Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Yes again Yes again yes again Yes!

From Bloomberg, via TPM. Now, pace Tbogg and Mitt's eternal bridesmaid, this is Sex in Mile High City, at least for political junkies like me.



``They recognize the nature of media is changing,'' said Zennie Abraham, 46, a blogger from Oakland.

Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable company, is providing customers with video-on-demand clips of the convention. People watching the convention over the Internet can even pick their own camera angles.

The idea is to ``bring more people into the convention experience than ever before,'' said Jenni Engebretsen, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Convention Committee. A key is to allow people around the country to view events and highlights when they want, rather than having to rely on coverage provided by the TV networks.

Like the Democrats, the Republicans are providing full coverage of their convention over the Internet in English and Spanish. They've also given bloggers credentials and engaged in social networking.

McCain Lags

Still, Senator John McCain, the party's presumptive nominee, has fallen far behind Obama when it comes to networking on sites like Facebook and MySpace. Obama has 1.4 million supporters on Facebook compared with McCain's 220,000.

``The Obama campaign has a superb organization,'' said Charles Cook, an independent political analyst. ``The McCain operation isn't even a shadow of the Bush 2004 effort.''

While viewers may have forgotten speeches and camera angles two months from now, the campaign will have their names, e-mail addresses and cell-phone numbers. On Nov. 4, that information will help the Obama campaign encourage people to show up in the voting both.

``A strong get-out-the-vote effort is said to be good for a point or two,'' said Cook. ``In a close race, that can be decisive.''