Some Things

This post is the last part of a series of posts about the Web 2.0 and its role in the American presidential election 2008. The main purpose of this series was to provide a platform for discussion among the members of our group and, in true Web 2.0 spirit, everybody else. It lead into a series of podcast episodes, this is the last episode. The series is being written for the seminar “Campaigns & Candidates” at the University of Osnabrück in the winter term 2008/2009.

In February, we gave a presentation at the 2nd Osnabrück Student Symposium, talking about the Web 2.0 and American politics. As we promised in the audio podcast, there is a video of that presentation available right now. Unfortunately it seems like the last part of our presentation is missing, but over at lernfunk.de you can still have a look at the first half of our presentation.

This project has been very interesting and a lot of fun. If you ever get the chance to give a presenation at a student symposium like this, try it! It’s well worth the work and time. We learnt a lot on many different levels, but most importantly, we still think about a lot of the topics brought up at the symposium and the seminar.

This post is part of an ongoing series of posts about the Web 2.0 and its role in the American presidential election 2008. The main purpose of this series is to provide a platform for discussion among the members of our group and, in true Web 2.0 spirit, everybody else. It will lead into a series of podcast episodes. The series is being written for the seminar “Campaigns & Candidates” at the University of Osnabrück in the winter term 2008/2009.

In this podcast we talk about our presentation at the student symposium and how we could expand on the ideas we presented.  As this is our final team effort in this project, this podcast is also a reflection on the talk and our blog posts so far. A video podcast episode of our presentation at the symposium is still forthcoming, so stay tuned.

This post is part of an ongoing series of posts about the Web 2.0 and its role in the American presidential election 2008. The main purpose of this series is to provide a platform for discussion among the members of our group and, in true Web 2.0 spirit, everybody else. It will lead into a series of podcast episodes. The series is being written for the seminar “Campaigns & Candidates” at the University of Osnabrück in the winter term 2008/2009. 

We, among other students participating in the Campaigns & Candidates seminar, are giving a presentation at a student symposium on the 14th of February at the University of Osnabrück. It will take place in the Schloss (I will try to find out in which room, might be important) and will be very interesting, so come, listen and discuss. Below you can find the abstract we wrote for this occasion.

A lot of people, from the New York Times to “Joe the Plumber”, stress that the Internet, specifically the so-called Web 2.0, really became a viable and integral part of campaigning in the 2008 election and the primaries. Some even say that Barack Obama won because of his effective use of new technology. In our presentation, we will explain what the enigmatic Web 2.0 is and why it is different from traditional media (both on- and offline). As a starting point for the discussion of the Internet’s influence on the 2008 election, we will also show examples from Web 2.0 services used by both the Republican and the Democratic campaign, as well as their supporters. Furthermore, we will have a short look at the use of the Web 2.0 in other campaigns and present a brief comparison of past attempts to harness the power of the web with what Barack Obama and his campaign did.

Comments are, as always, very welcome.

Image by Bluvalo, it was released under a GNU Free Documentation license.

This post is part of an ongoing series of posts about the Web 2.0 and its role in the American presidential election 2008. The main purpose of this series is to provide a platform for discussion among the members of our group and, in true Web 2.0 spirit, everybody else. It will lead into a series of podcast episodes. The series is being written for the seminar “Campaigns & Candidates” at the University of Osnabrück in the winter term 2008/2009.  

This is just a quick teaser for the next, longer post, but I want to share this video right now. I found it a while back, but never got around to watching it, but going through pages I had archived for reading at a later date, I stumbled upon this post on boingboing. Boingboing is blog that functions as “A Directory of Wonderful Things”, where interesting sites, stories, applications and much more from around the Internet are collected. It is a very influential, judging from the number of boingboing posts appearing on social news sites like digg or reddit.

Once and again, boingboing lets guests blog on the site and the video I want to share is in a post, written by a guest blogger. His name is Clay Shirky and he works, among other things, as an adjunct professor at NYU in the Interactive Telecommunications Program. His post shows, that the Democrats are not the only ones profiting from “netroots” activists. The Dear Mr. Obama video is very effective on an emotional level, as of now has been watched by more people than the famous “Obama Girl” video (13.5 mil <-> 12.9 mil, although Dear Mr. Obama was posted over a year later) and still didn’t get the same attention “Obama Girl” or the will.i.am Yes We Can Music Video. Shirky explains this seemingly strange development, by referring to the homophily of the Republican blogosphere. Conservative blogs usually only link to conservative blogs and so on. As long as the story doesn’t get picked up somewhere else, it might be hugely popular in these circles, but unknown to the public. This is also mentioned in Netroots Rising by Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox, who describe the conversation in the conservative blogosphere as merely repeating what Republican politicians and conservative journalists say.

So, without further ado, here is the video:

Image by Bluvalo, it was released under a GNU Free Documentation license.

This post is part of an ongoing series of posts about the Web 2.0 and its role in the American presidential election 2008. The main purpose of this series is to provide a platform for discussion among the members of our group and, in true Web 2.0 spirit, everybody else. It will lead into a series of podcast episodes. The series is being written for the seminar “Campaigns & Candidates” at the University of Osnabrück in the winter term 2008/2009.

Welcome to the first ever post of the “Campaigning 2.0″ series. These posts are meant as a discussion of our topic, that will hopefully lead us to conclusions that we can present in our podcast series. This first post is a short introduction of the “2.0″ in “Campaigning 2.0″, a collection of sources we might be able to use and a starting point of a discussion on where we should go with this topic, how we can incorporate other topics and how we should go about doing this whole thing. But first, the most important question of all: Why should we talk about this?

A lot of people say, that the 2008 election was in many ways different from the elections before. For the first time, the Internet became a viable and important part of the campaigns. According to many commentators, especially Barack Obama used new technology effectively. His use of technology seems to be a deciding factor for the outcome, not only of the presidential race and, perhaps even more importantly, the primaries. Last night, I stumbled upon a documentary on N-TV (reruns are pretty frequent, it seems), in which an American TV journalist said, that the Obama camp treated them (the TV journalists) as if they were old-fashioned and outdated. She said something along the lines of “They were much more interested in writing SMS, than talking to us.” But there’s more. While SMS are already old-fashioned themselves, the Obama camp seemingly had a presence everywhere on the web. But not only Obama used the Internet and its many communities, his opponent John McCain did as well and to this day Ron Paul has a strong following online (as with all links to Wikipedia in this post, this link is meant as an illustration for curious readers, rather than a source), to the point that he turned into a an Internet meme of sorts (he gets mentioned in this 5-part webcomic series for example) . So, it seems like there is a lot to talk about. Was the web really a deciding factor? How did the candidates use the Internet for their campaigns? The Internet has been around for a while, why is it suddenly becoming so important? That last question is something we should probably get out of the way first, say, in the next paragraph.
(weiterlesen…)