Sarah Lai Stirland at Wired’s Threat Level, reporting on tech Gadgetry at The Democratic National Convention:
It’s not only C-Span and the television networks that will cover the convention this year. Bloggers, video-loggers, and even party delegates themselves are promising to provide their take on the events at the Democratic National Convention. This could be the most blogged, v-logged, and photographed convention in the nation’s history.
Even C-Span, the square, lumbering public affairs cable network is getting interactive: It’s making its convention footage searchable and embeddable online. It’s augmenting its old boob-tube camera-on-a-tripod footage with raw footage shot from cell-phones and streaming online video with Qik. (The network teamed up with the Washington DC firm New Media Strategies to create its convention hub.) The hub is also aggregating blog and Twitter postings about the convention.
The Democratic National Convention Committee is itself encouraging independent-spirited coverage of its convention. Its providing video-uploading stations for v-loggers in the convention hall. It also plans to communicate with and ask for feedback from attendees with text messages, says Brooke Colangelo, the DNCC’s director of technology in an interview.
GigaOm’s Brian McConnell on What Obama’s Text Message Campaign Reveals:
Barack Obama’s now-famous text-message announcement of his VP pick reveals something about the candidate that should really worry the Republicans. What it reveals is not that he’s a smart technologist. If he was, he would have known that sending 10 million SMS messages at the same time is pretty much guaranteed not to work; it’s not designed for that. [WaPo stories here.] What it does reveal is that this is probably the smartest marketing campaign we’ve seen in decades.
It’s well known that Obama’s campaign is sophisticated about collecting and cross-referencing voter contacts and using this information to identify two especially important populations: new voters and persuadable voters…
What impressed me about the text-message campaign was that it was an effective device for collecting millions of voter contacts, while also signaling that Obama connects with young people. This won’t do much to persuade 50-something independents in the Midwest, but this is the type of marketing campaign that will get young people to register and to get to the polls. Here are just a few examples of things the campaign can now do with these phone numbers:
- Conduct non-intrusive surveys (e.g. are you registered to vote yet? what zip code are you in?)
- On a state-by-state basis, send reminder messages about the cutoff dates for voter registration and link to registration forms
- On a state-by-state basis, tell people to mail in their ballots to vote absentee
- Invite people to campaign events in their area code
- Remind people to get out and vote on Election Day (believe it or not, some people forget, although you’d need to be hiding in a cave to miss this one)
- Promote down-ballot candidates on a zipcode-by-zipcode basis
The first two items alone are probably worth a lot of votes.
The WSJ’s Amy Chozick sees significance in the message’s 3 a.m. arrival, “just a coincidence or is it a subtle jab at former rival Hillary Clinton?” The Trail’s Anne E. Kornblut and Ed O’Keefe note that it was intentionally timed to miss newspapers’ Saturday edition