Catching up
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/09/2007 - 10:53Well, I’m back from Cape Cod. There is plenty to write about, the poison ivy, the campground, turning 48, having over 2000 unread email messages upon returning home, progress in selling the house and trying to figure out what the next steps are.
Stay tuned.
Random Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/05/2007 - 10:02Shortly, we will be heading off to Cape Cod for a few days. I don’t expect to be online during that time, so the blog won’t be updated, and most emails will probably go unanswered.
I dealing with the inspection for selling our house, I ended up climbing through some poison ivy, and I’m pretty miserable right now. Itching everywhere, unable to sleep. This, of course, means that Kim could sleep well either. It will be a difficult trip, but hopefully a little salt water will help out.
With the NOI campaigns, only the Burns campaign responded to my inquiries. Most, but not all of the campaigns list an email address somewhere to contact the campaign, and it appears as if most of those don’t bother to check their email. It seems to be a standard problem of many campaigns. The flood of emails can be overwhelming and many of them are spam or people wearing tin foil hats, but over the years, I’ve found some great volunteers and made some good friends as a result of responding to campaign emails. It gets to the idea of campaigns and emails really being a two-way conversation, and not just another broadcast medium.
On the graphing front, I have another graph of MyBlogLog interactions up on Flickr. It was during Wordless Wednesday and you can see the clear community grouping of Wordless Wednesday. It was also done early in the day and ends up showing a grouping of Malaysian bloggers.
Enough for now. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.
Way Off The Bus
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 07/04/2007 - 11:07Recently, Zack Exley wrote an entry at Huffington Post entitled Time to Get Off the Bus. It is about the joint venture between NewAssignment.net and Huffington Post to get more citizen journalists covering the 2008 Presidential election.
Zack was also a cofounder of the New Organizing Institute which is doing a training in Washington DC right now. As part of the training, teams were formed to promote different fictional characters running for President. So, in the spirit of Off the Bus, I’m going to go way off the bus and present my fictional coverage of the campaigns.
The first candidate that I heard from was Lisa Simpson. Lisa’s supporters have a Facebook group up and can be reached at info@lisa2008.com. I’ve received several emails from the campaign urging me to spread the word. In the latest WOTB polls shows Lisa getting about 28% of the vote and running in second place. I learned about this from a friend on a regional blogging list.
The second candidate that I heard from was Stewie Griffen. I have not been able to find contact information or a Facebook group for Stewie. However, they are up on MySpace. Their website is taking advantage of some nice Blue State Digital features, and it isn’t a surprise that I heard about it from Clay Johnson. Unfortunately, they are going nowhere in the WOTB polling, showing up at 5th place with a whopping 1%.
Mr. Burns 2008 campaign was the third that I heard about. A friend of mine whom I know from a mailing list about the 2008 Presidential election contacted me about Mr. Burns campaign. Their Facebook group can be found here. In WOTB polling, they are currently in 3rd place with 21% of the vote.
The most recent campaign to catch my attention is Maggie for America. I found Maggie’s campaign when I stopped by at Rosalyn Lemieux’s page on Facebook. Maggie’s Facebook group is here. Rosalyn is the executive director of New Organizing Institute and having her in your Facebook group counts for a lot. It isn’t surprising that Maggie is leading in the WOTB poll with 36% of the vote.
Through more searching I’ve also found a campaign site for Krusty the Klown. Again, Roz links to his campaign on Facebook. Krusty is running fourth with 14% of the vote.
The blog that seems to be capturing most of the action on this campaign is the NOI Blog. I am picking up rumors that Homer Simpson, and Apu Nahasapeemapetilon are running. Yet details of their campaigns have remained elusive.
As of the deadline for this article, none of the campaigns have responded to inquiries about their positions, schedules or the food that they are eating on the road. Time and interest permitting, a followup will be posted.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/03/2007 - 18:23
Lisa Simpson for President?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/03/2007 - 12:27I’ve been going through the endless stream of emails that have been piling up. A lot of them have been comments about Bush’s commuting of Libby’s sentence. I’ve read press releases from Sen. Edwards and from Patrick Fitzgerald. I’ve read standard form solicitations from Facebook groups and from the DSCC. Enough has been said already, and I’m not sure that I can add a lot to the discussion.
Instead, a different email, entitled “lisa simpson for president” caught my attention. I must admit, I do not focus a lot on popular culture, so when I received the email, I didn’t think of Bart’s brother, but instead wondered if she was the next Ava Lowery or some youth standing up for responsible healthcare.
Instead, Lisa 2008 is the project of a team of students at the New Organizing Institute in Washington DC. NOI runs a great program to help political activists learn how to use social media to get their message out. Some of the students may go on to write standard form email solicitations for the DSCC. Others may go on to something more creative.
Besides setting up her campaign site, they’ve also set up a Facebook group, Lisa Simpson for President!.
A friend of mine from a regional political blogging group sent me an email about the campaign. He also sent it to the blogging group. If I were instructing at NOI, like I have in the past, I’d probably give him a few of my thoughts on how they could improve the campaign, but this time, I’m just a targeted potential supporter.
So, signup to support Lisa Simpson for President. Lend your hand to the New Organizing Institute in training new social media savvy political activists, and for that matter, lets have a little bit of fun on this week in which we celebrate our countries independence. It sure beats rehashing yet another example of the Bush administrations distain for the rule of law in preference for tired cronyism.
