Smallbrain Solutions

Jim Moore suggests that Dean’s turnout in IA was 15,000 below their hard count of 40,000 caucusers. via CalPundit and CNN, the entrance polls suggest Dean lost seniors AND first time caucus-goers to Kerry.

I was expecting to see the seniors go away, but do the low results from first-timers suggest that Dean’s online organizing was not as successful as we thought in pulling those new voters? I hope not. Maybe the IA Caucuses are just weird… We will see about NH.

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Alex Alben (http://www.alben2004.com/alexblog.html) may be the first blog from a congressional candidate. It is probably no surprise that he is a retired Internet Exec. He doesn’t allow comments, but the writing is pretty good.

Senate Democratic Leader Daschle put one up on his campaign site during his annual ride across South Dakota and appears to be updating it now - the newest entry is here, but it was widely panned as a press release factory… and no comments, trackbacks, etc.

Thanks to Ken for the comment on my previous post on the subject. He is trying to convince his brother (a city commissioner) to start a blog for folks to get more involved with local politics. That would kick ass.

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Clay Shirky (posting at Many-2-Many) and Jon Stahl point to a post from Desigining for Civil Society regarding Dan Bashaw and Mike Gifford ’s article for Democracies Online Newswire (big shoutout to fellow minnesotan and internet pioneer Steven Clift) titled Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism.

(pardon me while I catch my breath from all that trackbacking/linking)

(one more minute)

Ok. Anyway, you can read the top 10+ for yourself, but the whole time I was reading I couldn’t stop thinking about the depth of discussion that is clearly going on in the NGOsphere (newly minted term from jon stahl) and how little of that discussion is really going on in the CampaignSphere (newly minted term from me).

I suspect that will change as soon as the caucuses/primaries wind down and more local and other federal races get going. I wonder if their should be an online non-partisan conference this summer? As if any of us political ‘net developers have time…

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From the “should have mentioned something a few days ago file…”:

via SmartMobs, Cyberjournalist.net mentions that the The Spokesman-Review has equipped their blogger w/ a Treo camera phone to blog the NH primary. The results will appear on Spin Control, as soon as they can figure out how to send the photos while roaming.

I trust that their service provider isn’t T-mobile, as my experience is that their service is worthless up there.

It is certainly worth thinking about the future implications of photoblogging on campaigning. For instance, there is the inevitable gaffes that could be recorded, or also near instant photos of events that could be used as fuindraising or viral tools. neato…

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An article in PC World describes how members of congress are buying email lists from commercial vendors at about 25 cents a pop.

While this should come as surprise to no one, it is mildly interesting to wonder whether their is going to be as negative of a reaction to this kind of email as to normal commercial spam. The Pew Internet and American Life Project published a report in October suggesting that public opinon shifts somewhat when the message is political in nature- instead of commercial. In that case, the percentage labeling the email “Spam” drops from 92% to 76% (here is that section of the report)

Additionally,

…about two-thirds of emailers (65%) do not consider unsolicited commercial email to be spam if it comes from a sender with whom they’ve already done business;

So, it would seem that your campaign/organization could get away with matching up emails to your previous supporters names and sending them email - even if they hadn’t opted in.

I am not ENDORSING that, but, I wouldn’t be surprised if that opinion continues to spread as people become accustomed to a lot of Spam.

On the other hand, as Spammers get more devious (and flood peoples’ blog comment boards) maybe there actually WILL be some sort of uprising… hmmm…

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