a great kick out of it," one admitted. Really, it was the spirit of the Internet translated into politics: informal, to-the-point, forthright, and sometimes downright funny.

Maybe it was because they’re Democrats, but I was impressed by most of the candidates ability to adapt to the different types of questions. (I wonder how the Republicans will fare on September 17th.)

Speaking of gray-haired politicos, there were a choice few who got a little riled up over the war and tax questions but lost energy and started murmuring when it came to social issues. I thought that Barack and Hillary were by far the most consistent. The audience agreed: Obama was the winner of CNN’s focus group and Clinton won the SurveyUSA instapoll.

Last month TechPresident
came onto the scene with the goal of covering “how the 2008 presidential
candidates are using the web, and vice versa, how content generated by voters
is affecting the campaign.” They’re covering the whole kit and kaboodle – from online
advertising, email lists, postings on YouTube (like the latest John McCain “Bomb Iran” clip
that is so disgustingly boring and non-news that it needs to forgotten about
instantly if not sooner) to the MySpace and Facebook popularity contests. Though I
think in that space Kelly
has everyone beat.

In a DailyKos report
on how the presidential candidates are advertising themselves online, it was
found that Republicans are all about paid search, while the Democrats are more
likely to use blogs. They cite “ideological disparity in media preferences” to
explain this difference, but if more Democrats are getting their news online, shouldn’t
these candidates be the ones dominating? Maybe because the numbers tell us
something different: Nielsen//NetRatings
reported that 36.6 percent of U.S. adults online are Republicans, 30.8 percent are Democrats and 17.3 percent are
Independents. Oops.

A lot of the value of TechPresident, in my humble, apolitical opinion, is actually the comments about the content on each of the candidate’s campaign
websites. They’ve found that our boy Rudy is kinda sorta using his site in a generic, blah way to talk about issues,
and Barack is also throwing
some ideas out there, but it seems like Hillary
was too busy writing her biography to include her stand on major political
issues. (For some light reading perhaps you can explore Mitt Romney’s paragraph on “Defeating the
Jihadists.”) Organic searches on terms like social security, global warming, minimum
wage, and even the Iraq war returned no candidate ads. What is wrong with this picture?

A response to Alan Rosenblatt’s “No Issues?” post sums it
up well:

If I take the trouble to come to your website, it’s only because I’m
trying to decide whether or not to support you. And the only way I’m going to
do that is if you give me a really good reason. I want to know where you stand
and why–the why part gives me a good indication of what positions you’ll take
on issues in the future. I want to know who you are–not in the sense of where
you were born or went to school, but rather in what you stand for.

The overall conclusion is that they are sorely lacking in
pull – and I agree. There is truly a lack of positioning on the candidates’
sites, and moreover, a lack of passion and dedication to informing and convincing
the electorate. We’ve seen how effective online media can be, with the incredible amount of messaging options available through combinations of text, photographs, video,
and link resources. So why are they missing the boat?

As
Helen Margetts of the Oxford Internet Institute said of the candidates in this Reuters article: “They
haven’t been very innovative,” and the days of dedicated party members "tramping
the streets and persuading people are dead." In addition, it’s noted that in
order to be successful, they’re going to have to recognize that voters are no
longer satisfied with the “one-way traffic” that constituted campaigns of the
past and are going to demand interactivity and user-generated content. What,
Web 2.0? Thought I’d banned that word.

Here’s something I will condone: OpenSecrets.org’s new Flash tool
that “tells all” by making visual connections between each of the 2008
candidates and the biggest contributors to their campaign. Now that is a good use of IT.

This has gone too far, I thought yesterday. It was all over the news that media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN,
and Fox News were buying Virginia Tech related keywords on major search
engines. Some called this the modern-day equivalent of hiring a barker to yell
“Extra, Extra! Read all about it!” on street corners. Some called it downright
tasteless. My initial reaction was to side with the second camp.

But wait a second. Believe half of what
you hear, I could hear my mother saying. So before I got all upset
about this, I thought I’d check it out for myself.

Like Kaiser Soze – poof – they were
gone.

Nothing on Yahoo, and the only sponsored
result I found on Google was from a news organization in the U.K. called The First Post. Argh, Brits! At first I thought they purposely removed
it because so many bloggers
had pointed it out as “crass” or “tapping in on a business purpose on a tragedy.”
However, if it really is a business-driven action, maybe they’re down because
it’s no longer a front-page headline?

Social networks like Facebook are also creating
online bulletin boards as a method of keeping friends and classmates up to
date both on their whereabouts and thoughts on the tragedy.  Poof! Faith in humanity – and compassion – restored.

The Big News of the day is undoubtedly Google’s $3.1
billion purchase of DoubleClick. After all, you can read about here…and here…and here. Oh, and here. And then of
course there is the news of the reaction from AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and all
their pals as they cry, “Hey! No fair!” You can read that here – and here. In fact, I think it is safe to say that this deal is dominating
the news today like a 5^th grade bully. Or, for a closer metaphor,
like the State of the Union – even when it’s a whole lot about nothing.

But it’s not as if nothing else is
happening in the world – online or off. What happens to all the little bits of
news that fall by the wayside? They might have otherwise had a chance at the
big time, but tragically were overshadowed by this acquisition. I mean, on the day that Reagan died, the Berlin wall fell, or Britney shaved her head, scientists in the Amazon may have discovered a new species of toad, or other offbeat news might have occurred that was subsequently pushed
to the bottom of the page. “Rats!” they thought. If only we’d been a day
earlier – or later. It’s all about the timing.

Let’s go one step further: what about personal news? The Internet has enabled each of us to be our own beat reporter,
hot on the story of our lives. For example, yesterday I tried matcha tea for the first time.
It was marvelous. I could also report that there is something
obscene written in Flemish with a purple Sharpie on my left forearm and that I am having
difficulties removing it. Finally, my breaking news of the day: I am closing a
deal that involves the $3.10 acquisition of a new Uniballer pen.

So, forget Google, forget DoubleClick –
heck, forget Sallie Mae, al-Sadr, and the Boston Marathon.

What’s your news?

Who cares? 

The Hillary 1984 ad is really not that creative.  And btw, it will have exactly zero impact on the campaign.   This is derivative navel gazing of the worst sort.  I got bored before it was over (which says more about Hillary’s speaking style than the genius of the editor) and I didn’t really get it.

The one thing this ad will doubtless do (as we all chatter about it) is help the producer with the very Francais sounding name of Phillip(e) de Vellis, — outed today by Arianna Huffington — grow his consulting business, as the lemmings latch on to this oh, so out-of-the-box revolutionary idea of sending up an over-rated twenty three year old commercial.  Good thing for Phillip(e), he got fired today.

Next up? Steve Jobs, goes after de Vellis, YouTube, Obama, Microsoft (on principal), Blue State Digital and us for denigrating the logo.