this and that

Obama GETS the internet: http://change.gov.

The Newsweek series I linked to previously talks about the New Media team in some more detail in Chapter 4 (print version for single page):

To the casual visitor, the New Media department at Obama headquarters seemed at once ultrahip and painfully earnest, a touchy-feely, emo sort of place where people talk about saving their souls and use lefty academic jargon like “agency.” One reporter described the sentiment toward the candidate as a sort of “Lincoln 2.0.” The frat brothers over in Communications liked to joke about whether the geeks in New Media were still virgins.

When it came to what they actually did, however, the nerds of New Media were cold realists. “We never do something just because it’s cool,” the campaign’s official blogger, Sam Graham-Felsen, told a NEWSWEEK reporter. “We’re always nerdily getting something out of it.” He showed off the Obama ‘08 iPhone application. With its deep Obama blues, correct fonts and glassy graphics, it looked like an electronic bauble for the well-heeled voter. Closer inspection revealed a sophisticated data-mining operation. Tap the top button, “call friends,” and the software would take a peek at your phonebook and rearrange it in the order that the campaign was targeting states, so that friends who had, say, Colorado or Virginia area codes would appear at the top. With another tap, the Obama supporter could report back essential data for a voter canvass (”left message,” “not interested,” “already voted,” etc.). It all went into a giant database for Election Day.

Early that summer, the campaign made the unorthodox decision to announce its vice presidential pick via text messages sent directly to supporters. It wasn’t just a trick to do something flashy with technology and attract media attention. The point was to collect voters’ cell-phone numbers for later contact during voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts. Thanks to the promotion, the campaign’s list of cell-phone numbers increased several-fold to more than 1 million. (Among the registrees: one Beau Biden, son of Joe.)

“I don’t care about online energy and enthusiasm just for the sake of online energy and enthusiasm,” said Chris Hughes, head of New Media’s social networking. “It’s about making money, making phone calls, embedding video or having video forwarded to friends.” There was nothing starry-eyed about Hughes, who had been the Harvard roommate and later partner of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and made his first millions before he was 24. His goal was to make old techniques—like call centers and getting polling information to voters—more efficient. “When computer applications really take off, they take something people have always done and just make it easier for them to do it,” he said. “And maybe bigger.”

The last two sentences capture what I try to do at work better than anything else I’ve read.

All you have to do is look at the faces of the people around the world, and you know that this man is the better of the two choices we were given. America stands for something again, and it isn’t torture, war, or greed.