Blog P.I.

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.