Interesting Take on Twitter

TechCrunch has a great article up about "Why Twitter Hasn't Failed," exploring why Twitter is different in terms of distribution in feeds than facebook, FriendFeed, and other sources that produce feeds to specific audiences (vs. blogs where we don't often know where they're going.)

In the political context, we can see that Twitter does have a very targeted marketing capability in this respect. Campaigns - like Obama for America - can track exactly who receives their tweets from the candidate and use it to help hone message.

Latest Online Campaigning Tactic - Attack Websites

Here's the latest in my column for The Huffington Post - "Smear 2.0: Attack Ad Culture Goes Online." It goes into detail about the latest campaign sites launched on specific issues targeting the media and the public. The sites are mostly being used as a campaigning tool by Democrats, but Republicans have launched a few as well.

e-Cards Still Make an Impact

This JibJab Card, shown on the LA Times site, is a humorous take on this year's presidential election proving that animated e-cards can still have a place. Since they are essentially usable as videos, they easily translate to the '08 campaign technology. Humor also has always played a part in political campaigns.

Women Leaders in Technology & Politics

I published a post earlier today that was a long time coming that lists many of the talented women working in the field of technology and politics at The Political Voices of Women, a blog launched in the past year by BlogHer and Care2 Contributing Editor, Catherine Morgan. The list I hope will become a living document like her list of what began as under 200 women bloggers who write about politics and now spans beyond 450.

John Edwards Cameo at PDF

One of the highlights of PDF was when Elizabeth Edwards spoke to the crowd via Skype - she was supposed to attend in person but her flight was cancelled. And at the end of her Q&A, John Edwards came home and answered a two-part question for the PDF attendees about the Internet and how it has affected campaigning in general and the '08 election specifically. He gave a great answer, shown on this ABC News video.

Campaign Internet Directors Turned Up the Heat in Person

Here's a post just published at The Huffington Post "Off The Bus" that I wrote (mostly - they do have editorial prerogative!) about what transpired on Monday, including a video. It's from a panel called "What Worked, What Didn't" for the campaigns online during the primaries. The panel included six tech strategists for six campaigns: Obama, McCain, Clinton, Paul, Romney & Edwards and was moderated by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum.

Having been in their shoes, it was difficult to write about the panel without interjecting my own experiences on the topics, but Tracy Russo did a fabulous job defending the points she made online in the offline forum which is now traveling around the web so I knew that was what readers would want to hear the most about. The rest of the article is an attempt to cover some more of the important issues touched on during the panel discussion that I (and Mayhill Fowler made this point as well) wish would have been a bit longer.

Here's Mayhill's post about her experience at the conference and her remarks about what it was like as a presenter and why she was there as well as what it means to her and all she's learning about journalism.

What Do the Techie Politicos Do At PDF?

So while participating in the Personal Democracy Forum conference (that it sounds like will be rebranded to the "Participatory Democracy Forum", it was hard not to also notice in passing what everyone else was doing at the event since I was often plugged in at the back of the room... so I thought it would be fun to write about it.

During the conference sessions, people were...
- watching/participating, mild but not much Q&A
- on laptops (80-90% had) - usually in the middle of the sessions (closed up/saving energy @ the end)
- on pdas/checking (majority - blackberries)
- occasionally stepping out to take calls (but frankly not as often as I'd expected)

Those on phones/pdas were...
- returning voicemail
- checking email
- stopping phones from ringing

Those on laptop were...
- blogging
- checking email
- viewing yelp for restaurants nearby (just saw that once)
- reading news online
- occasionally messing with social networking sites (mostly facebook & twitter)
- watching the occasional youtube video, esp between panels so could have volume

In between and outside conference sessions, people were...
- networking, meeting each other
- chatting about issues/ideas and panels
- making jokes about Twitter (there was a lot of that)

So it was in a sense just like any other conference except more wired and definitely on the power user side of things. I will note that most people had multiple windows open on their laptops and were juggling a lot of different tasks.