Smallbrain Solutions

Clay Shirky at Many-2-Many asks whether the organic adoption of the Dean social software has led to a sense of accomplishment that prevents users from performing social acts (e.g voting or caucusing) in the real world.

Iowa - it is important to not confuse swings of public opinion with a lack of organization. As organized as Dean was, the campaign put thousands of activists on the ground from all around the country. Without the social software, none of that would have happened. Those people weren’t deterred from action. And we should really not ignore the significant organization and recruiting that was made possible by his social net.

Granted, Jim Moore points out that the campaign “lost” 15,000 caucusers on the actual night. That doesn’t speak well for the organizing success, but take a look at the thousands of letters sent by supporters, the number of calls made and doors knocked upon. And then think of where Dean was at this time in 2003. Clearly FAR more action was generated by the social network than was lost at the end - after all, the polls predicted Dean was losing ground, and caucuses are notoriously difficult to deal with, as voters can be persuaded or picked off due to the 15% viabillity requirement.

As with everything else in a campaign, it is bad to judge something on the ultimate result at the polls or caucuses. Did an ad work? Yes, if it created some movement in the polls. No, if it didn’t. Did social networking take Dean from nothing to something? Clearly yes. Did it persuade a lot of undecided voters? Not in Iowa. Did it maximize the allocation of volunteer and supporter effort to create a strong presence in Iowa? Again, I would have to say yes.

Update: Ben Hammersly makes a good-point about the main perceived failing with Orkut being similar to the Dean failing - meeting people who agree with or already know is boring. True, but I would again mention that people are trying to judge a mobilization technology with a persuasion outcome, which is sort of the apples and oranges thing.

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Lots of comments on the Blogging of the President last night. I think the most interesting comment is from David Weinberger who picks up on a theme from his must read Small Pieces, Loosely Joined and argues that the increasing “a-listing” of the biggest blogs threatens to return to a “newspaper” model. His book postulates that the nature of “authority” has been subverted by the web and now you have anonymous folks like Atrios viewed as “authorities” in their respective fields.

I find that this follows a similar line of development which continues to this day, where the a few gigantor sites command the vast majority of the traffic. On the plus side, niche sites like ours cater to previously unreached segments of the market… even if the natural tendency of blogs is to aggregate at the “higher-being” level, there is still plenty of traffic for the rest of us to work with. If we don’t suck.

That, and, we could always be annointed “authorities” if we suck even less.

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via BuzzMachine, Sunday night from 9-11pm (Eastern Time), Minnesota Public Radio will be hosting a national call-in show, hosted by Chris Lydon.

Guests include Atrios, Josh Marshall, Gary Hart and more.

Thankfully, WAMU will be carrying it… you can see the participating stations here.

Internet activists/strategists/pundits doing a radio show. How post-modern is that? Or is that post-post-modern? crap.

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This is the funniest site ever. Love him or hate him… these rule.

http://home.comcast.net/~cozdemir226/

I prefer the http://home.comcast.net/~cozdemir226/ironmandean.mp3.

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There is a great piece over at Network-Centric Advocacy regarding the lessons of Dean, Kerry and Edwards in Iowa.

Point 2, which argues that the mobilization tools available to all the presidential supporters help to magnify momentum, is spot on.

I would add that there is going to be a lot of folks arguing that the netroots failed Dean. I think that it is more important to focus on the fact that having solid mobilization tools is key to making you competitive - but not what will win you the election. I hope that campaign managers won’t view this setback as an excuse to underfund and underfocus on online mobilization.

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