Strange Criticism

Oct 02 2007 Published by under Craziness, Miscellany, Technology, The Internet

(Cross-posted at TechPresident)

I’m used to being criticized by liberals for all manner of atrocities allegedly committed by the GOP in furtherance of its goals, but this one has to be the strangest thing I have seen in a while.

But the campaigns of the Republican Presidential candidates have so far managed to write emails so indecipherable, or more likely, so poorly formatted, that the Google’s AdWords system can’t come up with any relevant ads for them. The right sidebar that usually holds half a dozen Google Ads is instead completely blank.

Yup, you heard that right. We’re now being attacked because our e-mail actually prevents Google from spamming you with lame ads for cheesy t-shirts and stuff. We are somehow negligent in our adherence to HTML standards because we prevent Google from making money off of you.

Hillary is praised because her e-mails are so good you can get your ads for Jack Bauer t-shirts, a shocking secret coffee companies don’t want you to know, and an Obama bumper sticker. Mitt and Fred, however, are supposed to feel bad that their subscribers are denied such conveniences.

Wow! I thought I had heard a lot of odd charges leveled at me, but this one is truly bizarre.

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Google Radio? Who Knew?

May 14 2007 Published by under Business, Miscellany, Technology

There’s been a lot of chatter about Google’s ever expanding array of services. Things like Google Analytics and Google Groups made sense for an Internet operation. More and more often, however, I am seeing Google pop up in places I would never expect them.

A few weeks ago, I attended the National Association of Broadcasters annual show to serve on a panel about Internet politics with Joe Trippi, Jeff Jarvis, Hugh Hewitt, and others. While I was there, I took some time to wander through their exhibit hall.

As I round a corner in the “radio automation” section of the massive exhibit space, I spy a booth with the familiar blue, red, green and yellow logo. I step up, and am immediately rushed. The booth, it appears, is there to push the SS32 radio automation system. What does Google have to do with radio? Got me. Is this all part of their plan for world domination? Possibly, but who knows.

I had a sudden image of the praetorians chasing Sandra Bullock after she discovered the little pi symbol on the otherwise innocuous Mozart’s Ghost. I figured it was best to leave the other questions unasked…

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More From Politics Online

Mar 16 2007 Published by under Bloggers, Candidates, Democrats, Elections, Operatives, Politics, Republicans, The Internet

I was planning to do more live blogging from POLC yesterday, but the breakout sessions were in fairly small rooms and I ended up standing most of the day. That’s not terribly conducive to breaking out the laptop.

Morning Plenary Sessions

At any rate, day one was pretty decent. The first panel on using off-the-shelf business software in a campaign was almost entirely uninteresting to me. I sat in for part of it, but it was just too painful. If you’re looking for a CRM solution, then sure, Salesforce.com will probably fit your needs. If you want to go beyond an electronic Rolodex and integrate your donor, voter, and microtargeting data, then you really need someone who understands how all of those pieces fit together.

That’s actually the problem a lot of people have buying software from political application developers. Take Vocus, for instance. They’re a good group of guys, but they developed their application around a PAC. If you’re managing a PAC, it’s a great fit. If you’re managing an advocacy group, or a campaign, you’re S.O.L. If you’re looking for a good package for candidates and, to a lesser extent, state parties, then Aristotle is great. It’s not so good for PACs.

I would never use Salesforce to try and run my campaign or an organization. If I were running a business, they would be high on my list.

The second plenary I touched on yesterday. It was a good discussion, but the people who most needed to hear it, as I said, were nowhere near the building, let alone the room.

Google’s Keynote

Google’s SVP for Government Affairs (or some such title) took the stage just after lunch. I honestly expected him to launch into a diatribe about net neutrality, but he didn’t. He did pontificate on the “information should be free” movement.

He also made some comments to the effect that Viacom’s copyright infringement suit against Google was being done solely “to gain attention”. He also joked that people think Google knows everything there is to know about them – and they do. He followed that up with a quip about how that would be a bad thing to have circulating via YouTube. I’ll make the video available to anyone who asks…

Afternoon Sessions

I was on a panel for the first session. It was sort of an odd mix of folks with me, Mike Liddell from the DSCC, and Neil Hare from an outfit called ISupportThisMessage.com. Neil suggested that the web could supplant direct mail and should be considered for low dollar races. I don’t agree.

I think the Internet is certainly a cheaper means of reaching people, but everyone has their preferred means of contact. If your campaign calls me on the phone, I’m likely to hang up on you. Send me a piece of direct mail, and I’ll read every word. I probably won’t respond, but I will read it. Send me an e-mail, and I’m likely to act.

The best campaign should a) incorporate everything you do offline – whether it’s political, fundraising, polling, communications, or anything else; and b) use every available medium to reach you. The old adage was a voter should wake up and hear your name on the radio, turn on the TV and see you, drive past a billboard and see your face, hear your name from friends at the office water cooler, see a bumper sticker on the car ahead of you while driving home, and see you again on TV that night. The only thing that has changed in that mix is the Internet.

Those water cooler conversations have gone online and are now the blogs we read. The Internet is the focal point of word of mouth marketing in the world today. If you ignore it, you ignore the greatest marketing tool known to man.

The Internet also gives you the greatest advertising medium known to man because you can so carefully target your message. Why buy an ad in the local paper that relies on generic simplistic messages when you can move that ad online and target exactly the person you want to reach with exactly the message you want to deliver?

Need to reach people in precincts 415-421? Buy weather.com and accuweather.com for that zip code. You’ll probably spend about $30/M, and I can almost guarantee you will reach only the people who are in those precincts. Your creative can talk to them specifically about the local streets and the need for a speed hump.

That’s a capability that direct mail, television, and telemarketing (for the most part), do not offer. That doesn’t mean there is no place for other media.

The final session I attended largely repeated sentiments from the others. I sat in on a session on the “technology candidate”. Mike Connell, who I have worked with for several years, made the best point I heard at the conference.

I’m paraphrasing, but he said the one thing a candidate who gets technology really needs to do is surround himself with people who get technology. I could not agree more. There is nothing on earth as annoying as working for a guy who gets it, but knowing that almost everyone he has hired doesn’t.

If you understand the transformative power of the Internet in politics, one of the first questions you should ask any potential campaign manager or communications/political director is how they see the Internet playing a role in what they do. If they offer you platitudes about the Internet, and tell you how important it is, show them the door.

They should talk to you about integrating cell phones and PDAs into a walk program, making call and walk lists available via the web, being able to register people, and track the status of that registration to ensure it gets completed, and the importance of bloggers to both spread and amplify the campaign message as well as to attract and mobilize activists, hire them.

The “technology candidate” cannot continue to hire people who have no understanding of the capabilities of a modern campaign, and expect to be successful.

That’s the takeaway from POLC this year. The conference is going on today, and I may head over this afternoon. If I do, I’ll offer more thoughts later.

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Scott Cleland on Google’s Partisanship

Jan 30 2007 Published by under Net Neutrality, Politics, The Internet

Scott Cleland runs an outfit called NetCompetition.org that is opposed to Net Neutrality. He and I have crossed paths on the net neutrality debate and he’s a good guy – he’s also a solid Republican (in the fiscal conservative, responsible government way). On his company blog he took a look at Google’s plans to insinuate itself into the political discourse and to become the measure of what’s true and what isn’t in candidate debates.

Given the fact Google’s contributions to political candidates in the last election leaned Democrat by a ratio of 49 to 1, that thought should scare Republicans. At what point do Google’s “impartial” search results become nothing more than an indoctrination into liberal philosophy? What the Democrat says is true but the Republican lies. Is that how it will work?

At any rate, Scott has an interesting take.

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What Do Santa Claus And The Internet Have In Common?

Dec 18 2006 Published by under Miscellany, Net Neutrality, The Internet

The shills for the billion dollar content companies (also known as “Save The Internet”) have launched a new video. It’s pretty amazing how blatantly they’re misrepresenting the facts of Net Neutrality – especially given their proclivity for claiming that’s what phone and cable companies do.

First of all, the “founding principle” of the Internet is not Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is a big government intrusion into the net. The government had previously understood that regulation of this still nascent medium is a terrible idea. Yet now the Net Neut proponents want to freeze development in its tracks – ostensibly convinced that innovation can go no further.

The proponents will tell you that net neutrality has always been – based on a law that applied to 40% of the broadband connections carried by DSL lines. It never applied to cable – which accounts for about 60% of the broadband connections. So NN was never “the founding principle”. It was a hindrance to DSL, and the lack of it allowed cable to arrive on the scene and steal the market (well, that and the fact that cable had faster lines and a $100 billion network investment to make it better).

The video also fundamentally misrepresents the state of what we call the Internet today. I’ll get into why there really is no Internet as most people think of it in just a moment, but let’s look at their definition first.

They claim the Internet is a series of pipes and the phone and cable companies are not allowed to mess with what is in those pipes. That’s simply not true. Phone and cable companies mess with what’s in those pipes 24/7. It’s called “managing the network.”

What that means, for instance, is they give video and VOIP traffic preference over e-mail. They move video and voice to the front of the line so you see smooth video instead of the choppy, buffer-problems you used to see a couple short years ago. As more and more video is watched, it requires more and more management (which requires investments in administrators and equipment).

What Net Neutrality argues those pipes should just sit there and let e-mail spam duke it out with YouTube to see who gets there first. They call that “dumb pipes”.

“Dumb pipes” really is a founding principle of the Internet. That’s how it used to be, but managed networks made it better for everyone. Occasionally they’ll allow for management and priortization of video and voice over other traffic, but it’s usually for disingenuous purposes (but more on that later).

Now the Internet, as you probably think of it, does not exist. A lot of people hear about DARPANet and the government creation of “the internet” and they think there is this great big thing out there somewhere – some sort of tangible item.

That is not the case.

“The Internet” does not exist. It’s like Santa Claus. It’s a great myth perpetrated on the uninformed people of the world. The Internet is a series of interconnected networks – not one big thing. The term “Internet” is exactly what the Latin root of its name implies. Inter- means between and Net is short for networks. The Internet is nothing more than a method of exchanging data and traffic between separate, usually privately-owned, networks.

That becomes important when you consider what net neutrality really means. It means someone who invested $100 billion dollars in a network is now being told they cannot manage it as they see fit simply because someone who invests $49 is afraid they may not be able to access CandyTheDominatrix.com.

Let’s say you have a network in your home – say three computers all linked together – for you, the wife and little Johnny. Johnny wants to spend all day downloading the complete director’s cut of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. That, however, brings your network to a crawl, so you, and the router in your closet, set to work to prioritize the rest of the traffic on your network so Johnny has fast access to educational sites, and the rest of the family can use the net, and The Lord of the Rings is throttled back.

That sounds like a great solution except Little Johnny, not happy with your choices, decides to petition the government to get involved, and they pass a law saying you cannot manage the network to impede Johnny, regardless of the negative impact to the rest of the family.

That is exactly what Net Neutrality does.

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