Senator Clinton Hires Experienced BLogger
Filed under: 2008 Election, Blogging, Government and Technology, Politics and the Internet
The New York Times reports that Senator Clinton’s campaign has hired an experienced political blogger. The 2008 Presidential Election is going to heat up the blogosphere in the next two years. But I’m really afraid most of the candidates won’t actually do it right. I’m afraid they’ll try to use the web as a top-down communication tool, and not a giant listening device and organizing device that actually empowers citizens to be involved in government. The Dean campaign really energized voters, most of whom are dissatisfied with both political parties. (According to Joe Trippi’s book, the number is 70%.) The web offers hope for politics and government, but only if it is used in the right way.
After I finished Joe Trippi’s book in July 2004 (which ought to be required reading for every political candidate in this country) I wrote this impassioned post about how the internet will affect politics and government. It may be one of my best posts ever. Unfortunately, our political social networking site iCount was never fully funded or fully developed. So it sits today as a site that aggregates political feeds. Fortunately, Phil Windley has kept it alive. When Provo Labs has more bandwidth, perhaps we should revitalize it.
I hope to see the day when most elected officials and political candidates in this country have their own blog and actually write their own posts and read feedback from their constituents. I would love to see them continually in touch with the people they represent and serve.
My hopes for our political future are inspired by my own personal experience at MyFamily.com, where I was in touch in a remarkable way with millions of customers. One of my favorite things to do at MyFamily.com was to write daily surveys on any imaginable topic to see what our users thought about things. We had about 100,000 users logging in each day back in 2001. And we had a pop-up survey that came up whenever someone logged in. So we could get 6-8,000 responses per day on one or many surveys.
I wrote more than 300 surveys in a one or two year period. I knew what my customers thought about digital cameras, genealogy, languages classes, cooking, hobbies, how many yearbooks they had in their homes, what genealogy software they used, their plans to buy a new computer, how many had high-speed internet, scanners in their homes, how many relatives they kept in touch with, where they planned to vacation next summer, etc, etc, etc. And those are just a handful of the survey topics that I can remember off the top of my head.
I could write a survey, post it, and within a few hours have more than 1,000 responses. It was amazingly powerful! I felt completely in tune with my customers needs, wants, desires, plans, thoughts and feelings. (To supplement the quantitative feedback from these surveys, we did weekly phone calls with actual customers and we read emails and listened to calls in the call center for qualitative feedback.)
(The only thing close to this feeling that I’ve felt since is from blogging. But the feedback I get is on a much smaller scale. I can’t wait to have 10,000 blog readers a day and a survey tool that will allow me to do the same thing. I love to know what people think about new ideas. But that may never happen.)
Imagine if every elected official could get 1,000 responses from constituents on any question that came up. A personal, instant poll. And imagine if they could write their own survey questions, point to it from their blog, and get the survey results in hours as well as comments on their blog to provide them with texture.
The web provides this power. The question is, will any candidate embrace it and use it in a way that empowers the rest of us and could create the most energized campaign in history?
Read my 2004 post and tell me what you think about all this. Which candidate do you think will be the darling of the blogosphere in the 2008 election?
Blog Promotes Mitt Romney in 2008
I recently found a great blog promoting Mitt Romney as a presidential candidate for 2008. Mitt and his team saved the Salt Lake City 2002 Olympics from financial disaster. As Governor of Massachusetts he has not only helped the state go from major deficits to a budget surplus, but he is vigiliant about helping the state stay out of the red. He vetoed $290 million in spending just this past week. I wonder what he, as a brilliant investor and business strategist — a turn-around artist really — might be able to do for the United States with its ominous $8.4 trillion debt. That would be fun to watch.
My guess is that if Romney were elected President and had a line-item veto (President Bush called for a line item veto last week in his radio address), he would use it effectively and in no time get our national spending in line with our income. I can’t imagine any other president could do as much to reduce our national debt as Mitt Romney, given his amazing background in business, and his desire to be of public service in the tradition of his father.
(Hey, I just realized how fun a Mitt Romney vs. Bill Gates presidential election would be. It would be so much more interesting than John McCain vs. Hilary Clinton! And I understand Gates might just be available in 2008 …)
According to Wikipedia, all but 7 state governors have a line-item veto.
Internet Surpasses Radio for Political News
A new survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows how important the internet is for political news, especially among broadband subscribers. The 2008 president election is going to be far more internet-based than 2004, for fund-raising as well as for organizing support and disseminating news.
Sites Track Political Donations
Several web sites allow you to find all donors to federal election campaigns.
Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr.
I just filled out a Zoomerang.com survey to tell the future governor of Utah what I think should be done to create a good business environment in the state of Utah. I’m glad politicians are using the internet to get feedback. I hope it becomes an essential part of governing.
I wish Utah didn’t treat capital gains as normal income, for taxation purposes. Utah shouldn’t make it tempting to move to Nevada before selling one’s company.
But for the record, my major concern about Utah is not economic–it’s education. According to the 2001 Manhattan Institute report, Utah is in 49th place — trailing Hawaii only — in education freedom. The report explains:
Utah‚ which offers no assistance for private school choice, closely regulates home-schooling, and has large school districts and weak charter-school offerings‚ slipped to second-to-last place. Rhode Island, because of similar restrictions, comes in 48th.
I think charter schools are gaining momentum in Utah, so maybe we are moving up in the rankings, but we have a long ways to go before parents really have choice in this state. Schools really need to be accountable to parents, and parents must have choice in choosing schools and teachers for their children. Schools need to compete for the best teachers (wages should go up if there is more competition for good teachers) so that we can provide our children with the best education possible.
iCount growing fast
iCount is about to hit 4,300 registered users. Our soft launch has been more successful than we thought it would be. With our new visibility, we are now talking with several individuals and companies about how we can enhance the service and empower more Americans to be involved in the political process.
If the Dean campaign started with just 432 email addresses, and by reaching out to them consistently and involving them in creating what Joe Trippi calls the first “open source campaign” in American history–what will we be able to achieve with 4,300 email addresses, and a mission to revitalize participatory democracy in this country?
One of our slogans: “we seek not for power, but to pull it down” represents what we are trying to do. Bring power back to the people. Too much power is concentrated in Washington, DC, and in big media and in big business and it leads to corruption. It’s time for a change. Please help us spread the word about iCount.com.
How the Internet Will Affect Politics and Government
I finished Joe Trippi’s book last night, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything. I marked hundreds of passages and dog-eared dozens of pages. This is one man’s insider view of how the Dean campaign revolutionized political campaigns forever, but more importantly, how “open source” politics will finally overthrow the top-down broadcast politics system we’ve been living with in the age of television. As one who decries the impact television has had on public discourse (I read Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Death of Public Discourse in the Age of Television ten or more years ago), morality, and health in this country, I am thrilled with Trippi’s book.
He gets it. He gets how power is inevitably shifting away from governments and political parties and corporations who try to ramrod internally developed policies and plans down our throats to communities of organized citizens and customers who will no long allow this to happen. Companies and organizations who re-invent themselves to catch this new wave will thrive and prosper; those who don’t will founder.
But this is so non-intuitive and so counter to how business and government has been done in our lifetimes that I believe very few people will make this shift.
Even at an internet pure-play company like MyFamily.com, a company that I co-founded with the goal of providing genealogy data from every nation and a free private web space to connect every family in the world–a company that thrives when the community creates the content and the conversation–I would say that most of our managers and employees still think and act in the traditional top-down decision-making and corporate marketing model. The Internet playbook that I followed borrowed heavily from the theories in Net.Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities.
Trippi’s book explains the impact of online communities on politics and government as Net.Gain did for internet business.
If you have any interest in the future of democracy, in self-government, in ridding American or the nation in which you live of the corruption that comes from centralized power combined with the distortion of truth which is nearly always found in traditional media, with it’s one-way communication mode and 30-second sound byte form of discourse, if you want to be empowered to make a difference in the future of your world, I strongly recommend Trippi’s book combined with a heavy dose of the Federalist Papers, Madison’s Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, and as many other works by US Founding Fathers as you can find. Trippi himself cites Jefferson about a dozen times in this book.
As Net.Gain was the manual for Ancestry.com/MyFamily.com to build the largest genealogy community in the world, with as many as 15 million unique monthly visitors to its various web sites, then I see The Revolution Will Not Be Televised as the primary guidebook for our iCount.com, our new political community web service which is today only in its earliest stages, but which already has thousands of registered users who want to make their vote count every day of every year, and not just once every 2-4 years during an election cycle.
We are determined to arm every independent-minded American with powerful tools to connect with other like-minded people around issues, not partisanship, to organize, to take action, and to make a difference in the local, state, and national community.
We are tired of politics as usual.
I am especially tired of party politics, where vilifying the opposition leads to the politics of hate and where meaningful discussion of issues within a party are stifled because of the overwhelming requirement of party loyalty.
I’m an American first, a member of a political party second.
Our elected leaders must put the good of the country first and not sacrifice it to preserve their power or position.
George Washington warned us more than 200 years ago in his Farewell Address:
“Let me . . . warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally. . . . The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”
Trippi claims that 70% of Americans are dissatisfied with both parties.
He also explains how negative campaigning works to defeat individual candidates but backfires on the entire political system by causing all of us to believe that all politicians are evil and dishonest. No wonder everyone, especially the young, are disengaged and apathetic. They think the system is corrupt and there is nothing they can do about it.
I agree with Joe Trippi. The power is in our hands. We can organize, using the transformational technology that will soon be within the reach of every citizen, and take back our government and force corporations to “not be evil” and exploitive.
One of the reasons I don’t drink, don’t smoke, eat healthy (a Jamba Juice a day!), run several times a week, spend a lot of time with family, and generally live a happy and balanced lifestyle, no longer sacrifice my health “for the good of the company” (as Trippi almost killed himself off during the Dean campaign–I did that during Ancestry.com’s early years) is that I want to live to be 100, to see where technology takes our civilization, to watch the impact of the internet, global cell phone adoption, biotechnology, nanotechnology, alternative energy, robotics, and more. It’s the most fascinating age in the history of the world. And the more I take care of myself physically, mentally and spiritually, the better my chances to live to a ripe old age (my grandmother made it to 104!) and observe how this phenomenal age plays out. Fortunately, Mormon males (of which I am one) generally outlive the average male by 7 years, but that only gets me to age 77. I need to do something to get those extra 23 years. Maybe it’s lots of vitamin C. Maybe it’s Patch-Adam’s type laughing therapy. My grandma ate cracked-wheat cereal virtually every morning for breakfast, while I’ve been living for most of my life on cold cereal. I don’t think that’s working in my favor.
OK, so back to the Trippi book.
Buy it. Read it. Study it. Live it. Join the internet revolution in American politics, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” (Abraham Lincoln)
iCount
Filed under: Government and Technology, Politics and the Internet
I’m working with a team on an experimental political web site called iCount.com. We’ve done a soft launch and are getting some traffic from Google. There are big plans for this site (inspired by the Dean campaign, Meetup.com, MoveOn.org, and other cool and effective political sites) and motivated by a love for the greatest democratic nation in the history of the world, and a hope to keep it that way. (Our voter turnout is horrendous–13% in our recent Utah Republican primary, and politics has become a top-down raise-money-and-spend-it-on-tv-ads game that is sickening to watch.) Many Americans just don’t care and don’t think they can make a difference. Our long term goal is to help individuals organize themselves effectively and make a difference on issues that matter most to them.
View my political profile at iCount.com where ONE makes a difference
Top Candidate Web Sites, December 2003
|
Visitors to Major Candidate and Party Sites December 2003 |
|
|
Unique Visitors (000) |
|
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DeanforAmerica.com |
605 |
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GeorgeWBush.com |
503 |
|
JohnKerry.com |
316 |
|
Clark04.com |
248 |
|
Democrats.org |
222 |
|
Kucinich.us |
188 |
|
RNC.org |
122 |
|
JohnEdwards2004.com |
108 |
Top Political Web Sites
As we prepare to launch iCount.com, a political web site service whose mission is to help every citizen get actively involved in self-government (“let your vote count every day” is our slogan), we are seriously researching all existing political web sites to see which sites are getting the most traffic. I have been analyzing dozens of the top sites and just built a web page showing the internet traffic levels for a few of the top political web sites. I’ll be adding more later.
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