The United State of MySpace

If I were technophobic MySpace would be aboard a pale horse.

By golly they’ve done it again. Myspace is now hosting its own TownMeatings for the Presidential campaigns. Across the country MySpace will hold these townhall meetings where users can submit questions via MSIM and you can watch live as the old school consultants scramble to figure out how it all works. I smell another underwear question coming on. And so help me if I hear thong from anyone (including Edwards) they’ll lose my vote. I mean - there are some things about Brownie that I just don’t want to know.

This of course is going on in addition to the fact that MySpace, Not NH, is now the 1st in the country to hold a primary on the site January 1-2, 2008. The FIRST EVER virtual Primary. Boooya!

Now we’ve had a lot of conversation on here about MS but wait someone else is going wild about the whole Web 2.0 world.

Gather s jumping on board as well with a new competition for bloggers who could win a chance to blog at both NH debates. There will be five winners for each party as well as five independent bloggers. My assumption is that this is only the beginning for Gather who might have SEVERAL opportunities as the two year adventure rolls on - everything from blog at the debate, to blog while Romney is in church, blog while Brownback is shaving in the morning, blog during Kucinich’s colonoscopy, leading up to the convention of course where you could blog about some of the most hardcore political people that’ll make you wanna call your mommy (today is my Mum’s b-day btw).

KN notes:

“Gather is known for having contests that engage and reward the community, and we’re seeing a lot from the online social networking communities in the way of rallying political dialog. As experiments and projects promoting citizen journalism gain traction, the online politics culture is taking a lot of liberties”

Sing it sistah.

I think this is a great way to get your peeps engaged and reward the loyal not to mention the true political geeks. And that’s pretty hot. That said… who the hell is Gather? Know what I mean??

techPresident beat me to the blog on this by posing:

“What I’d like to see is the viewers not just trying to ask questions, but also being able to judge—individually and collectively—the quality of the candidates’ answers, and to see each other’s cumulative judgment in real time. Did X actually answer the question? How responsive was Y?”

Anyone catch French debates? Dude, them dang foreigners are ruthless. You don’t answer the questions the moderator goes after them and MAKES them answer it … or else they like drop them to a pit of gaters or something. But seriously, how cool would it be to force candidates to answer actual questions. (I blame irresponsible traditional journalists who lost their edge) Not just boxers or briefs but actually address issues outside of soundbytes like “I love America!” I want to know what your plan is for Mad Cow, Free Trade, Medical Marijuana, and bringing college to everyone who wants it.

See…. I know how these things work. I’ve worked for campaigns. What you do is organize your volunteers in your offices with their cell phones (or in this case their laptops poised) and they submit questions that support your talking points. You get 150 questions about Health Care its going to be hard for MySpace to ignore it and they’ll have to ask the question - when only one random guy wants to know why you’re a chainsmoker. Then you have your supporters run the post-spin afterward and control the conversations with positive feedback.

“because right now “debates” are little more than joint photo opportunities where candidates come to recite prepared talking points regardless of whatever questions they are asked.”

No… really??? Hadn’t noticed that…

“Come to think of it, let’s also enable the audience to rate the questions too. Was A a good question? Did your concerns get adequately raised by B?”

THEN - we’ll have em fight it out by filling an arena with jello. There’s always room for Jello - even in a political debate.

THEN - we’ll introduce the trap door and the gaters. If the debates were like that… I’d watch. Oh who are we kidding I watch them all - but if they were like that I’d have keggers around them!

Here’s the thing - with a well organized machine (ala the rich candidates) you’re going to see less of an opportunity to get actual answers out of them. I mean, I hate to kill your puppy but come on lets be realistic without a well organized army of people asking the same questions over and over and over again MySpace will have little incentive to choose the weird funny questions like boxers or briefs over the mounting “talking points” questions where the candidates have canned answers.

There are important questions that should be asked - like how exactly does Edwards really plan to give collage to everyone? Can Obama answer a yes or no question with less than ten words? Why is Hillary so scary? Is McCain still alive? All joking aside - the people who are going to be watching this are people who’ve already friended a candidate or ten and heard the answers about jobs, health care, and education - not to mention the plan on the War if not committed it to memory. Do we want to recycle the same questions or do we want to even go after the wacky? How does MySpace plan to account for the non-serious world of intrusive iPolitics?

So while I respect my pals at techPresident I’m still speculative that this can really work outside of a big money maker for MySpace and make politics fun enough to stay engaged and involved. For that - Pizza is required. Still… its a cool idea - it’s unique. It’s heading in the right direction and while I AM pessimistic about it I’m hopeful that over the next year we’ll come up with some insane and wacky ways of forcing these people to answer questions, give specifics, and outline their 5 point plan for the issues that matter most AND the ones that matter least.