Win Points for McCain!: Rewards Program for Online Commenters, Washington Post.
On McCain's Web site, visitors are invited to "Spread the Word" about the presumptive Republican nominee by sending campaign-supplied comments to blogs and Web sites under the visitor's screen name. The site offers sample comments ("John McCain has a comprehensive economic plan . . .") and a list of dozens of suggested destinations, conveniently broken down into "conservative," "liberal," "moderate" and "other" categories. Just cut and paste.
Activists and political operatives have used volunteers or paid staff to seed radio call-in shows or letters-to-the-editor pages for years, typically without disclosing the caller or letter writer's connection to a candidate or cause. Like the fake grass for which the practice is named, such AstroTurf messages look as though they come from the grass roots but are ersatz.
McCain's campaign has taken the same idea and given it an Internet-era twist. It also has taken the concept one step further.
McCain takes lead on YouTube hits: 'Celebrity' attacks against Obama amuse younger generation, Washington Times.
“The Obama folks get it,” said Mr. Burch at TubeMogul. He said they always have new material coming out to keep continually peaking.
But Mr. McCain is catching up, with 4.1 million views this month compared with Mr. Obama's 2 million as of Wednesday evening.
“He made a smart move because he jumped out of the political blogosphere and chattering class, and got into the celebrity chattering class, and that's where most of the energy is,” said David All, a Republican strategist who runs Slatecard.com, an online contributions site.
Mr. All attributed the change in attitude to the elevation of Steve Schmidt at the McCain campaign. The former Bush White House aide and campaign aide to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger took over day-to-day operations at the McCain campaign a month ago and brought an aggressiveness that put the campaign beyond the usual political talk.
Vint Cerf backs net bandwidth management, Heise Online.
His recommendation is similar to common fee structures available from providers, in which users pay a flat rate for a particular data transfer rate – 6 Mbps or 16 Mbps, for instance. However, these are maximum bandwidths; in reality, data transfer rates in daily use are usually slower than this. Unlike this system, Cerf is interested in guaranteeing a minimum bandwidth during peak use hours, and when there is less traffic on the data highway transfer rates could actually be higher.
This initiative, proposed by the leading search engine internet evangelist, was a reaction to a decision on Friday against Comcast by US regulatory authority the Federal Communications Commission, according to which the US cable network operator is no longer permitted to slow down individual services, such as file sharing protocols. Cerf shows sympathy with Comcast's argument when he writes that some kind of "network management" is needed.
