Word on the Tweet is a logical extension of On Call’s sister publication and my former vocation, The Blogometer. When we started in the winter of 2005, the blogosphere had just recently gone mainstream, largely thanks to its impact on the 2004 presidential campaign. Here in the winter of 2009, it’s the Twitterverse which has only just hit the big time.

And this is an even easier call for Hotline to decide on covering: The Blogometer covers the blogosphere as an amateur/activist extension of the Beltway media, but no member of Congress has time to sit down and write a blog. Twitter is different: after all, no less a politician than the president of the United States is an admitted BlackBerry addict.

And where most members would formerly have staffers maintain their Twitter account — if they had one at all — more and more are following the lead of Texas Rep. John Culberson and actually tweeting themselves. This participation by actual sitting congresscritters could be a great deal more entertainment, as writer Evan McMorris-Santoro hints in this disclaimer:

Note: all tweets are reproduced exactly as they appeared, grammar/spelling warts and all.

Exactly as it should be. For the announcement video starring McMorris-Santoro and my old boss John Mercurio, click here:

The website debuted in late summer 2008 and mostly featured writers about my age and no more than one or two degrees of Kevin Bacon away, writing mostly about whatever they wanted. I thought the project had merit: as someone of a center-right disposition who listens to college music, watches art films and reads literary fiction, I wanted it to succeed. The best explanation for why Culture11 was important, I thought, was delivered last November by features editor Conor Friedersdorf on Bloggingheads.tv. However, just because I wanted it to succeed did not mean that I thought that it did, or even that I read it very much.

Likewise, the name was a definite stumbling block.* I’m not sure what Culture11 was supposed to mean, but it had the unfortunate connotation for me of 9/11, which in turn made me think the site was supposed to be or comment upon something like “a cultural 9/11″ and I just didn’t understand. At least something like “Slate” or “Salon” conjures something: a place for writing and a place for talking, respectively. And while “culture” is interesting, it always seems less so when one calls it that. I don’t know why, but let me know if you do.

While it’s hardly the only journalism concern cutting back or going under this week, it is probably attracting the most discussion of any right now. Which means it’s high time for a roundup:

First off, Culture11 founder David Kuo, in his farewell post:

We raised a certain amount of money last year predicated on the assumption we would raise more money last year. Then the Fall’s fall occurred and we stretched money as long and far as we could without incurring any debts. With no new money in the door the board decided the most prudent thing to do was suspend business operations.

From NYC-based Patrol Magazine:

There were “signs,” says one source who spoke to a Culture11 editor yesterday, but the announcement was a shock. The financial backers lost money in the downturn, and suddenly decided the expensive Culture11 needed to be profitable. (The site has, in its five months of operation, only occasionally displayed small ads.) How things proceeded to an overnight shutdown, we don’t know. If you worked at C11 or know more, feel free to share.

One-off contributor and Culture11 fan Will Collins:

Culture11 was a pretty special publication. The editors gave new writers a shot, published authors from across the ideological spectrum, and provided something of a one-stop shop for great blogging. But beyond all that, I felt close to the writers, who always did their level best to respond to interesting comments, reply to our emails, and even solicit reader submissions. So much of this new media bullshit is hype and snake oil salesmanship, but at Culture11, technology actually enhanced the relationship between publication and audience.

Another dedicated reader, blogging under the name Freddie:

If you Google “Culture11″ you’ll find a ton of entries that say “My article at Culture11″. That’s because, in addition to tons of content from established (and David Brooks approved!) writers, the editors went out of their way to find young or undiscovered talent and give them a forum to write in. It made for a much livelier and more complete discussion, and was a real credit to the imagination of the architects of the site and to the willingness of the editors to let quality rule and give whoever was honest and well-spoken a shot.

The man who defies political categorization, Andrew Sullivan:

I have a feeling that Culture 11 will one be remembered in the same way that Seven Days, the briefly brilliant New York City magazine that Adam Moss edited in the late 80s, is now remembered. One day, a conservative journal will emerge that is able to break from the stifling, clammy orthodoxy of today’s post-Buckley National Review and the often unhinged neocon catechism of the Weekly Standard. When it does, its editors will be able to look back and say that Culture 11 opened up the frontier.

And the aforementioned Josh Treviño:

Culture11’s subject matter was perfect for, say, summer 2000: heavy on pop and principles, light on policy and prescriptions. But it launched in summer 2008, when the national conversation was focused on war and economics. In that sense, it was marginalized from the start, and stayed that way: today, for example, the single largest item on its front page concerns the Culture11 “American Idol Watch Party.” This may be good fun, but it’s not particularly in touch with the national zeigeist — nor even the zeitgeist of those who read online publications like Culture11. All this said, it’s reasonable to assume that in the fullness of time, those zeigeists would come around: perhaps in spring 2010, the national mood will be ready to reflect upon the conservatism of reality television.

This probably explains a lot why I didn’t read the site much. And there are bigger problems with the project as undertaken, which Mike Riggs at the City Paper explains at some length.

It’s always seemed to me that a center-right pop culture website would have to be incidentally so, just as Slate doesn’t usually make a point of being center-left. Which brings me back to my old lament about the state of conservative journalism.

A change of culture, ironically, will have to take place for that to happen, and I don’t see that just yet.

P.S. In a post at the still slightly active Culture11 blog, Joe Carter graciously notes my comment on the name of the site and explains to my satisfaction just what the name was all about.

___
*Prior to launch, I had suggested an alternate name to an editor I didn’t know too well. The original name was originally titled “Liberty Wire”, which sounds like an Associated Press for Ron Paul voters; my idea was “Redhead”, a nod to its espoused conservative, intellectual and cultural inclinations. Someone later pointed out the dot com for that name went to a porn site (a claim I cannot verify this morning, although I promise I have tried).

I say “typically” because Yglesias’ blogging history has taken a few turns more than most bloggers of comparable influence and readership. I wrote about this early on at Blog P.I., when Yglesias gave up simultaneous blogging duties to focus on just one and write a book, the recently published “Heads in the Sand”. I praised the move, but when he changed sites once more just a few months later, I wasn’t inclined to devote another post to it.

Yglesias is of course far from the only blogger to have changed blogs more than once at this point in blog history. I’ve done it myself a few times. At the top levels, Instapundit and Atrios both eventually migrated away from Blogspot [though as a commenter notes, Duncan still uses Blogger], and Reynolds recently moved his site again to Pajamas Media. But that’s nothing compared to Yglesias, a veritable rolling stone even if he is far from a complete unknown.

In order to give a fuller picture of what I’m talking about, I’ve created a handy chart in Keynote that shows at which URLs he has written his blog(s) and when:

This is the small version, of course. Click on the image to visit my Flickr account and see it full-size. For specific dates and the explanation for that short, unlabeled “50% red” rectangle, let’s go below the fold. Otherwise, check back after another four or five Yglesias blogs, when I’ll probably have another update.

The Full Matthew Yglesias Timeline

• January 10, 2002
  Launches yglesias.blogspot.com from Cambridge, MA.
• July 15, 2002
  Ends yglesias.blogspot.com on account of technical difficulties.
  Launches matthewyglesias.com.
• June 2003
  Graduates Harvard, moves to the District, becomes fellow at The American Prospect. Yglesias may in fact begin writing for the magazine’s Tapped blog at this time, but the blog would not have bylines for several more months. Because I’m not sure when he started blogging, I made this section of the bar 50% white, which is to say pink. [Update: Yglesias writes at his blog that he was, in fact, blogging without a byline during these months.]
• October 02, 2003
  Tapped bylines begin, and Yglesias is already contributing to prospect.org/weblog.
• June 28, 2004
  Ends matthewyglesias.com on account of technical difficulties.
  Launches yglesias.typepad.com.
• May 31, 2005
  Launches new blog on Josh Marshall’s TPM Cafe, specifically at http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com.
• August 30, 2006
  Closes his Typepad blog, ceases writing for TPM Cafe and hangs it up at The Prospect. Relaunches matthewyglesias.com.
• April 23, 2007
  Shutters matthewyglesias.com to join The Atlantic, blogging at http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com.
• August 10, 2008
  Following the announcement on July 15, Yglesias starts blogging at http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org.

Last week I traded a series of Twitter “@ messages” with Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor, blogger and media critic. The first one asked:

Maybe you know. Q: why doesn’t Politico have a Ben Smith for the White House? Bets on whether they’ll get one if Obama wins?

He’s got a point. The Politico lists the organization’s designated blogs on its front-page in this order:

Ben Smith on Dems, Jonathan Martin on GOP, Shenanigans on Gossip, The Scorecard on Campaigns, The Crypt on Congress, Michael Calderone on Media, James Kotecki on whatever.

The Politico is literally blogging about “whatever” but not about “the White House.” So I guessed, in fewer than 140 characters:

Smith-Martin are a package deal, covering both primaries. Politico: more campaign, less governing? But that’s a great idea.

Prof. Rosen suggested in turn:

How about a PI post? Politico columnists for the Dems, Reps, Congress, Media, Gossip, Campaign trail, but no White House?

To which I replied:

Mike Allen certainly covers the WH. But not in blog form, true. Have friends down there, so I can ask. Possible PI post indeed.

And so I did, getting in touch with a half-dozen or so current and former Politico writers, asking for their thoughts on background. I also made an effort to get VandeHarris on the record, but they did not return e-mails by my less-than-rigorously self-enforced deadline.

So here’s what I could piece together:

• When the Politico launched a little under two years ago, the presidential campaign offered the biggest opportunity first. Politico was first conceived as a newspaper to be called Capitol Leader — “Yet Another Newspaper Aimed at Capitol Hill” as the Washington Post had it. The Executive branch wasn’t even in the picture until John Harris and Jim VandeHei were.
• As noted above, the newspaper that did emerge hired the much-acclaimed, much-accosted former White House reporter for Time and WaPo, Mike Allen. He writes big stories, is in good with Drudge, and produces content on a daily basis like everyone else. The format of his output is a secondary matter.
• Most everyone I talked to seemed to assume that no matter who won the presidential election, Politico would increase their White House coverage after the election. After all, it’s the logical continuation of the campaign stories they are covering now. Some said they thought a blog would be involved, and no one volunteered the opposite.

One thing that occurs to me is that other major newspapers have blogs covering the White House as a beat, as do regional newspapers with Washington correspondents, but none of them command major audiences (even when they resort to Olympics T&A).

People care about the big stories that emanate from the White House, and they’ll get that from every newspaper and every political blog inside the Beltway, but few are looking for the day-to-day minutiae. Bush is a lame duck, interest has waned even in some of the bigger stories, and other national newspapers have moved their White House correspondents to the campaign trail.

The answer given reminds me a bit of the response I got in the summer of 2006 when I first wrote about the opening for a “Republican ActBlue”, viz., just wait. It may be worth noting, the person who did finally create one was not yet working on it at that time.

So, yes, the Politico will probably have a White House blog next year. Whether Politico writes the one that Jay Rosen is hoping for remains to be seen.

Photograph by David Boyle in DC via Flickr.

Evidence that Slatecard, bootstrapped project of Republican consultant David All (and web developer Sendhil Panchadsaram), is “the Republican ActBlue” can be found throughout mainstream political coverage over the past six months. Here are just a few:

Campaigns and Elections:

Then why the development of small donor online vehicles, including the Democratic ActBlue and Republican Slatecard, that aim to raise small donations on the congressional level? Both tools are growing substantially, and several candidates for Congress are highlighted on those sites.

USA Today:

“Your average online donor is an impulse buyer,” said David All, a Washington, D.C.-based consultant who last year founded Slatecard.com, which he hopes to be a Republican answer to ActBlue. So far, the site’s donors have raised more than $5,000 for GOP presidential candidates.

Wall Street Journal [$]:

Mr. All, the Republican consultant, started a rival site last October called SlateCard.com. It has raised just $300,000. “What I’m finding is a lot of Republican campaigns are just hiring college kids or using their son who has a Facebook account,” said the 28-year-old Mr. All. “They don’t understand what this is all about.”

Human Events:

Slatecard aims to raise money for Republican candidates in the same way that ActBlue has for Democrats. Slatecard lets users create profiles (“slatecards”) for candidates they support and then raise money by donating to that candidate and passing it on to friends, family members, co workers — anyone — through blogs, emails, and social networking groups.

Wired:

“If you read the statute, the result is not surprising,” said Don McGahn, an attorney who advises Slatecard, the Republicans’ answer to ActBlue. “However, when they passed the statute, there wasn’t even the internet … what it really shows is that the way to fix this is to pass legislation to update the Matching Payment Act .”

While Slatecard is more elegant, interactive and transparent than its counterparts, it seems that All’s sometimes controversial self-promotion has made the lion’s share of difference, especially as he has succeeded in persuading local congressional campaigns to use his site, sometimes making it their exclusive online fundraising platform.

But if you need further evidence that Slatecard is the take-all (no pun intended) winner of the online GOP fundraising tool primary, consider the image at right, taken from the sidebar of leading Republican activist site RedState. It’s a Slatecard widget encouraging contributions to the McCain camapign.

It’s noteworthy not just for being there but for what it replaces: Nearly a year ago, RedState announced it was backing one of the future also-rans, Big Red Tent:

Patrick Ruffini has said more than once that the right needs to stop building what the left already has and instead build the next big thing. As part of heading in that direction, please let me introduce you to the Big Red Tent. We didn’t build it, but we’re actively supporting it.

There is more irony here: Ruffini is chiefly responsible for the other runner-up, Rightroots, and RedState’s Erick Erickson was party to a minor internecine fight with All during the Republican primary season. To back All’s Slatecard over Big Red Tent may have been a difficult choice, but considering how the other two have languished, it may have been no choice at all.

Update: David writes to say that 48 candidates now have used Slatecard exclusively for online fundraising, though some have already lost their primary or special elections. That’s impressive, especially for a site not yet nine months old.

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…

I should preface all of this with a caveat: These observations are simply what I found when I visited over the past week. It’s possible there are oversights in my summary, and if there are I will update this post. In true Mystery Shopper style, I didn’t discuss my testing process with any of those involved, so this should not be taken as a fully reported piece. There are probably good explanations for many of the problems I encountered, and if they are given, I will gladly link to them in an update.

Choosing a candidate to receive my small donations was not difficult: I am not only providing outside counsel to the Fred Thompson campaign through my employer, New Media Strategies, but I am also a FDT supporter. Thompson’s consistent federalist philosophy being a large component of my enthusiasm about his candidacy, where I could, I termed my group or slate “The Frederalist Society.”

With that out of the way, here are my thoughts on each in turn, followed by a conclusion. As always, YMMV.

RIGHTROOTS

Because Rightroots is the oldest, arguably best-known and first to go live (again) this summer, that’s where I started:

• The website is very simple, and not difficult to navigate. From the main page, one can click through to “Candidates & Races” or perform a search, enter the amount of money you want to donate and proceed to its Amazon.com-style checkout.
• Rightroots includes a link to the candidates’ homepage, which is nice, but that’s about it for any information about the candidates. One pretty much has to know who they are supporting before they get there.
• Using Rightroots, I donated $5 to Friends of Fred Thompson. This went fairly smoothly, up to the point where I had to enter a credit card. The confirmation number on the back of my card has just three digits, while the form demanded exactly four. So I put a zero in front of the digits, and that did the trick. It would have been nice if it would recognize the different security systems for each of the major cards.
• The front page of Rightroots also lists “hot slates” (groupings of candidates) but it doesn’t list figures for how much each have raised. These slates were evidently compiled by Rightroots itself, and so does not answer one of my main criticisms from last year — that it does not allow for users to compile and promote their own slates. I was told this feature would be included next time, but for whatever reason, it didn’t happen. Consequently, this was also the one site where I was unable to set up my “Frederalist Society” slate.
• Now, the selections for some of these slates make good sense — “100% No Earmarks” is described on that page as:
  

  Honoring House Republicans with a perfect 100% voting record against pork barrel earmarks in the 110th Congress, as recently scored by the Club for Growth.

  Nice. On the other hand, one slate merely collects all of the Republican presidential contenders — well, except for Alan Keyes; I doubt that bothers you. But I also doubt very many people want to donate to all of the White House candidates.

• There is a “Donate All” button for each slate, but it’s hidden at the bottom, underneath the last candidate’s picture — it is not flush with the other, similarly-designed donation buttons.
• More nitpicks — Rightroots’ poll, promoted on the front page, is out of service. Try voting, and you get this:
  

  An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

  The good news is, the error message goes on to detail instructions for fixing the error. I don’t do code, but if I could get terminal access, even I could probably take care of that. Also, there is no button to view the results without voting.

• Along the same lines, I also got this certificate warning at one point:


• But I really dig the link to the FEC query for Rightroots’ own reports. The others should follow this example.
• I gotta give Rightroots this: It is back. The website languished after the November ‘06 midterms, which I complained about in January, drawing strong objections from some of those involved. I wasn’t sure that it would actually return, but it certainly has done that.
• Unfortunately, the follow-through seems to be half-hearted. Nothing has been added to the News section since August, and it’s been just over a month since anything was added to the blog (there are 5 posts total). It’s not clear to me why there are separate sections for “News” and “Blog.” This reminds me of typical campaign websites, which have had a press release section since the dawn of online politicking, then added blogs separately when they became the norm. Why not put everything in one place?
• RightRoots is simple, but it’s too simple. The site lacks any compelling reason to use it. (Really, not even a widget?) There is nothing that makes the site sticky, or compels you to come back.

BIG RED TENT

Next, the one I know the least about:

• My relative ignorance about Big Red Tent probably has something to do with the fact that its creators are based in Austin while the others are inside the Beltway. On the Internet, physical location is of much less of a consideration, but it still hasn’t received much coverage. It does have the official backing of RedState. But I haven’t seen them write about it since it first went up.
• This site is quite a bit different than the other two, starting with the sea of white compared to the others’ dark backgrounds. I like that. I like the logo, too — it’s the best of the three, I think. Moreover, it also has the best name, communicating its intent to build one large, happy GOP family.
• Otherwise the site is a chore to navigate. Why does Big Red Tent not have a “Sign up here” button on the front page? Why can’t I click on the logo to return to the homepage? Rightroots and Slatecard offer both.
• When you go to sign up and give money, the form asks for your blog URL (sure, why not) as well as my IM screen name (hmm) and cell phone number (really?). There are not required, but it would be nice to know why they were asking. This reminds me of the website Radiohead built to sell their latest album, “In Rainbows.” Am I opting into future text messages? I know people who just elected to grab it off BitTorrent instead. I don’t think that quite works for Big Red Tent.
• The reliance on Drupal means I was assigned a convoluted password, rather than being able to choose my own. Maybe I should write down every single password for every single site where I’ve created accounts, but I don’t. So this bugs me.
• Big Red Tent is not free of bugs, either: I kept getting this when I was logged in:
  

  “The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.”

  Hitting “reload” did take care of the issue, but it happened a couple more times thereafter.

• Alone among the three, Big Red Tent has a Twitter account. Great! Unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated in approaching two months:
  
  

  In that case, it’s fortunate that it isn’t featured on the main page (where it probably should be), where it would signal to all that there isn’t much activity here.

• Big Red Tent offers a widget that I didn’t test, but looks attractive enough to place in my sidebar. However, it seems to be fairly wide, and I doubt it would fit in everyone’s sidebar. (But I certainly approve of the fact that the example widget shows Thompson at the top.)
• Is Big Red Tent trying to do too much? Take for example BRT TV — a promised series of video interviews, hosted by Gravatt and Jackson’s Patriot Group colleague Jill Warren, that has no third video (really second, as the first is an introduction). Again, the lack of follow-through isn’t promising.
• More questions: Why does signup page still ask if I want to be notified when they launch? Seems to me like they’ve already launched. Why can I click into Groups at the top of the page, but not individual Slates? Isn’t “Group” just another word for category from the blog? Where is the blog? The Field Report is helpful, but I could use more of it. I also can’t find the Stump Speeches feature now, so I can’t link to it.
• Stump Speeches, Slates, Groups, Files, Contact lists, Guestbooks, Inboxes... help! I’m utterly lost. The confusing array of features reminds me of the late, unmourned HotSoup and its “issue loops.”
• At least you can create your own slate. As Gravatt explained to Matt Lewis in a Town Hall interview this summer:
  

  We were faced with a decision: Who will the PAC support? We only liked two options. Option 1 is for Brad and I to decide, and Option 2 is to let others decide. We decided Option 2 would be best for a PAC with an online community.

  That’s right on, although it doesn’t seem that there is much of a community so far. That said, at least it offers the possibility, which Rightroots does not.

• I concluded my experiment with Big Red Tent feeling both overwhelmed and underwhelmed. It’s great that there are several functions, but it seems there are several too many. Ultimately, I felt like maybe there was something going on that I just didn’t get.

SLATECARD

And the newest kid on the block:

• Slatecard had both the longest incubation period and was the last to launch. This owes something to principal David All’s penchant for self-promotion, which may bug others (including some at Rightroots) but probably serves Slatecard well.
• At Slatecard, the minimum donation is $10, unlike the others, where I was able to give just $5. Credit card processing fees do take a big bite out of proceeds, so I understand this, and there are probably very few who can afford to give no more than $9.99. On the upside, Slatecard alone lets you check a box to make your donation recurring monthly, if you’d like.
• On the downside, unlike the other websites, my phone number was required. I would kind of like to know why.
• Otherwise I had no problems signing up or making a donation. If there are bugs in the site, I didn’t encounter them. It was the smoothest experience I had at any of the three.
• On the other hand, why isn’t there a search function on the website? The other two do offer this capability.
• The front page of Slatecard shows you who’s “hot” — individual candidates and user-created slates — and includes dollar figures. That’s cool. The non-disclosure from the other sites I believe is a holdover from traditional campaigns, where if you’re not sucking up the dollars (and therefore sucking), you don’t want that public. All puts his cards on the table, and I respect that.
• Speaking of which, All has led an e-mail drive to raise $75,000 overall in the first month since going live. He didn’t quite make it, but it was very close — and within days, the $75,000 goal was met.
• Slatecard offers widgets, of course, and they are the best-designed of the bunch. In fact, if you’re on a Leopardized Mac, All has even explained how you can put one in your Dashboard. (Note: This is a Leopard feature; one could do this with Big Red Tent’s widget as well.)
• True to All’s love of all things social networking, candidate pages link to each candidate’s official pages on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and the like. Each is represented by the socnet’s logo, but you have to mouseover to know that they go anywhere. Slatecard links to candidate official sites as well, but it’s just a clip art image of a house — I got it the second time, but it would make a lot more sense if I could just see the URL as on Rightroots.
• Because Slatecard has the best pages for individual candidates, it paradoxically left me wanting even more. For one thing, the biographical summaries are clearly copied from older versions of each candidate’s Wikipedia page. I can tell because I know Wikipedia style, but it doesn’t identify the source.
• And these pages would be improved if you could add comments. Slatecard gives the impression of offering greater interactivity than the others, when in fact Big Red Tent so far allows for the most feedback.
• Perhaps the most unique aspect of the site is the ability to add “issue badges” to candidates you support. As much as I’d like to sneer, “we don’t need no stinkin’ badges,” I dig this:
  
  

  Naturally, I added the “Federalism” badge to Thompson’s page. It makes sense that you can only add a badge if you have donated to a particular candidate. However, I was only able to add one badge, and the site doesn’t say how many added the same badge as I did. It would also be nice if you could organize by badges and call up a list of all the candidates whom users think they describe. And would it be too difficult to let users create and upload their own?

• This feature also includes idiosyncracies that are all All — one of the issue badges is for “Supports Net Neutrality,” a pet issue of All’s, and something only Mike Huckabee does. As Ruffini has noted separately, it’s essentially a lefty issue. Sure, you can add the “Opposes Net Neutrality” badge… but why is “Support” represented by Pac Man and “Oppose” is represented by Blinky (the red ghost villain)? An annoying editorial tic.



• Perhaps a more serious issue — the badge for “Defeat Radical Islam” puts the Universal No symbol over the Star and Crescent. The war against radical Islam is not, the last time I checked, a war against all Muslims. But that’s what the badge implies.
• Most promisingly, the frequently updated blog announces milestones and upgrades, and has done so consistently since Slatecard launched.

All of these sites are good enough — that is, they do what they advertise. It’s just a baseline, though these websites are still in their infancies (maybe some are toddlers). After tinkering around with each, Slatecard emerges the winner in my book so far. It’s by no means perfect, but it seems more thought-out than its rivals. It offers some unique features that are still fairly intuitive, and it appears to be the most active. While there hasn’t been much activity on either Rightroots or Big Red Tent since their respective launches, I presume both parties imagined the sites would be self-perpetuating and requiring minimal upkeep. At least Rightroots doesn’t promise much more than it delivers; Big Red Tent was more ambitious but almost feels abandoned.

Most of my judgments above are fairly subjective, so I did try to include one objective (if imperfect) metric — how often each site is linked to by third-party websites. Since BlogPulse advertises this capability (unlike IceRocket) I fed the URLs for each into their Trend Tool, selected feedback for the last three months, controlled for possible alternatives (ABCPAC.com and BigRedTent.com both redirect to their respective main sites), and here’s what I found:

Rightroots has had the highest highs, Slatecard is buzzier now, but thanks to an apparent spike in attention last month, Rightroots is hanging in there. I presume that All’s frequent promotion for his project is propping up his numbers a bit. Big Red Tent was in the mix when it launched, but never received as much attention and has since dropped off significantly. (Note: I also fed the names of each site into BlogPulse; the Trend Tool returned more spikes for each, but the pattern was the same.)

Although there are many differences between the sites, they are not so far apart that, given an update or two, Rightroots or Big Red Tent couldn’t usurp Slatecard as the go-to site. But perhaps the most important thing about Slatecard is that, like ActBlue but unlike its Republican counterparts, it has already made the transition to being the primary fundraising mechanism of a political candidate. That’s VA-01 hopeful Kevin O’Neill. So far he’s raised nearly $65,000 — so All should definitely be thanking him for helping reach that $75,000 goal. Of course, candidate support is just what a site like this needs to gain credibility in Republican campaigns, and it’s no secret that brick-and-mortar GOP consultants are warier of using the web than their Democratic counterparts.

I salute each one of these websites, and their creators, for doing what they are doing. I hope they all continue to upgrade, borrow features from each other and compete for online GOP fundraising supremacy. And there’s no reason why there needs to be just one; perhaps they can all find a niche. I hope they do.

Disclosure: As previously noted, I’m with Fred, but that merely influenced the direction of my extraordinarily modest contributions. Otherwise, I do know some of those involved. I consider David All a friend, Patrick Ruffini a friendly acquaintance, and while I have not met Mike Turk in person, we do sometimes work together behind the scenes in the Thompson camp. None of them knew I was writing this post, and I doubt that any of them will be entirely happy with it.

Democratic candidates for federal office have seen more than $25 million come through the web site ActBlue — some of which will eventually flow to the Democratic National Committee for use during the general election. Republicans, meanwhile, have seen just a tiny ripple of activity on the ABC PAC web site — $385 raised for the presidential candidates to date — which is supposed to be ActBlue’s direct competition.

Sure, at one time it was supposed to be. But as this blog and other blogs have pointed out, it’s never had the kind of support such that it should actually be spoken of in the same sentence. Not to mention that several journalists, including Mosk’s colleague Chris Cillizza, have (apparently ignorantly) misrepresented what ActBlue means to different Democratic candidates.

Mosk’s brief report is of a piece with this, not knowing or bothering to differentiate between the two websites. Is it fair to point out that Democrats are doing better with their independent online fundraising tools? Absolutely. Is it fair to compare ActBlue’s total fundraising figures over three cycles compared to ABC’s (admittedly underwhelming) year in existence? Not without explaining the situation, it’s not.

But it gets worse:

Now there is a new effort to change that. R. Rebecca Donatelli, a pioneer of Internet fundraising who help raise some of the nation’s first online dollars for John McCain in 2000, has revealed she and partner Michael Palmer are working on a new, and she hopes improved, version of ABC PAC to launch this fall. While she continues to work on behalf of McCain, she said she is optimistic the improvements to ABC PAC will help all of the Republican candidates. Given the numbers they are posting on the site right now, it would be tough to make things worse.

This “new effort,” as Mosk doesn’t adequately explain, is a second go at the same operation by the same person responsible for ABC’s ineffectiveness. Worse, though, Mosk is apparently unaware of other new ventures by GOP activists in the same space. Even before Mosk’s posting, there were two new efforts gearing up to do same thing:

• Big Red Tent, created by a couple of Austin GOP consultants, supported by RedState
• Slatecard, created by DC GOP “modern media” evangelist David All, still yet to launch

Both sites have yet to prove themselves, sure. But considering that Mr. Mosk was moved to write a post about ABC PAC, isn’t this worth an correction? Or better yet — another post?

Whatever happens to Open Left, it won’t be like HotSoup. [AP Reporter Ron] Fournier and company had no idea what to do with an online community or even how to build a website and no clear idea who their audience was. These guys don’t have that problem. I think the better analogy is HuffPo — that website is very successful, but it’s not quite what Arianna originally envisioned. The netroots will come to the table, and probably so will the offline activist orgs. Campaign professionals, not so much.

Not enough for you? See the whole thing here. For my thoughts on the (apparently defunct) disaster called HotSoup, see here.

It’s grade-A YouTube cheesecake for sure, but it also helps that the R&B parody lyrics effectively deploy its political references, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that they also have that so-bad-it’s-good quality:

You’re into border security
Let’s break this border between you and me

But not everyone is smitten with Obama girl. From the comments:

This video is the nail on Obama’s coffin. The Republicans will have a field day with this trash. I hope someone has the good sense to yank it. It is disrespectful and insulting to a serious candidate. Bill Clinton is still stuck with his womanizing legacy.

Well… maybe if this came from Blue State Digital, and not a video-blogging version of Wonkette. As with many a YouTube comment section, the best comments, are often the ones that make the least sense:

I hope you Omabmagirl gets kicked out of temple. Also I want this spot off youtue. This spot slanders, ombama and is a way the other contenders might get a leg up. SHAME ON OMAMAGIRL. SHAME. You have gave you your intregty to make yourself fame for yourself.

That may or may not be the case, but still you have gave you your watching to make yourself comment for this video.

No category such as “faith/religion”? If you say so. Not only has Sen. Obama has faced unfair but persistent questions about his faith, but the entire Democratic Party has been trying since 2004 (at least) to demonstrate that Republicans don’t have a lock on “moral values.” Sure, it’s just the initial launch of a website intended for those who already support Obama, but it’s still worth asking how they let this one get by.

And while it certainly is easy to nitpick and second-guess someone else’s hard work, I still have to wonder: If “This Campaign is About You,” then why not provide a box for you to fill in your own most important issue?