it’s unix, not eunuchs

You’ll have to excuse me because I wasn’t a Dean fan even before he made the blood curdling scream that halted his forward progress.  I ask for your forgiveness because I can not report on how he was using technology to get people involved in his campaign.

What I can say is that Obama has, hands down, the most intelligent use of Web 2.0 technologies that I’ve ever seen.  I first ran into this when I went out to his web site just to see what sort of page he was sporting.  I hadn’t really decided on who I wanted to get behind yet, and since I want this blog to say non-political I’ll pretty much leave that fork of the conversation unfinished.  I had heard on NPR that Obama were releasing their supporter’s information online and that this was an unheard of act.  Historically politicians guarded their supporter information very closely.  I think it was so that people wouldn’t harass or attempt to confuse them?

Anyhow, imagine my surprise when I found that Obama had an easy way for supporters to log into his website and then reach out to undecided voters in other states.  You don’t have to get in a car, go to a call center, sweat with other people, use crappy phones and then try to stay enthusiastic while talking to people about your favorite candidate.  Instead you could call from a coffee shop, from your home, inbetween classes.  And Obama had made it competitive.  You could try to be the biggest caller of the day, or of the month.  And you could step into forums and trade ideas with other people online.

Also, Obama is the only candidate with a Short Code.  A short code is a 4-9 digit code that people can text message.  If you’ve texted in who you want to win on American Idol, you know what a short code is.  It helps make it easier to get people involved in a campaign, because it’s easier to text to o-b-a-m-a than it is to text to 9137079131(completely made up number.)  And it’s easier to tell other people to text obama than it is to tell them to go google it.

The funny thing about these technologies is that they’re not very difficult to set up.  Yet millions are spent by all the candidates and each dollar usually only gets them a dollar’s worth of support.  But when you give people technology like this, they start using their own talk time on their phone or skype account to call people.  Or they manage to stay upbeat about the campaign when they talk to others.  It’s just smart economic spending.