Category: Interesting Reading

This week’s buzz about Google

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

I joined Google Buzz this week.  It was easy – I didn’t have to do anything except log in to GMail.  Google had transformed my private email – including my contact list (which it automatically populates based on my email traffic) into a social networking experience, a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter.  After several privacy complaints, Google made opting out of certain features a bit easier.  It’s still a little creepy.

Tellingly, Buzz allows you to integrate your Twitter feed but not for Facebook profile – another sign of the coming Armageddon between Google and Facebook, which Google will likely get to right after their fight with Apple and possibly after their fight with Microsoft.

How big is Google?  There were three separate stories about Google which made headlines this week.  That’s not three articles – but three separate issues which made news independent of each other.  First was the aforementioned Google Buzz; second was Google’s plan to become an internet service provider; and now comes news that Google is butting heads with the Department of Justice over intellectual property rights of authors as part of their ongoing effort  to become a latter-day, digital Library of Alexandria.

That these are all separate issues leads to them becoming one issue.  Google is seeking to define how you get to the internet, how you communicate with others, and what information/content you receive.  If this scenario continues on the same logical course, Google would become to the internet what AT&T was to the telephone networks before it was broken up by a federal antitrust suit in 1984.

Is Google at risk of an anti-trust lawsuit?  Possibly, but they have certainly done their best to make inroads with the government that would prevent that from happening.  The relationship between Google and the current administration is well-documented.

And if you believe the balance of power in Washington will tip back to Republicans in 2010 or 2012, Google is ready for that to – they are sponsoring TechRepublican’s Digital Boot Camp at CPAC this year.

Viva la revolucion

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

Patrick Ruffini, one of the consultants who helped Scott Brown take back the people’s seat in Massachusetts, wrote an extensive wrap-up of the campaign’s online fundraising in the last month.   The whole thing is a good read, but his assessment of the recent online innovations of each party at the very end is intriguing:

As we have written in the pages of the Washington Post, during the right’s online wilderness years (this “wildnerness” being the mirror image of being in power in Washington) many pundits wondered whether the right was at a permanent structural disadvantage online… [N]ow that the right has needed to use grassroots tools to break the Democratic lock-hold on Washington, they’ve done it in a big way. And it’s happened much faster, and with greater early electoral success, than the evolution of the liberal “netroots” which didn’t really take off until the end of Bush’s first term.

Much has been written about the Massachusetts race, and most of it is an exaggeration.  But the studies of Brown and Virginia’s Gov. Bob McDonnell successful use of online tactics in winning campaigns underscores a running theme – like President Obama, their innovative campaigns were seeking to win an office held by the other party.  All three were on the outside looking in.

As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.  Political parties are made up of politicians, so of course they tend to be risk-averse – unless they have no office to risk.

All politics are local…

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

…but this may be a little too local, even for Arkansas:

Riding down Highway 165 through the Arkansas Delta, I knew I was about to experience one of the timeless traditions of Arkansas politics.

For more than 60 years — there is some dispute whether it is 64 or 67 — people have descended on the little town of Gillett to participate in the Gillett Coon Supper, where the main course is the exotic meat of locally hunted raccoon but the real dish is the political undercurrent that is impossible to miss.  Within this humble event lies perhaps one of the most important lessons in Arkansas politics.

Untold Tales of Massachusetts

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

In discussing the Scott Brown victory with friends and colleagues over the past few days, some angles of the race incredibly haven’t been picked up by the endless mainstream news media coverage.

#1: Specter’s Swap caused the Bay State flop

A casual conversation with a veteran campaign operative brought up an interesting angle to Brown’s victory: that  Arlen Specter may have unwittingly delivered this seat to Republican control with his April party switch.

Back in April, Specter’s switch didn’t just make the rallying cry of “The 41st Vote” relevant, it also eliminated the Republican primary between the liberal Specter and conservative Pat Toomey.  Remember Toomey had just barely lost a 2004 primary challenge and was poised to overtake Specter in 2010 – if he had the right resources.

If you were a conservative donor somewhere outside of Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, to whom would you donate money if you had to choose: a well-known candidate who had legitimate shot to help return the Senate to its roots, or a long-shot barely-known state senator trying to take Ted Kennedy’s seat?  Specter’s swap in April made Brown the best investment when his nine point poll deficit was announced earlier this month.

Who said Arlen Specter never helped the GOP?

#2:  Speaking of polling…

Remember how Democrats were roundly criticizing Rasmussen polls for supposedly being skewed in favor of Republicans?  Well, it was Rasmussen who first signaled that this race may be closer than the conventional wisdom would suggest it could be.

#3: Jack E. Robinson helped break the “color barrier” for the Massachusetts Congressional Delegation

No, it isn’t THAT Jackie Robinson, and that “color barrier” is, of course, blue.  Robinson has been a Republican candidate for multiple state offices since his 2000 challenge of Ted Kennedy, but is considered something of a joke among Massachusetts Republicans.  Yet Brown took him at least semi-seriously in their primary match-up.

The contested primary was no contest – Brown won 89% of the vote.  But Mike Rossettie, who blogs at RedMassGroup (and used to run the political machine that was the UMass Republican Club) made the point that the primary was an opportunity to campaign, drum up name recognition, and win endorsements and free media.

What was that about eggs and baskets?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The ACLU’s largest anonymous donor is no longer anonymous – and no longer a donor.  As mentioned on Dan Flynn’s FlynnFiles, David Gelbaum can no longer afford to write his annual $19 million check – a figure which represents one quarter of the group’s annual donations.  Combined with money he gave to the Sierra Club and groups that returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, Gelbaum’s withdrawal from philanthropy represents a lost $81 million in donations.

Anyone who has drawn a check from a non-profit group (especially one that is more political than charitable, as I have) can attest, economic years like 2008 and 2009 usually mean reduced donations, which lead to layoffs and budget cuts.  Of course, it’s more work to have a donor strategy with more individual donors giving smaller amounts, but dispersing the financial burden of an organization is like building a car with a wider wheel base or a house with a wider foundation – it’s just more stable.

No organization in their right mind would turn down a yearly check of $19 million.  At the same time, part of the reality of the non-profit world is understanding that at any time, any given donation can go away.  Maybe the ACLU knows this, maybe they don’t, but in either case they have provided a cautionary tale for other non-profits.

I would say that it sucks to get this kind of news around Christmas, but that might be overly religious.

The Year in Google

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Google has released their 2009 Zeitgeist report – a summary of popular search trends along various topics.  Lists like this are usually predictable – the most-searched-for baseball team was the Yankees; the alphabet soup of AIG, GM, and TARP led bailout-related searches.

But search results can also give a good concept of popular thinking on key news topics.  For instance, the top term used in healthcare-related searches is “Obama.”  That seems to indicate that, for better or worse, people are closely identifying the President with the health care reform issue.  Also interesting is that the Heritage Foundation was the #5 search term in this category – which could mean that Americans are open to hearing alternatives to what has been circulating on Capitol Hill.

Google also looks at localized search topics for several major cities.  Movie theaters and school websites dominated the results, especially colleges.  In DC, the top term was “fcps blackboard” – the portal for the Fairfax County public school system.  This actually says a lot about the Washington, DC workforce and commuting patterns.  (I knew I had company on my daily commutes into and out of Your Nation’s Capital from Merrifield, but had no idea it was enough to alter search results; Metro clearly needs more trains.)

That education websites are so popular also notes another trend.  Around the Thanksgiving table this year, my soon-to-be brother and sister in law commented that they hadn’t seen their daughter’s recent report card, despite the marking period having ended.  They explained that they just check her grades online.

Pollsters can call voters, ask questions, track answers, and get a pretty good idea of what folks are thinking.  Still, there’s an element of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in that method – that the very act of measuring could affect the responses to poll questions.  Internet searches are somewhat anonymous.

As the old saying goes, you are who you are when no one is watching.

It’s in the dictionary now, and can’t be “unworded”

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The verb “unfriend” is in the Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year.  (It is also now officially a word.)

Of all the verbiage to come out of social networking and new online environments, it’s interesting that unfriend – the negative act of rescinding a connection – takes this honor.  The inclusion and exclusion of words in dictionaries is more a measure of culture than technology – technology creates new terms every day, but to be included in popular language those terms must have a crossover appeal that removes them from the realm of technical jargon and into the realm of word you might read in a newspaper article.

When most of us “unfriend” someone, it’s not because of an offline relationship that has gone south, but because the online relationship was more than we could handle.  Anyone with a Facebook account has had the friend who constantly sends requests or shares too much information.  Most people on Twitter have followed a friend who peppered their feeds with such witticisms as, “Making a sandwich and can’t decide – grape or strawberry jelly?!?”  Speaking of Twitter, after a spike earlier this year their new user numbers seem to be leveling off,and big companies that were excited to enter the medium have become absentee Tweeters.

In other words, we are settling into these new online environments by shifting from the mindset of signing up every new and shiny community or connecting with every long-lost high school class.  Perhaps we are getting better, both in terms of who we connect with and where we connect, at prioritizing what is best and most useful for us individually – and unfriending the rest.