John Edwards continued his pre-announcement festivities with a video posted to YouTube yesterday. Wow. It’s pretty amazing how far technological integration in political campaigns has already come since 2004. The most shocking campaign this time around will be the one that doesn’t have a blog.
The Deval Patrick campaign used net video to an excellent extent during this past year’s Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign. The software platform, provided by brightcove, allowed high quality archiving of campaign commercials, speeches, debate appearances, and other miscellaneous materials.
But this was a proprietary system (albeit a proprietary system with some nice RSS and e-mail capabilities). Edwards has gone directly into the frenzy of YouTube, with comments and ratings and related links. The top related video to Edwards’ announcement, which is displayed directly to the right of the video and also shows up right after you’re done watching the video, is to Wal-Mart attacks John Edwards, a CNN capture about a mini-controversy that happened to Edwards back in November. Now, this was generally negative press, though nothing too bad, but what about when a viewer watches a candidate-sanctioned video and is then linked to a Swift Boat “documentary” immediately afterwards? And the comments being posted?
I’m glad to see someone still exploiting the Katrina tragedy for their own gain. I’m sure the people in N.O. miss all the celebrities “helping” them out down there.
Ouch. With the viral popularity that YouTube can offer, there can be a lot of strings attached. I’d expect most big 2008 campaigns to mainly use a brightcove like proprietary system, with occasional forays into the more scary viral world.
Not that proprietary is necessarily a bad thing - I’d like to see a campaign use one of these platforms to establish an incredibly thorough library of video on a candidate. Every campaign stop, every TV appearance, every press conference. Transparency is accessibility, and accessibility is grassroots, and as much as some people may be skeptical of the grassroots idea after Howard Dean’s spectacular flameout in 2004, it is an incredibly intoxicating idea, and incredibly potent in the right hands.
One other quick prediction: this upcoming campaign will, and must, feature the birth of a hugely popular political video blog. The market for this is tremendous, and something as quick moving, complex, particular and high profile as a presidential race is the perfect platform for it. 2008 will be for political (and consequently, general) blogs what 2004 was for text blogs.
Okay.
First there was your AIM away message, where could keep people up to date with whatever you were doing when you weren’t chatting.
So then there’s Twitter, which lets you update your profile with what you’re doing at any given moment. Your status will show up publicly on the web, and you can update it through Google Chat or via text message. They’ve got a badge for your blog, if you’d like, and of course the requisite RSS feed.
And Facebook’s been pushing their status updates, where your status appears on your profile, in your friends’ news feeds, and also has a badge available.
Plus, you’ve got your Google Chat away status, and God knows how many other sites and chat services.
I hate information like this being spread all over the place. I wish there was a single place where this information could be set and then reflected throughout the various applications and sites.
Not only that, but how about some sort of permissions? Wouldn’t it be nice for specific messages to appear for specific groups? For instance, on AIM I could set an away message for the “Boston” group, an away message for the “Home” group, and a Default away message for everybody else. That could even be reflected in the different newsfeeds for these friends in Facebook, based on a cross-reference between AIM screen names listed on Facebook profiles.
This is all just wishful thinking - it would all require far too much interoperability and open standards and peace and love and happiness among programmers. But, dammit, let me engage in my exhibitionist behavior in an easy, cross-platform manner.
