Category Archive for ‘Social Networking’ at Blog P.I.

Archive for the 'Social Networking' Category

Digg Buries Daily Kos

Published by William Beutler on June 19, 2008 in Barack Obama, Daily Kos, Digg, Environment, Netroots, Public policy, Site Traffic, Social Networking, Trend Tool, Web 2.0, White House '08 and William Beutler. 0 Comments

This submission to Digg from Daily Kos “went popular” today, which is to say it made the front page:

So it wasn’t “buried” per se, in that the story has not (as of about 8:00 p.m. Thursday) been demoted from the front page, and almost surely will not be. Last I checked, it was #10 out of 10 in all categories. The article submitted was a user diary by someone calling themselves environmentalist (like e.e. cummings or k.d. lang), cross-posted from the long-running mid-tier leftroots blog Unbossed.

The first Digg commenter said:

It’s a scam engineered by big oil interests to dupe the $4 per gallon weary public. Drilling/plundering our coasts for about 19 billion barrels of oil is akin to placing a Band-Aid on the hemorrhaging wound that is our oil-dependent, wasteful lifestyle.

The comment received +31 “diggs”, that is to say a net total of 31 votes in agreement. So far so good. But out of the ~430 comments added to this story, the top-rated comments fell somewhere between ~+150 and ~+50 diggs. Here is the first sentence of each, in descending order.

+151 diggs:

I hate to play devil’s advocate but here I go. (personal note: I am not a Republican)

+107:

Buried for being misleading bullshit.

+68:

If we began drilling offshore, oil prices would actually fall, because speculators trading in oil futures would bet on prices to be lower in the future.

+66:

Both candidates are forwarding two different ideas, but they are by no means mutually exclusive.

+59:

I should have guessed this was daily Kos bullshit.

+51:

Thanks, DailyKos, for continuing to put forth the stupidest ideas on the internet.

Anyone who follows the two websites knows that Digg and Daily Kos are both very pro-Obama. But apparently they are not pro-Obama in quite the same way. Better yet, Ron Paul’s volunteer army of paranoids seems to wandered off somewhere else.

As for the title and the caveat above, well, that’s not the only way Digg can bury Daily Kos:

That’s What FriendFeeds Are For

Published by William Beutler on April 22, 2008 in Barack Obama, Fred Thompson, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Online Campaigns, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Web video, White House '08, William Beutler and YouTube. 2 Comments

As I am frequently given to blogging about the first thing I see in my e-mail box each morning, and commenting on the extremely limited tools on John McCain’s campaign website, here the twain meet. This morning I woke up to find John McCain, or someone using his name, had subscribed to my FriendFeed account:

FriendFeed is one of the more recent Web 2.0 services on the scene, and some believe it could be the latest next big thing. Considering the McCain campaign’s sometimes uneven online strategy, this is a step in the right direction. It’s better to send your campaign out into the places where people are than to expect them to come to you, anyway. So, I subscribed in return:

And it’s the campaign, all right — the favorited video indeed shows up on the official McCain YouTube channel as the most recently favorited video.

Better still, the favorited video was uploaded by McCain Girls, the parodic creation of left-leaning humor website 23/6. Sure, the joke may be on McCain, but the McCain campaign is willing to laugh along with the joke. The video favorited is of McCain literally laughing along with it.

Obama, of course, is on FriendFeed as well. He also has more online content piped through it: Digg, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. McCain’s camp only lists the official blog’s RSS feed and YouTube account.

I know that’s not all they’re doing. McCain is on LinkedIn; earlier this month the campaign made clever use of the surprisingly resilient socnet, asking a question of the site’s memebers and receiving more than 3,000 responses.

I’m a bit surprised that McCain’s camp appears not to be using Flickr. Surely someone is taking pictures; during the Fred Thompson campaign we kept the Flickr account updated constantly with photographs taken by Thompson family friend Jim Rydell. (We released all photos under a Creative Commons license, thus providing quality photos of Thompson that supporters could use.)

McCain doesn’t appear to be using Twitter at either likely account (here or here), though supporters are giving the campaign a presence (here and here) on the increasingly zeitgeisty socnet. McCain’s camp did create an account on Digg, but they haven’t used the account since late last year.

Maybe all of this is not crucial, but the more social networks a campaign uses, the likelier it is they will reach people they would not have otherwise. Democrats will do all they can to portray McCain as old and out of touch, so presenting him well him to the young and with-it denizens of these online communities should take on added importance. Meanwhile, fundraising seems to be improving a bit, so maybe Pat Hynes will get a few extra hands to take care of these things.

Lost in McCainSpace

Published by William Beutler on April 4, 2008 in John McCain, Online Fundraising, Social Networking, Website Design, White House '08 and William Beutler. 3 Comments

A little over a year ago, I wrote a deservedly unkind and undeservedly lengthy post about John McCain’s social network-in-name-only. It was essentially just a personalized donation page, glorified by its socnet-ish name: McCainSpace. Or MyMcCain. That part hadn’t been sorted out by its launch.

In any case, that was then. I hadn’t been back since (who thought back then there would be a McCain campaign right now?) and recently decided that a follow-up might be in order. So what is it now?

It’s exactly the same. The McCain campaign website doesn’t seem to have much interest in making their website into a real destination. As I said then, a campaign does not need a social network of its own, but if you’re going to claim one, actually have one.

Actually, something has changed with the profile I used to illustrate the problem last year. It’s Debaser, the Un Chien Andalou/Black Francis-inspired username of Todd Zeigler at Bivings Group. Here’s the image I posted last year:

The page is unchanged, with one exception. Here’s the detail:

Granted, $100 is not a lot, for a presidential campaign or the fourteen months between the first screen shot and the second. But for a website that’s essentially abandoned, it’s a fortune.

I asked Zeigler if he had donated, or knew who had. The first word of his reply: “Weird.” Zeigler logged in and found out that the donor hailed from the Delmarva Peninsula and was not known to him. In an e-mail reply he allowed me to share, Zeigler offered two possibilities:

(1) [Name Redacted] stumbled across my page (or blog post) and gave through it.
(2) Funny business.

I’m going with (1) but for Debaser to reach its assigned goal, (2) may have to get involved.

A LinkedIn to the Past

Published by William Beutler on January 6, 2008 in Amazon.com, Facebook, Social Networking and Tech Blogosphere. 3 Comments

Despite much chatter in the tech blogosphere over the past year about whether business-oriented social network LinkedIn would fade in the face of competition with an increasingly professionalized Facebook, the site appears to be holding on, if not exactly thriving. Anecdotally, I get a new request on the order of once per week, a little less often than Facebook (and way less often than attractive young women with “cams” on MySpace…) but more often than I gain followers on Twitter.

Far from throwing in the towel, the site continues to improve. However, there are some annoying tics. For example, a colleague of mine joined recently, and has been having a small problem. Like many social websites, including Amazon, LinkedIn makes recommendations. For Amazon, items you might want to buy. LinkedIn, people you may want to add as contacts:

Or, in this case, not…

Here’s what he got back, about 24 hours later:

Hi [REDACTED],

Thank you for your email. If you choose to join LinkedIn, uploading your contact list is entirely optional. By uploading, you can discover which of your existing contacts are already LinkedIn members and also invite those who aren’t.

Dashboard scans the uploaded list of contacts, and based on sent/received emails it recommends members you should invite to join your network, based on who you are in contact with most frequently. The LinkedIn People you may know feature uses your email correspondence score, counting the number of emails sent to a particular person to determine whom you may want to invite.

LinkedIn does not gather the “notes” or other fields from your address book. The only fields collected are those required to identify your contact: name, email address, title, and company of your contact. If your contact is already a member of LinkedIn their name will not appear, as that contact already has a LinkedIn profile.

Please feel free to contact us with any additional questions you may have.

Thanks for using LinkedIn!

Brian F. Customer Support Specialist

“If you choose to join LinkedIn… Thanks for using LinkedIn!” What? Did Brian F. even read his complaint? Shouldn’t the customer support specialist know that my colleague is already a LinkedIn user? He didn’t ask for a lengthy explanation of the LinkedIn algorithm, however interesting it may be. He asked to stop seeing his ex’s name every time he logs in to his LinkedIn profile.

Certainly this doesn’t rise to the level of Facebook’s ongoing Beacon fiasco, but LinkedIn should certainly offer users more control over automatic notifications. A check box is all it takes.

Rightroots, Big Red Tent and Slatecard: An Assessment

Published by William Beutler on December 3, 2007 in Blog Consultants, Brick-and-mortar consultants, Campaigns, Charts and Graphs, Fred Thompson, Internecine Battles, Online Campaigns, Online Fundraising, Republicans, Social Networking, Startups, Trend Tool, Twitter, White House '08 and William Beutler. 4 Comments

Online fundraising startups are a longstanding interest of Blog P.I. In our year and a half, we’ve devoted more than a few posts to the subject, including the progressive, Democrat-supporting ActBlue, the conservative, Republican-aligned newcomer ABC PAC/Rightroots, attendant security issues and flawed coverage often (but not exclusively) in the Washington Post. The last time I wrote about it, Rightroots had relaunched, and two similar Republican fundraising startups — Big Red Tent and Slatecard — were announced and on the way shortly.

Now, all three have been up for more than a month, which I think is enough time to make an early comparative assessment.

For those playing at home: Rightroots is a reboot of the ABC PAC/Rightroots slate that saw a trial run fairly late in the 2006 cycle, controlled by McCain adviser Becki Donatelli, former Giuliani Patrick Ruffini and Mike Turk, an outside adviser to the Thompson campaign. Big Red Tent is an outside-the-beltway venture by a pair of Austin, Texas web consultants Ryan Gravatt and Brad Jackson. Slatecard is the brainchild primarily of ubiquitous DC Internet guy David All and web developer Sendhil Panchadsaram (who strangely has no website that I can find).

Last weekend, I signed up for each one and made some nominal contributions. Since then, I’ve continued poking and prodding. I thought about putting together an elaborate chart comparing their features side-by-side. Perhaps in a future post I will, but for now, but I don’t think that gives as clear a picture of what I thought about them. Instead, this post collects my observations, with screen captures. It’s a long one, so I’ve tucked the rest of this post below the fold. Follow me…

Continue reading ‘Rightroots, Big Red Tent and Slatecard: An Assessment’

Has the Ron Paul Machine Given Up on Digg?

Published by William Beutler on June 27, 2007 in Apple, Digg, Ron Paul and Social Networking. 3 Comments

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve noticed fewer and fewer Ron Paul-related stories on the front page of Digg. Maybe Kevin Rose had the monkeys tweak the algorithm a little more? Nah, more likely they were out drinking beers.

To test my anecdotal observation that the Paulite obsession with Digg had subsided, I searched the site for “Paul” — “Ron Paul” is barely possible; Digg’s search function has never recovered from an “upgrade” from earlier this year — going back one week’s time.

Sure enough, just two stories involving Ron Paul had been made “popular” — with enough Diggs and comments to warrant front-paging — in the past week. As of 11:00 p.m. EDT, at 12 stories per page, by my count that’s 204 stories mentioning “Paul” (though some, admittedly, were about Paul Reubens’ latest comeback) that went absolutely nowhere.

The second-most popular was a Wired feature story about “how a fringe politician took over the web,” with 833 diggs. As if to prove the point, the only other popular story was about the congressman’s “Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act,” with some 1749 diggs.

And that was last Thursday. Compared to the cornucopia of Ron Paul stories following his breakout second debate, this is nothing. Where has the movement gone?

Fear not: the Paulites haven’t gone away, they’ve only shifted their focus. But the Paul Machine never really loved Digg. You could say they never really dugg it. Their participation was always contingent on making a point, and whether it’s done Paul any good or not, trust me, it has been duly noted.

Meantime, I’ll be digging yet another story about the iPhone.

Note: Standard FDT disclosure; as usual, all observations are my own.

P.S. AOAMO? Ugh. That’ll never work.

Inside the Ron Paul Machine II: On the Assembly Line

Published by William Beutler on May 25, 2007 in Facebook, Howard Dean, Mitt Romney, Online Polling, Ron Paul and Social Networking. 41 Comments

In yesterday’s installment, I demonstrated how it took Ron Paul’s supporters a few hours to start making an impact on the May GOP Bloggers straw poll — fair evidence, I think, that his supporters are not quite as legion, or representative, as they’d have everyone (not least themselves) believe.

So where are they meeting to plan their onslaught? A few days back, one frustrated Digg user identified ten such sites, noting that Paul’s Diggers were organizing in such a way that violates Digg’s Terms of Service (thereby qualifying Paul’s support as “manufactured,” not that I expect it to forestall complaints in the comment section).

One site he didn’t count was the Congressman Ron Paul for President 2008 group at Facebook, but it too qualifies as the planning site for yet another [potenti] TOS violation. Specifically, the Wall — a constantly updated comment stream — for this group is a veritable assembly line of votes for online polls testing the Republican field.

And of course their latest obsession is the aforementioned GOP Bloggers poll. I would say don’t miss this comment, but alas, it’s since been deleted:

Ron Paul Facebook user requests script to game GOP Bloggers poll

To be fair, two subsequent Facebookers recoiled in horror, (correctly) concerned that someone such as yours truly would find it, and the commenter agreed to remove it (note: this is from the archive, hence the wideness):

Telling that this Paul supporter’s first instinct was to suspect that the poll was rigged, isn’t it?

In any case, I’m sure this won’t result in too much bad press. Not this instance, at any rate. But this is just one Ron Paul forum, and one that merely requires Facebook membership to view. And even here, Paul’s supporters are well aware that poll hosts will view their organized effort as illegitimate:

Ron Paul Facebook user warns against being identified by referring IP

What’s sad about this is a) Paul’s supporters are not going out and trying to convert more supporters through reason and debate, and b) they have no sense of humor. First they try to overwhelm others’ communities, and retaliate with subsequent e-mail swarms when their man gets knocked.

So far at least, it’s a hollow movement. The Paul Machine certainly compares unfavorably with, say, the Deaniacs of 2003. They got organized to blog and MeetUp and demonstrate, rather than merely agitate. Ron Paul does have honest supporters at Reason’s Hit and Run and a few other libertarian blogs, but his movement fares badly in comparison with Mitt Romney’s online volunteers as well. Sure, the so-called Romneybots can be annoying at times, but at least they’re reaching out to other conservative constituencies and trying to engage the uncommitted. Not to mention, I’m sure their ranks are filled out by, you know, actual Republicans.

Meanwhile, the assembly line rolls on, only slightly less amusing than Lucy and Ethel’s:

Ron Paul Facebook users keep up the swarm

A lot has changed, indeed. For instance, he has now sailed past Romney and is within 900 votes of Fred Thompson. Truly, it will be a stunning victory. But history will probably mark this as the biggest contest Ron Paul won in the 2008 race.

P.S. This poll, however, will likely go down as Paul’s most unanimous victory.

Games Ron Paul Supporters Play

Published by William Beutler on May 17, 2007 in Asymmetrical Media, Blog Fights, Libertarians, Ron Paul, Social Networking and White House '08. 37 Comments

At what point does the online support for libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul do his candidacy more harm than good? That is, when does his obviously devoted online fan base start to turn off uncommitted voters, rather than provide an example to follow? I think we might just be getting to that point.

In few communities has the outsize influence of the Ronbots (borrowing more from “Romneybot” than “Rahmbot” here) been felt more than fast-rising social news website Digg. Digg is a prize target for manipulators — getting listed on the front page all but guarantees a tidal wave of traffic headed toward the submitted link. After repeated revisions to the algorithm, it apparently remains no less vulnerable.

Paul supporters have been moving stories onto the front page for a couple weeks now, and while I found it curious and somewhat amusing, Diggers are quirky and I didn’t find it illegitimate or overly distracting — that is, until this morning.

Check out the top five stories, as of about 7:30 Eastern time:

Those top three are not quite all the same story, but they are certainly variations on a theme. Note also the separation in digg totals with the next two, non-Paul submissions. And considering Paul’s negligible support in meatspace, one gets the distinct impression that the system has been gamed.

Others have suggested that his online support is manufactured. I don’t think that’s the case. Click through the headlines (here, here and here), take a look at the comments and the digging (voting) histories of the users submitting them (here, here and here). They may all be acting in concert, but there’s no reason to believe these are not legitimate members — two of the three submitters signed up last summer.

But even if they are acting sincerely, this is simply not what the vast majority of users go to to Digg for. The website is at its best when it provides variety. Forerunner Slashdot has codified this as “The Omelette,” but Digg manages to create this organically. Most of the time.

To cherry pick just one comment out of the third story, here is user 9Digits throwing up his hands:

I’m an anti-war Republican, and I still find your candidate’s campaign to be goddamn annoying. If these are the type of supporters he’s got, there’s not a chance in hell I’ll vote for him.

This follows the Ronbots’ success in compelling ABC News to add their candidate to an online poll. That doesn’t bother me so much, except as ABC knew well, the poll was about to be freeped. But it also follows Charles Johnson’s decision to delist Paul from his online poll at Little Green Footballs. To whatever degree ABC News has an obligation to create a level playing field, even one that they know will be gamed, Johnson has less of one.

And yet that still says more about the general uselessness of online polls than about Paul’s supporters. Is the backlash unfair? Perhaps it would be, if they didn’t seem so prone to the same kind of vitriol that sometimes still causes trouble for their counterparts on the left.

If Paul’s supporters are willing to take the effort to game online communities not already predisposed to isolationist libertarianism they should be willing to accept the consequences. That certainly means their own ostracism — but it also risks creating the impression that Paul’s support is manufactured. And especially in politics, people don’t like being played.

The Facebook of Virginia Tech

Published by William Beutler on April 16, 2007 in Cable News, Facebook, Social Networking and Virginia Politics. 2 Comments

What happened today in Blacksburg, Virginia, surely has many thinking back to the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. But I am also reminded, in part because I have Hokie co-workers, of the 1998 killings at Thurston High School. Thurston is in Springfield, Oregon, just next door to Eugene, where I was in my freshman year at the University of Oregon.

What was first reported as loud noises soon horrifically became 24 down and three killed, counting the killer’s parents, murdered the night before. Despite my relative proximity to the crime scene, but perhaps not surprisingly, I remember it mostly through the media: The initial radio report whence I’d first heard that “gunshots rang out” at Thurston, then a friend of a friend who was there calling in to CNN’s now-defunct Talkback Live and, much later, Rolling Stone’s in-depth coverage and the Frontline documentary.

One thing we didn’t have was Facebook. Today, students with accounts who couldn’t get through to their family and friends have been using it to let people know they’re all right:

In fact, a new group was started today called I’m ok at VT, already with 1,983 members. Remember Virginia Tech (4/16/07) has 1,885. An event concurrent with this very post, Student Gathering at the Drill Field, has 99 confirmed guests. And I’m sure that I’m only scratching the surface.

ABC News has taken notice of the activity, plastering an image (below left) of Facebook on their front page and quoting one registered user (whom I couldn’t locate) taking strong exception to the administration’s handling of the initial murders:

They could have prevented most of this…shooting at 730 in WAJ, classes don’t start til 8, why couldn’t they cancel classes for the day … SOMEONE WAS SHOT AND IT TURNS OUT THEY DIED … I THINK THATS GROUNDS TO CANCEL CLASS RATHER THAN SENDING OUT AN EMAIL THAT SAYS USE CAUTION AND REPORT ANYTHING TO POLICE. They could have save almost 20 lives and 20 injuries if they just decided to cancel class right away.

Facebook is a fairly closed system, so I would normally say it wouldn’t become part of the permanent record of this event. But this event is also a criminal investigation, and it’s entirely possible the killer will have an account of his own. Or maybe a MySpace page — he wouldn’t be the first mass killer to have one.

If the rumor is true — originating on the TechSideline.com Hokie fan board (via Hot Air via Dan Riehl) that “this all started with an ex-boyfriend finding his girlfriend in bed with another guy,” would you really be surprised if he’d blogged about it first?

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