Google, Ebay, Facebook, ... and Barack Obama
![]()
Stories of Howard Dean in the 2004 primary election do not just limit to his infamous scream, rather, through the prism of the Internet technology, it is how Howard Dean, with the help of Meetup.com and other internet tools like blogs, successfully organized thousands of volunteers, raised money from the net incomparable to no one else, transformed himself from a relatively unknown governor to a formidable player for presidential bid (that is before he went down in a scream).
Howard Dean only caught a glimpse of what internet technologies can achieve for a political candidate.
At Dean's time, blogging was still a novelty, YouTube yet to be invented, Facebook was in its infancy, Web 2.0 has not gained its currency.
In February 2007, shortly after Barack Obama jumped into the 2008 presidential foray, his campaign revealed a completely revamped website with all of the web 2.0 components and features. Most importantly and prominently, it launched My.BarackObama.com. One of the major designer and creator of My.BarackObama.com (MyBO) was Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Not surprisingly, it has the feel and functions of a more advanced Facebook, however it is not at all a poking-field for hormone-raging college students, it is entirely focused and revolving soly around Obama Barack's campaign.
My.BarackObama.com and his campaign crystallized some of the principals of web 2.0.
- Networking
- Harness collective intelligence
- The Long Tail
- Cross-platform and multimedia
Networking
The first generation of social networking website were mainly dating websties such as Match and Classmates in the early 1990s.
The second generation appeared in the late 1990s, including FireFly, eGroups/OneList, ICQ and Evite.
The third generation, dubbed Social Networks 3.0, started to take off in tremendous popularity and growth around 2004-2005.
The third generation networking websites are backed by the advancement and sophistication of a series of networking technologies across multiple platforms, including: instant messaging, text chat, internet forums, blogs, Wikis, online membership and profiling and a bevy of social network services to allow people to come together online around shared interests, hobbies and common causes. The ever more powerful search engine also enables users to find and network with their like-minded friends.
Currently Facebook and MySpace stand at the pinnacle of the networking website pyramid.
The Facebook networking features including: The Wall that allows users to post messages on other users profile, Gifts and marketplace to give, exchange or purchase objects; "Pokes" to poke one another, Events to inform or be informed one's events, plans and whereabouts.
MySpace.com offers an equally rich set of social network features including: Bulletins for common messages, Groups for people to form groups, MySpaceIM for instant messaging, MySpace Classifieds for ads listing.
Both the Facebook and MySpace provide RSS-based news service. Both provide elaborate video and photo features.
Built on the strength of Facebook, My.OB site allows you to send and receive messages, track, plan and attend local events, create and join groups, start a blog, initiate an online campaign.
Obama internet social networking does not stops at My OB. He has claimed a great more friends on Facebook and MySpace than any other presidential candidates, he has created multiple online accounts and profiles on websites of different languages and interests and focci (Blackplanet - tailored towards young black population, Linkedin, MyGrito (in Spanish), Digg, Econs.com - a networking siting for people over 50 years old). He has a rich album and thoughtful profile on Flickr, a dedicated BarackTV on YouTube. The plethora of online activities helps him communicate effectively with millions, help supporters organized and motivated and connected. They also become vibrant tools of online fund raising.
Harness collective intelligence
The all-inclusive and forever-updated Wikipedia is a perfect example of collective intelligence at work. It hit a million-articles mark on March 1st, 2006. It exists in more than two hundred languages and has hundreds of thousands of contributors around the world. Its mass of information, gradual and granul refinement relies on exclusively the collaboration of an army of volutunteers. It is an unprecedented excercise of trust that any registered user can add an entry and edit any existing entries.
Google's breakthrough in ranking webpages - pagerank - is also an aggregated work of collective intelligence too.
"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.' Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance"
Jim O'Reilly in this widely-circulated work <a href=http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html">What is web 2.0"</a> also states:
"Much of the infrastructure of the web--including the Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl, PHP, or Python code involved in most web servers--relies on the peer-production methods of open source, in themselves an instance of collective, net-enabled intelligence. There are more than 100,000 open source software projects listed on SourceForge.net. Anyone can add a project, anyone can download and use the code, and new projects migrate from the edges to the center as a result of users putting them to work, an organic software adoption process relying almost entirely on viral marketing.
Relying not on a pre-built however inmovable political machine, instead the Obama campaign has used an open, participatory, dynamic model. and heavily invested in building grass-roots organizations. His campaign has set up intensive regional training camps across the nation, to create "self-sufficient, interdependent teams that take responsibility for all aspects of a campaign within their congressional district." Thousands of volunteers received training, set up regional offices and solicitied campaign donations and votes. His campaign volunteers range from celebrities, local politicians, students and salon hair dressers. His army of volunteers went door to door from all counties of Iowa to rural North Dakota.
The Long Tail
In January 2008, OBama campaign collected 36 million campaign donation, dwarfing the $13.5 million donation in January Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has collected and the $12 million Senator John McCain's campaign has collected.
Out of the 36 million, $28 million came from online, with 90 percent of those transactions coming from people who donated $100 or less, and 40 percent from donors who gave $25 or less and who are expected to contribute more.
This is The Long Tail.
The Long Tail was coined by Chris Anderson in his best selling book: "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More", respresented by the graph of a short head and a long-tail curve. In statistics it is known as the graph of power-law distribution. Wikipedia explains the Long Tail as the following
"Given a large enough availability of choice and a large population of customers, and negligible stocking and distribution costs, the selection and buying pattern of the population results in a power law distribution curve, instead of the expected normal distribution curve. This suggests that a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items ("hits" or "head") against the other 80% ("non-hits" or "long tail")."
Internet companies that have successfully utilized the Long Tail strategies include Amazon, Netflex, Ebay and Google. Netflix has a library of more than sixty thousand DVD titles, about seventy per cent of which are from the back catalogue and its genres range from documentaries, art-house movies, and other little-known films. Everyday thousands of people buy and sell items on Ebay, many items are obscure and start as a price as low as 1 cent. A big chunk of Google's coffer was filled by small advertisers, tiny companies. Google adsense enables users to place ads with virtually any blog, any web page. A no small portion of Amazon.com's sale come from the non-hits, the Long Tail.
"What's truly amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it," Anderson writes. "if you combine enough of the non-hits, you've actually established a market that rivals the hits."
Technological advancement was behind The Long Tail success: powerful database for storage and information organization, search engines, query tools help to match supply and demand, ubiliqutous availablity and use of the Internet.
YouTube, blogs and multimedia
YouTube is a bright Web 2.0 star because it made video uploading and playing snappily easy. Since its launch in 2005, it has become an ever-more-popular platform for video sharing. As of February 20, 2008, YouTube has hosted more than 73,100,000 videos, and has about 2,750,000 user channels.
Political candidates for the 2008 U.S. Presidential election have been using YouTube as an outlet for advertising their candidacies. Presidential candidates such as Ron Paul, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden all have created YouTube videos. CNN also organized and aired a live YouTube presidential debate.
Obama uses BarackTV on YouTube to broadcast his messages and activities. His webite allow individuals to subscribe to the videos or just video tags, to repost or email those videos.
His hugh following and rousing speech also inspired many other memorable videos, such as "Yes We can", which enjoyed a wide audience and extensive media attention, which in turn helped to fuel his compaign.
Obama also extended his reach to other platforms: iTunes and Cellphones, he offers free videos on iTunes or cell phones, Obama Mobile also gives the option to download wallpaper, ringtones and subscriptions to key issues via SMS.
Like every other major website, Obama uses a mix of publishing tools, blogs, instant messages, text messages, videos, images. Obama Campaign has Launched a Comprehensive Text Messaging Initiative to Expand Grassroots Network and Organize Supporters.
In the 2004 campaign, Howard Dean's innovative use of blogs made him a front runner. By 2006, more than 1/5 of policital candidates have created campaign blogs and 14 million Americans said they actively read political and media blogs, and two million were writing about politics on their own blogs Pew Internet & American Life Study.
My.Obamabark.come offers any one who registered by clicking Vote for Obama a blog for free. All blogs on his website have a RSS feeds. Updated-by-minute and by-all function to keep on users connected and informated and excited.
Final words
The post-internet-bubble-burst-era is actually a booming internet era. It belongs to a net generation, who are young (between 18 and 27) and grew up with the Internet, who also has seen rapid growth in technology breakthoughs. This gave rise to the Internet as a powerful medium for political campaigns. Riding on the wave, Obama Barack has successfully used every Web 2.0 tools, blogs, videos, and social networks to organize and strengthen his campaign.
References
Barack Obama campaign
What Is Web 2.0:Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software
Wikipedia: YouTube
Wikipedia: Facebook
Wikipedia: MySpace
Wikipedia:The Long Tail
Going Long
