Print ‘n’ Read Feature: e-Hail to the Chief

Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post has been providing some of the best, most persistent coverage of the use of digital media by the presidential candidates all year.

And now he’s written a big where-we’ve-been/where-Obama-goes-from here piece. Like so much important writing about technologies, e-Hail to the Chief is a lousy read on the web. And so it is my first Print ‘n’ Read ™ feature of 2009, a distinction I assign to articles about technology so valuable they are actually worth printing out on paper and reading away from the computer.

The major theme is how hard it’s going to be for Obama to use the digital media that helped get him into office to carry out the duties of that office. [I've whacked this particular mole-head many times in this blog.]

Highlights include comments from Google’s Eric Schmidt and Al Gore about the messiness of digital democracy when people don’t like what the President is doing–and organize against the very guy they supported. [Am I the only one who didn't know Gore is a "senior adviser" to Google?]

But my favorite part comes at the end, where Vargas witnesses one of the “house meetings” that the transition team’s digital wing is organizing via the web to try to make use of the hunger for civic participation they’ve created.

It’s a somehow sad scene in which regular citizens create and capture a long list of well-worn goals–health care, energy, education, etc., etc., etc.–on a big poster at the front of the room.

The effect is a lingering sense of well-intentioned impotence. It leaves you wondering how on earth you get from that to. . .change we can believe in.

Disclosure: Vargas is a former colleague of mine at the Post.

Government, the Public Interest and You.0

Today I was lucky enough to appear at a Washington forum on government, non-profits and social media.

The event was hosted by Clickability and Kick Apps, two companies that work mostly in the private sector but who, like so many in the tech world, are eyeing Washington as a center of social media innovation. [Or at least technology contracts.]

As one federal agency CIO said over lunch, “It’s Obama. Everybody knows he’s into this, and we’ve got to get up to speed.”

As usual, I learned more from listening to the others than the audience did by listening to me. Here are seven nuggets I picked up:

1. The government is innovating with social technologies more than I realized. I heard about internal knowledge sharing at the State Department, a CDC effort to collect on-the-ground intel from first responders and the DOD’s Pentagon Channel. And the EPA’s blogging program. Here’s a wiki that planks out what various federal agencies are up to with social media.

2. In prepping for the conference, I learned about The Twittering Diplomat. Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy at U.S. State Department, is Tweeting away as she tours eastern Europe on a diplomatic mission. Yes, it opens Twitizens’ eyes to what a diplomat really does. What led her to do it? I have no clue. As I am writing this, she has Tweeted this:

flight departing for Armenia now–land 4:50AM

Of course, the Twitter profile could be a front, a persona created to head-fake the Iranians or something like that. I’d be delighted if this turned out to the first case of Twitter Espionage.

3. Michael Chin of Kick Apps, in his introduction, used a phrase I hadn’t heard on the 2.0 conference circuit: “multilogue”–as opposed to “monologue” or “dialogue.” I like that. I may steal it.

4. Fellow panelist and IBM marketing VP Sandy Carter described her company’s participation in an effort before the Beijing Olympics to get Chinese citizens to take cell phone images of broken stuff out on the street as a way to report problems to the government in time to spruce things up for the international media. She’s author of a new book titled The New Language of Marketing 2.0, full of case histories about this stuff.

5. Mario Armstrong, a digital guy who appears on his own web radio show Digital Spin Radio and occasionally on NPR as a technology expert, talked about a program he works on designed to get more U.S. students to graduate with engineering degrees. The program targets young kids.

Key insight: The adults designed a great-looking social media portal they thought was wonderful. The kids rejected it. Instead of retreating to the safety of a focus group, they just paid a bunch of the kids to plan the site. Armstrong showed a photo of the kids actually doing the card-sorting thing.

6. Alan Wolk, an advertising/PR strategist, talked about how the sort of persistent, minor contacts people have in social networks creates an effect like a “Seurat painting“–little points of color that, when taken together, suggest the full picture without providing every detail. I may steal that too.

7. The Voice of America, that hoary World-War-2-era government-funded broadcast service, launched a highly widgetized, user-generated-content-laden, make-a-profile-to-participate, join-our-discussion social network about the U.S. presidential election. They launched this in just two weeks.

Twittering diplomats. Two-week social media platform launches. Agency CIOs who know they have to get up to speed on social media. Head-spinning stuff.

Drinks were served afterward.

Obama and McCain’s Blogs, Writ Large

A while ago I wrote about a very cool tool called Wordle. You stick a URL or feed into the tool and it produces a visualization–a word cloud–that demonstrates how often words are used in a particular document or blog feed.

Just for sport, I compared results from an official Obama blog and an official McCain blog.

Obama’s blog:

And here’s McCain’s:

Fun stuff: The candidates talk a lot about themselves. Obama’s focused on Ohio, McCain on Missouri. Obama’s often used words: “get” and “can.” McCain’s: “reform” and “America.” Both write more about Gustav than each other.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. The Obama blog I’ve Wordled is the campaign’s main one. McCain’s main blog doesn’t have a single RSS feed [the feeds are parsed by issue]. So I had to cut and paste text from a bunch of recent entries from McCain’s blog and let Wordle have at it.

As for McCain blogs that do have a single RSS feed, let’s look at what they’re talking about in the “McCain Report” blog, written by the trench-warfare-mustard-gas-tosser Michael Goldfarb.

That blog talks about Obama a lot.

Alas, no apples-to-apples there, either. Obama’s site doesn’t have a negative campaign blog.

Obama’s “Explicit” iPod Playlist

There’s been a lot of light-hearted coverage about the music playlists of the two presidential candidates. They’ve been reported in various places in various ways for months, so I no longer have faith that any is the “real” playlist endorsed by the candidate himself.

Still, I was surprised when I was playing around in the social community of Microsoft’s Zune and found Sen. Barack Obama’s playlist presented this way:

Barack, you naughty dude! “Explicit” lyrics on your playlist!

The work in question: Kayne West’s “Touch the Sky.” The song is properly described by Zune staff as full of “hope and inspiration,” telling the tale of West’s rising awareness that there’s more to life than wealth and fame.

But the song wins its bad boy badge with a few lyrics that might make Cindy McCain’s shiny blonde beehive spin like a tornado. Let’s take a listen.

[Note to anti-Obama bloggers, GOP chop-shop bottom-feeders and Swift Boat wanna-be's: Cut and paste below for maximum impact in your echo chamber.]

Back when Gucci was the sh*t to rock,
Back when Slick Rick got the sh*t to pop,
I’d do anything to say “I got it”.
Damn, them new loafers hurt my pocket.
Before anybody wanted K-West beats,
Me and my girl split the buffet at KFC.
Dog, I was having nervous breakdowns,
Like “Damn, these niggas that much better than me?”

Obama has met with rappers and the hip-hop community as part of his campaign to reach young people. For instance, read  Billboard’s brief on West’s performance at the DNC. Hip Hop News featured this June report about Obama and hi-hop music:

“I’ve met with Jay-Z; I’ve met with Kanye. And I’ve talked to other artists about how potentially to bridge that gap [between hip-hop and mainstream culture]. I think the potential for them to deliver a message of extraordinary power that gets people thinking (is massive),” Obama told Jeff Johnson during BET’s political special What’s In It For Us?.

Though he supports using Hip Hop as a catalyst for good, Obama is also aware of Hip Hop’s negative side too, acknowledging that messages of crime and misogyny overshadow the many positive aspects of rap music.

“There are times, even on the artists I’ve named, the artists that I love, that there is a message that’s sometimes degrading to women, uses the N-word a little too frequently. But also something that I’m really concerned about is (they’re) always talking about material things about how I can get something; more money, more cars.“

But the WayRight Machine will never be able to use Obama’s “endorsement” of “shameful” lyrics that “no child should hear” and that demonstrate “he is not ready for national leadership” [again, this is the cut-and-paste line for use in anti-Obama blogs].

If the right tries to run with this issue, they have some explaining to themselves of McCain’s musical favorites.

Suffice to say: “Dancing Machine” by Abba.

Reposting: The Candidates’ $2,500 Fixation

[This is a repost from The Health Central Network's Healtcare08 Web site, where I write about the politics of healthcare [I also helped build the cool app appearing on the front page there]. It also appears on The Health Care Blog, to which I also contribute as part of my work in the Health 2.0 space.

The $2,500 question

By Craig Stoltz

There’s some peculiar numerology going in the presidential candidates’ health reform plans.
John McCain proposes that every American receive a $2,500 tax credit ($5,000 for families) to help them afford health insurance bought in the private market.

Barack Obama says his health care plan will save the average American family $2,500 per year.

I mean, what are the chances?

I suspect both campaigns are shrewd enough to know that “a couple hundred bucks a month” [middle-class citizen's translation of $2,500 per year] is likely to get a voter’s attention. The fact that both campaigns came up with an identical figure is eerie, however. It’s enough to make you wonder whether anti-trust laws should apply to political campaigns.

To be plain, there is no good reason to believe these campaign promises more than others, despite the precision of the dollar amount cited.

Obama’s $2.5k promise was recently picked apart by the New York Times.

Reported the Times:

“Even if the next president and Congress can muster the political will, analysts question whether significant savings would materialize in as little as four years, or even in 10. But as Mr. Obama confronts an electorate that is deeply unsettled by escalating health costs, he is offering a precise “chicken in every pot” guarantee based on numbers that are largely unknowable. Furthermore, it is not completely clear what he is promising.”

Meanwhile, McCain’s $2,500 per person tax credit doesn’t look like much when you consider the cost of health insurance purchased in the open market. Currently employers and workers together pay about $4,400 per person for insurance premiums, about $12,000 for families.

Individual policies–which McCain’s policies are designed to encourage, perhaps at the expense of employer-supported plans–often cost more. They certainly cost more for people who have one or more chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, depression or arthritis–which is to say, a vast majority of the adult population.

That couple hundred bucks a month you just pocketed from President McCain? You’ve got to spend that, and add a couple hundred more–and maybe a couple hundred more than that–just to pay for your premiums in the open market.

So what are we to make of this? What’s so magic about the number $2,500? Why would this figure stand out in the heads of political operatives trying to craft policies to appeal to supporters?

Hard to tell. But I got to wondering. Let me check a figure here at the Federal Elections Commission website a second. . .there it is! I thought this all seemed familiar.

The most money an individual can give to a presidential candidate to show their commitment is. . .$2,300. Five thousand if you’re a PAC.

I mean, what are the chances?

Parlor Game: Web Search & the Election

One of the fun parlor games of Election ‘08 is to look at Internet data and figure out what they mean.

The answer may be “nothing,” of course.

But let’s play along and look at the latest Hitwise data on popular search terms.

HitWise, a company that tracks Internet traffic, tabulated the search words that sent people to John McCain or Barack Obama’s websites. [Here's a press release about the findings on the candidates' top Internet search terms. For more detail, visit the Hitwise blog.]

Let’s look at the arguably vital issue of healthcare.

“Health care” didn’t make Obama’s top 5 search terms in the first quarter of 2008. In the second quarter, health care took the number 4 slot. Q1’s top term was “gay marriage,” Q2’s “abortion.

Meantime, “health care” took the tops spots for John McCain in both Q1 and Q2.

So: Does this mean people already think they know Obama’s healthcare plan and don’t need to search about it on the Internet? Or don’t they have much interest in the issue?

As for McCain, do the searches mean his plan is little-known and people want information on it? Or do those interested in McCain care more about healthcare than Obama’s voters?

You never know.

Q2 Obama top 5 terms, in order: Abortion, Education, Environment/Global Warming, Health Care, Immigration.

Q2 McCain top 5 search terms: Health Care, Environment/Global Warming, Oil Prices, Immigration, Education

Make of this what you will. But it’s worth noting that the economy does not make the top five for either candidate.

One final observation. The search term “Rumors” accounted for 5 percent of searches in Q1. In Q2, that number doubled. “Religion” dropped from 12 percent to 7 percent between Q1 and Q2.

Retreat to the parlor and discuss, please.

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