Gore: Web may affect campaign finance
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Former Vice President Al Gore said the rapid expansion of information flow on the Internet could change the future of campaign finance, but that hunger for campaign cash will continue as long as political TV ads remain effective.
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John Kerry's campaign boosts spending on online ads in the final month of the election season, trying to maintain the momentum he gained from the first debate. It's surprising the campaigns haven't spent more online, experts say. By Louise Witt.
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Voters are by now accustomed to seeing political leaders impertinently pop up on the social networking side of cyberspace. Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois has significant Facebook and MySpace profiles; former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who is also seeking the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, recently debuted a page on the Ã¢ÂÂavatarÃ¢ÂÂ social networking site Second Life.
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It was inevitable. In the Internet age, interest groups seeking influence in Washington are joining presidential candidates in discovering a new electronic tool to press their agenda: YouTube.
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Charges of vote trading and unethical fundraising against DeLay may curb his ability to raise money. By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor.
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An updated list of personal financial reports submitted by members of Congress Ã¢ÂÂ including the long-awaited filings from  top-tier 2008 presidential contenders Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain Ã¢ÂÂ are posted online by Political MoneyLine, Congressional QuarterlyÃ¢ÂÂs Web-based publication on money and politics.
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Bloomberg - June 7 (Bloomberg) -- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama emphasizes in a new appeal for donations that ``our movement is changing the way campaigns are funded.&#39;&#39; Not that much, it seems.
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(InfoWorld) - If Phillip Lamb's experience is any indication, the ability to leverage online social networking tools to organize campaigns may help make or break candidates in the 2008 U.S. presidential race. Lamb, a New York software architect with new media and Internet strategy company EchoDitto, was just another volunteer looking for a few good open-source software developers to help him build tools for Illinois Senator Barack Obama's campaign Web site. Using the site's social networking page, My.BarackObama.com, he posted his request for a "Hack for Barack" event to have developers meet and discuss how they could build mashups, APIs (application programming interfaces), and other tools to help with the Democratic senator's grassroots movement. "Six hours later, 30 people had signed up, and some of them just wanted to volunteer to help with the campaign, so I changed the nature of the event," Lamb said. Within 48 hours, so many people were signing up for the event that it crashed the Web site, and Lamb had to cap the event at 200 official attendees on the site. Five days after posting his request, about 250 people met at the GalleryBar in Manhattan's Lower East Side neighborhood for the meeting Lamb and other volunteers had arranged on My.BarackObama.com. Lamb walked away with about 150 names of people who not only may be able to help with Web site development, but who are interested in helping Obama in his presidential campaign, he said. Lamb also volunteered to develop the New YorkÂ siteÂ that will be the online hub of local efforts for Obama. EchoDitto's Lamb has been building Web-based community sites for about a year and a half, and he served as an assistant deputy field director for strategic targeting on Wesley Clark's 2004 campaign. These made him a good fit for EchoDitto when he joined four months ago, as former EchoDitto CEO Nicco Mele was the Web master for Howard Dean's online presence during his 2004 presidential campaign. Before Dean's campaign fizzled out after his now-famous scream when he came in third in the Iowa caucuses, the success of his campaign was largely attributed to his ability to drum up support online. Such support will be more pivotal in 2008, as social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.com are much more popular now than in 2004, when they were in their nascent stages, Lamb said. "The technology has grown so much and a lot of people now know about it and they're comfortable using it," he said. Jeff Merritt, president of Grassroots Initiative, a nonprofit organization that helps first-time candidates in New York with their campaigns, agreed that social networking sites have changed the game for candidates in political races of all sizes and importance. "It used to be you stuck with direct mail, phone banking, and door-to-door canvassing," he said. "Now it's clear you get more bang for your buck if you take advantage of pre-established networks, and tap into online networks that are usually free." Merritt added that his organization consults clients on how to drum up support through MySpace and Facebook in addition to traditional means of campaigning. New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and former senator and 2004 vice presidential candidate John Edwards also have tapped into online social networking in their quests to become the Democratic candidate in 2008, as have Republicans Arizona Senator John McCain, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Kansas Senator Sam Brownback. All of their sites have links to join up with other supporters, as well as links for planning events and making donations. Some of the sites have blogs, and McCain's offers videos. While these efforts certainly should help candidates "generate buzz," Grassroots Initiative's Merritt warned that a popular online presence alone certainly does not guarantee a candidate's success, a lesson Dean supporters learned the hard way. "I think the concern is that Dean did lots of social networking activity and young people were turning out, but that didn't translate into his electability," he said. To avoid this gaffe in 2008, candidates should ensure they stress to young voters that they must cast their votes at the polls in the same numbers in which they appear at campaign social gatherings and on social-networking sites, Merritt said.
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Making history, a record-breaking $6 million in internet support is given in a single day of online fund-raising for the libertarian-leaning Republican presidential candidate. Ron Paul is now on track to surpass the fourth-quarter fund-raising of every single competing candidate in both parties. The internet has spoken.
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Ã¢ÂÂW doesnÃ¢ÂÂt careÃ¢ÂÂ reads the headline on an e-mail message aimed at potential donors to the DemocratsÃ¢ÂÂ 2008 national Senate campaign Ã¢ÂÂ an appeal signed by former Vice President Al Gore, who is keeping his hand in partisan politics even as he hedges about a possible late-starting campaign for next yearÃ¢ÂÂs Democratic presidential nomination.
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The information superhighway has been a one-way street in the 2004 presidential campaign,  with President Bush and Democrat John Kerry raising money on the Internet but spending very little to advertise online, according to a study released on Monday.
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The Internet is changing the nature of political fund raising. The Illinois Senator has proved that small donors really matter
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The Republican candidate is finding new ways of engaging voters online. But will those results translate into votes?
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By Paul Rogers, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Feb. 1--Al Gore is scheduled to speak in Silicon Valley on Friday to a sold-out crowd of 1,400 people. His topic: how high technology can help reduce global warming.
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(InfoWorld) - Social networking Web sites such as MySpace and YouTube are already having a major impact on the way political campaigns are run, but a group of social-network experts had a hard time predicting Friday just what applications will best connect with voters in future elections. All of the creators of social-network sites speaking at a conference on "person-to-person-to-person" networking and its effect on campaigns seemed to agree that politicians need to pay attention to "consumer-created media," a term that some participants objected to. The rise of MySpace, Facebook, and other social-networking sites are making the controlled, broadcast-style way of distributing political information obsolete, said Henry Copeland, president and founder of Blogads, an advertising service for blogs. "The people we're dealing with today are no longer 'consumers,' they're participants," Copeland said at the conference, hosted by the George Washington University Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. Politicians who ignore the impact of blogs and other social-networking sites will miss a huge number of potential voters, said Tom Gerace, founder and chief executive officer of Gather.com, which he billed as MySpace for grown-ups. MySpace, which boasts 108 million profiles created by members, already reaches more people each day than CNN.com or NYTimes.com, he said. "If you just play in the traditional media, you're missing most of your audience today -- not 10 years down the road, but today," Gerace said. MySpace has more than 7,400 discussion groups related to politics. Candidates such as former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark, Nevada Democratic senatorial candidate Jack Carter and Arizona Republican Senator John McCain either have created their own pages or have supporter-created pages there. MySpace also has user groups devoted to the "truth" about the U.S. government's involvement in the 9/11 attacks, the legalization of marijuana and the claim that Republicans are better in bed. Smart politicians will harness the power of social-networking sites, especially the ability to run videos within them, said Jeff Berman, senior vice president for public affairs at MySpace. Politicians are just beginning to tap into the potential of social-networking sites, he said. For example, when a popular music group debuts a new song on MySpace, it could raise awareness for a political campaign just by having links to its pages on its MySpace site, he said. "It just makes sense [for politicians] to be there," he said. "This is influencer marketing." Smart politicians should also begin to realize that citizens journalists armed with video cameras or a blog platform are beginning to show up everywhere, speakers said. In August, Senator George Allen, a Virginia Republican in a tough campaign for re-election, was caught on video calling an Indian-American man working for his opponent "macaca." Macaca is a species of monkey, but Allen said he didn't know that. But asked about the future impact of social-networking sites on campaigns, conference participants hesitated to predict. "Anybody who tells you they know where this space is heading right now is lying," said John de Tar, co-founder of HotSoup.com. One audience member questioned if the increasing influence of social-networking sites was a positive development in a world where 9/11 conspiracy discussion groups get the same play as serious candidates. There's "mass production of nonsense in politics," the man said. But Chuck deFeo, general manager of Townhall.com, disagreed. "It's healthy for democracy for more voices to be heard," he said. "People get more involved in politics."
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The U.S. presidential campaign between George W. Bush and John Kerry has prompted a frenzy of gossip and conspiracy theories among Internet bloggers, hybrid online sites that blend news, gossip and opinion.
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It's official. Weblogs matter. A few of them anyway. In the election cycle just ended, the blogs made a serious presidential candidate of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean.