I got an email today from the GOP telling me to download their new toolbar.

Being a good email reader I did what they told me to do, it was quick, easy and voila now I can raise money for the GOP just by doing what I normally do, waste time learn valuable information on the internet.

After a few minutes of random browsing I checked back into my stats and I had raised $1.01!

Not bad, especially if you get a few thousand people using it during the next few months. Not sure how this works with campaign finance reform and wish the GOP site would be a little more clear in that regard.

The one thing I don't like about it is you have to use yahoo to search, I happen to like the other team.

Try it out for yourself. Then post your thoughts back here.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

YouTube allows you to potentially reach everyone with an internet connection. It’s an easy way to connect with your fans and supporters but it’s just as easy (or easier) to be ignored by the masses.

Senator McCain’s YouTube Channel

Total Videos = 217
Total Channel Views = 784,981
Video with the highest # of views = 390,543
A total of 7 videos with over 100,000 views

Senator Obama’s YouTube Channel

Total Videos = 1,146
Total Channel Views = 14,725,339
Video with the highest # of views = 4,616,204
A total of 7 videos with over 1 million views

If you take just a cursory glance at the two YouTube Channels you quickly see one really big difference.

Obama’s channel has videos of regular people talking to the camera. A feature that is noticeably lacking on the McCain channel.

People want to be famous and see themselves on camera, just watch the jumbo tron at a ballgame. If you interview 100 people and upload the videos on YouTube I can guarantee most of them will watch the video and tell their friends to watch it as well. To paraphrase Seth Godin, be remarkable, meaning be worth making a remark about.

Watch these two videos and ask yourself, “If I supported this candidate, which video would I be more likely to tell my friends to watch.” It’s that simple.

Web Ad: Jobs for America

Unite for Change National Wrap-Up

Now it’s YOUR turn to share your thoughts and comment.

Crossposted at MyMcCainBlog.com

Like every other geek in the world I was listening/watching/tweeting iPhone 2.0 today as Steve Jobs announced the 3G iPhone and the new iPhone apps.

Most of the new apps make use of GPS (and other location finders) to feed you data, relevant to your location. Also announced was the "Enterprise Apps" which allows an organization (or other group) to create a private app that can only be used by authorized iPhones. My first though/tweet was...

Imagine 100 poll workers, door to door teams, etc. all equipped with iPhones which are being fed local relevant data. You could walk down the street and have all the information for each house being sent directly from headquarters, you could take a poll and have instant data analysis, check off all the contacted people so no one is visited more than once.

All this can now be done by volunteers in their free time, after work, lunch break etc.

Most campaigns have already made the switch from land lines to cell phones for call centers. iPhone 2.0 takes this to the next level.

These are just a few possibilities I thought of, Aaron Marks over at TheNextRight.com had more thoughts.

Your turn, how do you see the new iPhone being used in political campaigns?

This morning the sheet was removed from the new and improved JohnMcCain.com.

It looks great and it's got some great new features. I heard about it via a facebook update not email, this shows they are thinking about who will use the new features.

Here are some of the new features...

McCainSpace is useful, users can sign up friends, comment on other blogs, raise money, and for each action someone takes they receive "points". Not sure what you do with the points once you get them but at least it's competition.

Badges, "We don't need no stinkin Badges" well maybe we do :-)

Visit the download center and have your fill of facebook icons, blog badges, wallpapers, website buttons, google icons, IM icons etc.

Register to voteRecruit friends, I tried to recruit myself (different email) as a friend but no followup emails yet.

Interact with other blogs. They provide a list of blogs and talking points for the day. Your mission, should you choose to accept it is to comment on the blogs and then post back what you did. Once you do you will receive some of those illustrious "points".

A cause greater than your self, this section provides links to volunteer opportunities. If you do any volunteer work they have a form so you can let them know how it went.

When browsing through the new site and kicking the tires I ran across quite a few 404 errors, missing pages (like when I click on my state). I also tried to retrieve my McCainSpace password, because it's been almost a year since I first tried to use it. It's been an hour and still no email.The search function (down at the bottom of the page) only works when you hit the triangle thingy. If you hit enter it gives you an error.

To conclude - it's a great step in the right direction. Essentially the new features "flip the microphone" (a la Godin) There are plenty of ways for people to talk back and also plenty of ways they can talk with their friends. This is a change in direction from the old top down model and hopefully a taste of things to come.

p.s. In case you missed it, the McCain store was redesigned a few weeks ago and plenty of new stuff added.

Go visit JohnMcCain.com and post a comment with your first reactions.

This is easily the best use of internet video and political endorsement by a candidate.

Ingredients:

1 part Chuck Norris

1 part Mike Huckabee

pinch of Chuck Norris Jokes

pinch of Chuck Norris Endorsements

shake well

Feeds thousands

Reccomended for the 18-30 age group online.

The key though is you need Chuck Norris I really don't see how this could have worked with Pat Robertson :-)

Whoever thought this up deserves a slap on the back and a large helping of porridge (that was for you David)

Comments?

New changes at facebook were announced today.

Today, Facebook Ads launched with three parts: a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads™; and an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about.

Politicians and facebook have been around for a while now and a politician on facebook is a strange animal. While they are people they don’t mess with their profiles. With the advent of new facebook pages a politician can now fit in a little better.

So far Barack Obama has the first facebook page that I have found

The new pages look like a profile/group hybrid. They are designed for companies to have a facebook presence and gather fans, the ability to do a mass mailing to all your fans, as well as way to integrate targeted facebook ads.For a politician on a grand scale i.e. presidential elections this will have an impact but on a smaller local scale I think pages will have a tremendous effect.A county commissioner can set up a facebook page, gather supporter and also run targeted facebook ads to just the conservatives in his town above the age of 18. Think google ads combined with a facebook page for your politician/business with targeting down to, age, sex, region, keywords etc.To bad it was released after the Nov 6th election cycle, it would have been fun to test out.

Those are my half formed thoughts after messing with pages for an hour so put on your thinking caps and discuss how this can help us techrepublicans.

IMHO - it's going to be BIG

The Telegraph.co.uk recently released a list of the top 100 conservatives and liberals. Here are the Republican presidential candidates along with some other name of note that made the list.

The Candidates:

• #1 Rudy Giuliani
• #9 John McCain
• #10 Mitt Romney
• #11 Mike Huckabee
• #58 Fred Thompson
• #97 Ron Paul

Names of Note:

• #3 Matt Drudge (props to internet journalism)
• # 21 George Bush
• #26 James Dobson
• #47 Joe Liberman (also made #47 on the liberal list)
• #71 Chuck Norris
• #85 Clarence Thomas (why so low?)

Liberal Listings of note:

• #8 Arnold Schwarzenegger
• #23 Colin Powell
• #62 Jerome Armstrong (co host of the poplar DomeNation with our own David All)

Some thoughts:

• The liberal side had more actors and musicians than the conservative side
• Barack Obama, his wife and his media strategist all made the cut
• A lot of Bloggers made the cut on both sides of the proverbial aisle
• Quite a few news anchors are on each list

From all this I gather that in order to be influential one needs to... run for public office, be a news anchor, be an actor or become a blogging phenom :-)

Any thoughts on the top 100 lists?

UPDATE (David All):: Erick Erickson of Redstate deservedly pulled #69:

69. ERICK ERIKSON
Blogger

ERICK ERIKSON

Founder and CEO of the conservative website redstate.com who also blogs on his personal site erickerickson.org, entitled Confessions of a Political Junkie, and on Georgia politics at peachpundit.com. A Republican political consultant and self-described “recovering lawyer”.

At just 32, Erickson epitomises the new power of the internet. A small-government fiscal and social conservative based in the south, he taps into and influences the Republican “base” that the GOP’s 2008 candidates are courting. Only started blogging in 2003.

Congrats Erick.

I conducted a little facebook experiment and thought it fitting to post prior to Sam Brownback leaving the race (hums tune "Another one bites the dust")

Here are the numbers of facebook friends for each republican candidate as of September 12th.

1. Ron Paul 23,141
2. Mitt Romney 17,204
3. Fred Thompson 12,718
4. John McCain 9,989
5. Mike Huckabee 4,548
6. Sam Brownback 2,664
7. Rudy Giuliani 980
8. Thomas Tancredo 851
9. Duncan Hunter 654

Total Friends 60,063

Ron Paul in the lead, no suprise there. Rudy Giuliani still in triple digits! That was a bit of a shocker.

Here are the results as of today October 18th (% change in parenthesis)

1. Ron Paul 31,617 (+36.6%)
2. Mitt Romney 19,431 (+12.9%)
3. Fred Thompson 17,688 (+39%)
4. John McCain 12,001 (+20%)
5. Rudy Giuliani 7,041 (+618%)
6. Mike Huckabee 6,489 (+42.6%)
7. Sam Brownback 3,061 (+14.9%)
8. Thomas Tancredo 1,007 (18.3%)
9. Duncan Hunter 822 (+25.6%)

Total Friends 99,157 (+65%)

Best Status Update:"Thomas [Tancredo] is challenging Mitt Romney to a trap shooting contest, loser drops out."

Worst Use of FacebookDuncan Hunter - A Flag for a profile picture, no information, no applications, no photos and no mentiont that he is even running for president.

Best Growth - Rudy Giuliani 618%Followed by Fred Thompson 39%Worst Growth - Mitt Romney 12.9%Followed by Sam Brownback 14.9%

According to these numbers the next to drop out will be Mitt Romney and Thomas Tancredo :-)

I'll be continuing to track these numbers and will be interested in see how the friends count compares to the actual vote. I've also got the numbers for the democrats and they put the republicans to shame. Obama has more friends than all the republicans put together.

What do you think about this data?

It's that time of year, time for pirate costumes, pumpkins and presidential primaries. Everyone it seems is trying to get a piece of the primary pie.

One trend is for startups to find a way for vocal techies to use there new service to promote a candidate.

One company to do this is Jott Networks. They offer a voice to text service. Sign up for an account then call their number, say who you want to contact (a friend, your blog, twitter) then record your 30 second message.

Jott then transcribes your message and sends it out to wherever you want it to go. I use it to twitter on the go without bothering to type in a text message.

Best of all... it's free!

So how does this affect a presidential candidate? Well Jott created a new sister site called JottTheVote.com where you can call in, record a message for your candidate of choice and a short while later it appears on the site. Like magic :-)

I think Jott cares more about getting people to use their service than they do about the 2008 elections but it is still a cool device to try. In case you were wondering Ron Paul has more Jotts than any other candidate. Others are still in single digits.

It's a good way to see how tech savvy a candidates supporters really are. Click here to see my Jott for John McCain.

Another thing that makes this unique is that Jott is sending all the comments directly to each campaign. I'm interested to see how this goes.