The Candidates’ Webbiness, Quantified

Barack Obama has a huge lead over Hillary Rodham Clinton, and John Edwards appears to be drifting in the direction of Dennis Kucinich. Over on the GOP side, Ron Paul is way out in front of Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani is fighting for turf in the middle of the pack.

This horserace is not about voter preference, of course. It’s about the battle for Internet marketshare. The tally comes from a Lansing, Mich.-based Internet consulting firm called Spartan Internet, which has developed the Spartan Internet Political Performance (SIPP) Index.

My guess is if you’re a geek of either the political or web persuasion, you’ll spend quite a bit of time with the SIPP Index. If you’re unlucky enough to be a political and web geek, you may want to pack a toothbrush.

The company describes the SIPP as the “first quantitative metric to measure the Internet-wide performance of each Presidential candidate for the 2008 election.” The index comprises 650-some factors, many of them related to social networks, that measure levels of public connection via the Internet.

The score takes into account such factors as number of FaceBook wallposts, MySpace firends, candidate rankings on search engine results for issues, YouTube channel subscriptions, and Technorati blog posts, along with more conventional measures such as mentions on CNN and Yahoo news. The total score represents what Spartan calls “overall Internet market share.”

Now I am no quant geek, and the specific formula is proprietary. So I’m in no position to validate the results. But in a web sector where armies of political supporters are trying to game the system of social networking to create the appearance of popularity, it strikes me that SIPP could be a way of gathering enough different kinds of data to provide a spin reality check.

[I surveyed the candidates' use of web 2.0 technologies in "Hillary Needs a Widget."]

[And I discovered some oddly off-message stuff happening in Ann Romney's blog. But I digress.]

View scores by individual candidate, and you create some curious Internet horseraces. Ron Paul edges Hillary by a hair. Mike Huckabee nearly caught Rudy G in the digital derby around the week of 9/11, but now the New Yorker has pulled comforably ahead of the Arkansan. The largest gap in Internet performance is between the two African American candidates, Barack Obama (SIPP 21.24) vs. Alan Keys (0.82).

Of course, all you have to do to remind yourself that Internet popularity does not translate into votes is click your heels together twice and say “Howard Dean.” Which may be a good thing. The prospect of a November ‘08 face off between Barack Obama and Ron Paul is enough to make you swear off social networks for good.

AnnRomney.com: Off-Message

Ann Romney, wife of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, has launched the first wife-of-a-candidate website. Along with the usual it’s-exhausting-but-I-love it pieties, she writes about her battle with Multiple Sclerosis.

Much of the story will be familiar to anybody who has battled the disease or helped a friend or family member cope. An excerpt:

When I was first diagnosed, it was probably the most difficult time for me. I was having difficulty with my physical balance, but I would soon realize I was having just as much difficulty with my emotional balance. I was overwhelmed and had so many questions. I had always been an independent person, strong and able. I saw the disease as an invading pac man - eating away at the myelin that was protecting my nerves. It was chewing me up, but I didn’t know when or how it would spit me out.

But then she writes about her treatments, some of which are quite unusual. Reflexology, for instance, is a highly unorthodox manipulation of the soles of the feet, based on the theory that various parts of the foot are related to organs and bodily systems–the tips of the first three toes correspond to the brain, for example. And then there is equine therapy, a more widely accepted form of exercise in MS treatment.

 

Equine therapy has been particularly successful for me. The rhythm of a horse’s gait closely assimilates a human’s and moves the rider’s body in a fashion that enhances muscle strength, balance and flexibility. The connection both physical and emotional among horse and human is powerful beyond explanation.

She continues to say how lucky she is to have had access to access to top-tier care–and that she believes making affordable, quality care available to all is an important priority for both Mitt and her.

But how does this square with her husband’s stance on applying “conservative principles to health care?” Detailed on his site is his 10-point plan to spread health insurance to all Americans, the usual conservative checklist of reducing regulation, providing tax breaks to corporations, unleashing the power of the free market and leashing trail lawyers.

In 2005, according to the site, he said the following:

“We can’t have as a nation 40 million people — or, in my state, half a million — saying, ‘I don’t have insurance, and if I get sick, I want someone else to pay.”

– [Massachusetts] Governor Romney, USA Today, July 5, 2005

Interesting. Of course, Ann has had someone else pay for her care–she has presumably been covered by insurance paid for in part by the good people of Massachusetts.

And whether Mitt Romney’s proposal to unyoke the health care system from the weight of the federal government will result in private insurance that pays for reflexology treatments and equine therapy for the nation’s most needy citizens with MS is a question he has not been asked.

You have to wonder whether encouraging Ann to post her MS story on her spousal website was such a good idea after all.