I met Brian Buser, marketing manager at Minggl, a few months ago at SXSW Interactive. He and I have exchanged emails regularly every since, so I decided to ask him a few questions about Minggl and how it might apply in the political space.

Who are you?

Minggl is a social interaction manager that helps manage multiple social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. We are based in Austin, TX.

What did you build?

In addition to the web browser toolbar, we’ve built a Facebook application called Political Wall. Political Wall uses technology built for a future feature of Minggl to get people involved in the current election debate.

What does it do?

The Political Wall displays comments made within Facebook on www.barackobama.com and www.johnmccain.com. The wall is viewable by anyone who has the Minggl toolbar. On the wall, viewers are able to vote up or down comments similar to the Digg ranking system. The most popular comments rise to the top. The Political Wall also displays vote totals for each candidate. A comment wall is also displayed on each user’s Facebook profile as a place for their friends to debate.

Why politics?

Quite simply, politics is the big story of 2008. There hasn’t been this much interest in a Presidential election in a long time. The internet has played a big role in bringing new people into the debate. And it just so happens our technology enables people to do some cool things on the Internet that haven’t been done before. So, it’s a natural fit.

Some people are really skeptical of Facebook as a political tool. They see it as a headline-grabber but not an organizer/mobilizer. What do you think?

First, we want to be clear that Minggl has no affiliation with any of the candidates or political party. However, we do see our Facebook application as another avenue for mobilizing support for candidates and interest in the political process. We think it will be interesting to see which comments are voted most popular and how the rivalry between Obama and McCain plays out on Facebook.

The Political Wall provides a unique way for people to voice their opinion in this hotly contested election. In a manner we know people very much enjoy…socializing with their friends on Facebook. And who knows…maybe your comment makes it all the way to the top of the rankings and is read by Obama or McCain someday. Isn’t it fascinating to think you could only be a couple clicks away from the next President of the United States?

Rad Campaign just posted interviews with leaders in the nonprofit/social networking space.

We particularly like this quote from Tara Hunt, founder of Citizen Agency:

Using Twitter and Facebook to merely disseminate information is akin to just constantly withdrawing, but never depositing into your bank account. The power of these networks is in the connections people are making, which is the building of social capital. You build social capital through positive interactions - listening as much as you are talking, and responding to people as they talk to you. The more two way conversations you have on Twitter and Facebook, the more support you will gain for those messages you send out.

[cross posted at http://alexkellner.com]

Last week, Nate Wilcox of the Webstrong Group spoke to one of my graduate classes. Wilcox’s lecture entitled “Confessions of an Internet Hack,” overviewed the history of politics and the Internet. While much of the lecture wasn’t news to me as an avid follower of Internet politics, Wilcox said one thing that really struck me. Throughout the lecture he “named” each of the elections, and his title for the current election cycle was perhaps the best metaphor to describe the state of the current political Internet that I have come across.

Wilcox’s metaphor began by talking about the 2006 election. He discussed the innovations in mobilizing, messaging and fundraising online that were made in the election cycle. He compared these innovations to rock and roll bands in the late 1960s and early 1970s like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. Moving on to the 2008 election cycle Wilcox said that The Beatles are to 2006 as Foghat is to 2008. In other words, no one would suggest that Foghat revolutionized the music scene or was even particularly innovative, but, regardless of that fact, they sold out gigantic arenas throughout the mid to late 1970s. The metaphor carries over to Internet politics because while very little innovation has happened online this election cycle (with perhaps the exception of the use of social networks), the effects of old innovations have had made a larger splash because the people are online in larger numbers (just as people were hooked on the rock and roll scene for Foghat).

I think when you look at the oft-pointed to evidence for why 2008 is “the first real Internet election” it backs Wilcox’s characterization. Ron Paul’s money bomb, Obama and Clinton’s online fundraising prowess, Obama’s offline movement with online roots and the campaign’s webpages themselves are all just extensions of developments that occurred in the 2006 election cycle. These events were more pronounced in 2008 because they involved more people and because they received more coverage in the press. This is not necessarily because the campaigns were doing anything drastically different; rather, there are more people comfortable with “new technology”, more people connected to the Internet and the press has become increasingly more likely to cover “Internet” stories in the mainstream press.

Now, I’m not sure that this means that we actually have reached the “first Internet election.” As a child of the millennial generation, The Beatles and Foghat were both before my time, but I have 12 hours of one of the bands and 0 minutes of the other on my iPod. The Beatles are still relevant in today’s music scene, even to someone born almost 20 years after Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, and Foghat is largely forgotten. Perhaps this is carrying Wilcox’s metaphor slightly too far, but I predict that in 20 years, 2006 will be considered far more important year for the development of online politics than 2008. Whether or not it is “the first Internet election” is going to depend on how 2010, 2012 and beyond carry out as the Internet continues to evolve.

Recently, I’ve taken a turn to looking into what was written about the so-called “Internet candidates” of the 2000 election. On the right, we had John McCain, who managed to pull up an astonishing $3 million after winning the New Hampshire primary through the use of….get this…pop-up ads! On the left, we had Senator Bill Bradley, who was criticized by Silicon Valley leaders for spending more time on real estate taxes during a two-decade Senate tenure than on the promotion of high tech issues. (Strikingly, Senator Bradley became the first Presidential candidate to raise a million bucks on the Web without putting so much as a donation link on his Web site’s sidebar, choosing instead to hide a donation hyperlink in a short paragraph encouraging voters to help out.)

The New York Times reported in February of 2000 about the McCain phenomena:

Several bits of evidence suggest that Mr. McCain’s success is of a different order than anything seen in many years. His presence on the ballot is driving voter turnout, starting in New Hampshire and sweeping through South Carolina and Michigan, where twice the normal number of voters went to the polls. He pulls big crowds that clearly adore him. Their excitement undercuts the conventional wisdom about citizen apathy, as does the explosion of Internet fund-raising that has brought him $3 million in the space of a few weeks.

In Washington, Republican leaders are assuring each other that Mr. McCain’s appeal is personal rather than based on issues like campaign finance reform and using the budget surplus to save Social Security and Medicare.

Similar sentiments have commented about the successful Web candidates today: Barack Obama and Ron Paul. As a piece of food for thought, I have considered the possibility that it may not be a campaign’s savvy use of the Internet that makes an “iCandidate” but an intrinsic value within that candidate him or herself. The campaign can guide and nudge, but beating overwhelming support out of the Internet will be a nugatory exercise sans a message with appeal to voters familiar to nooks and crannies of the World Wide Web.

Barack Obama’s forensic ability and “change” message bequeathed him a wide swath of followers who were (generally) younger and therefore less likely to be concerned with online giving. Ron Paul’s idiosyncratic message allowed support for his candidacy to thrive on Internet institutions such as Digg or YouTube because the truly tech-savvy have always been more likely to the beat of the libertarian drum (witness the need for overflow rooms at Google headquarters in California when Congressman Paul visited…there was no such need for more rooms when the more establishment types walked into Mountain View).

Perhaps its the man or the message that yields Internet attention, and not a stronger Web-based campaign tactic. Those who try to apply the Ron Paul example of diffusing most power to supporters with little to no supervision from the campaign in 2012 will probably be disappointed to find that they will not garner $35 million in contributions.

This post was guest blogged by Jesse Greenberg.  

Kudos to all the organizers of the Politics Online Conference for putting together an excellent program.  And special thanks to Julie Germany who invited me as a guest on IPDI’s blog.

I was fortunate to win Golden Dot Awards in the categories of Best Website for State/Local Candidate and Best e-Blog for my role as a communications advisor to Daniel Biss, Candidate for State Representative in Illinois’ 17^th district.  I was fortunate because working for the Biss campaign afforded me the opportunity to implement new political strategies needed to build relationships with voters, raise funds and construct the campaign brand.  Winning the Golden Dots affirmed that we’re on the right track. 

The candidate, however, did not see the value of attending the conference or receiving the awards in person and would not assist in supporting my trip to DC.  My argument for going was that this earned public relations was testament to the campaign running on a new model that utilizes technology to involve district voters in having a greater say in their politics than ever before.  We could build on this momentum, I argued, to achieve definitive, measurable results for the minor investment in going to DC.  Alas, my argument did not win this time.

I’m not sharing this because I have an axe to grind.  On the contrary, I wish the candidate only success.  Rather, I’m sharing this to demonstrate how difficult putting faith in politics 2.0 can be, especially on the state or local level where resources are often tight.  In that environment it is comfortable to fall back on the traditional ways of campaigning—canvassing, direct mail, etc.—that are often not as a good an investment (confirmed by Sara Parker, Edelman VP in the workshop, “Developing Mobile Social Software Applications”) but at least are more of a known quantity.  And despite having embraced new campaign strategies, this campaign found it difficult to let go of old campaign models.  This demonstrates it is going to take another election or two to really transform American politics down to the local level. 

My sense from the beginning was that politics 2.0 is applicable at the local level.  In fact, I argue new campaign marketing strategies can be more effective at the local level simply because the scale is so much smaller.  It is therefore easier to manage relationships and maintain relevancy to voters that is impossible to do in the same way in presidential or congressional campaigns. 

I’ll use this as an opportunity to challenge candidates running at the local level to use new campaign methods and bring down the barriers between candidate and voter.  We are in a climate today that demands a greater level of political transparency.  We must allow greater involvement from voters, many of whom a candidate does not know personally—and that’s ok. 

Lastly, local candidates need to trust new faces (Millennials especially) who bring new ideas to politics.  We’re the vanguard of change and despite our age, our perspective is fresh and helping bring about a new age of campaigning occurring most notably at higher levels of politics.  Thanks to the Golden Dots though, we’ve got a place that recognizes and rewards new thinking in political campaigns. 

Granted, I began this blog post solely as an excuse to highlight the fine work of Todd Domke in the Boston Globe today. A nice sarcastic piece at each of the Presidential contenders (although I do have a personal vested interest in hoping Mike Huckabee goes somewhere beyond Wheel of Fortune).

This did spark a little thought about the wild and wacky failed prognostications of the past election cycle. John Edwards’ firewall in Iowa, Chris Dodd(!) as the possible breakout candidate, Rudy Giuliani’s frontrunner status…this has essentially proven just how bad we all are at this game of punditry. And we’ve been no better when it comes to technology.

The January 1, 2000 edition of Newsweek, for instance, talked up the future of e-books, suggesting that by 2010 such a product would be in the midst of intense competition with paperbacks. It also gee-whizzed about folks having glasses that multi-tasked as computer screens for an arm-band keyboard/memory. These were projected as being the new office norm by 2010.

Likewise, I remember reading in 1999 about the plethora of middle-school students with laptops that was supposed to be standard by 2005. The $100 laptop notwithstanding.

So, what does this all mean? I suppose nothing more than the old adage that Web 3.0 will be completely unexpected and unlike anything we can predict…as well the politics that will emerge out of it.

For those of you attending (or thinking of attending) the upcoming Politics Online Conference, consider attending two panels I have assembled: Social Networking/Media Strategy of the Presidential Campaigns and Open Source Advocacy. While it may be too soon to say that this aspect of online campaigns is the “be all, end all” of online strategy, there have been some great innovations in this space this campaign cycle.

Social Networking/Media Strategy of the Presidential Campaigns

The panel includes Justine Lam, eCampaign Director for Ron Paul; Amy Rubin, former Deputy Director of New Media for John Edwards; Katie Harbath, Deputy eCampaign Director for Rudy Giuliani; and Michael Turk, former eCampaign Director for Bush-Cheney ‘04 and my fellow blogger at techPresident.com.

The panel will explore two contrasting views of using the social web for campaigns: it has not been useful (for some) and it has been essential (for others). I suppose where you sit is where you stand.

In any event, come join us at 3:30p on March 4 and join the debate.

Open Source Advocacy

On March 5 at 3:00p, I am chairing a second panel on Open Source Advocacy. This panel will explore how open source software, software that is free to use, though not necessarily free to implement, can help advocacy organizations. The panel includes Michelle Murain, who blogs on Non-profit technology at the ZenofNPTech.org; Ryan Ozimek, President of PICnet and a core Joomla developer; Michael Haggerty, President of Trellon and a core Drupal developer; and Jo Lee founder of CitizenSpeak, an open source advocacy campaign tool that integrates with CiviCRM.

Both panels should be very interesting and I encourage all to attend.

Not the forecasters.

George Anders recently looked back at some of the predictions Wall Street Journal published about what technology would look like in 2008. It looks like the crystal balls of five and ten years ago failed to predict one major trend in the way we use technology: our desire for interaction and interactivity.

The most elusive insight: the public’s desire to move beyond passive consumption of digital technology, in favor of active creation and sharing of personally shaped content. Forecasters didn’t foresee anything resembling the rise of YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace and incessant blogging.

In fact, Ambuj Goyal, then vice president for systems and software at International Business Machines Corp and one of the technologists interviewed by WSJ ten years ago, put it most correctly:

We have predicted the hardware speeds and feeds very well. We haven’t done nearly as well in predicting how these machines will be used.

This brings me, yet again, to what I have already noted on this blog as one of my favorite panels at the 2008 Politics Online Conference. The panel is called Pervasive Politics, and it looks at the ways in which ubiquitous, pervasive computing (think microchips embedded in watch, constant online surveillance, etc.) are shaping politics and public policy. We’re combining techno-futurists, like Adam Greenfield (author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing), Genevieve Bell (IBM) and Alex Pang (Institute for the Future) with representatives from the Beltway set (Garrett Graff and Tanya Tarr).

Last week at Steven Clift’s eGov discussion, someone asked, “after the 2008 election, will the new White House have a blog?”

Most everyone said yes.

I sat silently thinking, “Well, no. Not a real blog. Not a blog in the sense that people post things without first obtaining dozens of final approvals. Not a blog with comments (hey, that wouldn’t be too terribly different from ours). Not a blog with interesting, substantial posts.”

No, I thought. There will not be a blog. Not in 2009 and not for some time after. That’s just the way the presidency works.

I obviously skew toward the cynical, which leaves plenty of room for pleasant surprises.

It hasn’t been a secret that over the course of the past few days, administration staffers have posted trip notes about President Bush’s trip to the Middle East.

It’s not a blog exactly – a point that others have most likely pointed out – but it is a start. It certainly looks well produced. Cynical me found the journal-style posts Dana Perino, Bill McGurn and others very interesting, akin to reading about someone’s travel adventures. Sure, they appeared to be sprinkled here and there with talking points, but at this point, the intrigue factor is hitting me higher than the cynical factor.

Is this a frank discussion about the Bush administration’s foreign policy? No. And frankly, I don’t think it is intended to be just that, even though I think just that would be an incredible exercise. I look forward to the day when online voters and an administration can dialogue about policy – online or offline. Particularly online.

Is it a very interesting look at what it’s like to travel with the President in the Middle East? Definitely. A geek like me was hooked at “We ate dinner [on the flight] while watching the New Hampshire primary returns come in.”

So what is this good for? On one level, putting some nice faces and good stories on the administration can’t hurt. Gee, I thought while reading through the notes, policy differences aside, what a fun group of people to travel with.

One another level, let’s hope this is another step in the ladder of an administration – any administration – using the Internet to reach out to voters and chronicle the politics of, well, politics.

Another step is Ask the White House.

Higher up on the ladder?

Both of these tools, while interesting, give the administration another chance to speak. In the future, however, perhaps we will start to see tools that encourage another part of conversation: active listening.

Last night, the much-hyped news segment on Facebook, was aired on 60 minutes. If you didn’t happen to catch it, you can find it here.

The interview didn’t elicit any new information to those of us who have been following Facebook and its spheres of influence from the beginning. However, it does signify a small landmark-of-sorts, in the sense that the traditional media rarely acknowledges web2.0. And 60 minutes is as traditional media as it gets.

In the interview Lesley Stahl mentioned, albeit briefly, Facebook’s influence on politicians and campaigning

Stahl: You know, it used to be, first, you went on “Face the Nation” if you were a candidate; then well, no, you went on “Letterman.” Now it seems the candidates have to be on Facebook. Are you changing the way candidates are running for president?

Zuckerberg: Well, I think because politicians can communicate with tens of thousands of people at the same time, it’s pretty effective for them in campaigning.

While clearly these observations aren’t earth-shattering, it is nice to see a slight departure from mundane horse race coverage, and attention being paid to innovation in the campaign process instead. 2007 was a landmark year for Facebook, but it certainly wasn’t the only online application or website that deserves recognition for its achievements in the political and technology spheres. To fill that void, I want to mention IPDI’s Golden Dot Awards which will be presented at the 2008 Politics Online Conference this March 4-5. The Golden Dots recognize the best and most exciting online achievements and ideas in the 2007 calendar year in the following categories:

• Technology Impact Moment-of-the-Year
• Online Politician-of-the-Year
• Online Dream Team
• Best Website: Federal Candidate
• Best Website: State and Local Candidate
• Best Website: Issue Advocacy Campaign
• Best eGovernment
• Best Blog- eCampaign
• Best Blog- Political Coverage
• Best Blog- Issues and Advocacy
• Best Mobile/Text Messaging Campaign
• Best Podcast Series
• Best Networked Campaign
• Best Vlog
• Best Political Web Video
• Best Political Animation/Mash-up
• Best Online Collective Action Effort
• Best Online Get-Out-The-Vote Campaign
• Best Online Political Application
• Poli-Tech Innovator-of-the-Year
• Best Online Political Advertising Campaign

If you feel that you, your organization or company or anyone else that you know should be honored for their online political achievements in 2007, please go to the Politics Online website and nominate them. Nominations close on January 30, 2008. In February, the winners of each award will be voted upon by the public on the POLC website.