This afternoon, as I was working on an Executive Summary, my business partner said something about Obama touting a major endorsement tonight at 7pm. A few minutes later, he told me it was John Edwards making the endorsement. I asked him how he knew, and he said that everyone was Twittering about it.
A few minutes later, he showed me on PoliticalBase the continually updating content including the flight path information on John Edward’s private plane heading to Michigan for the announcement. Not only did this blow my mind when I saw it, but the fact that a community of people – working from scant information – was able to piece together the story faster than the MSM was another step in the direction of distributed management and creation of content. The power of freely accessible data, speed of information across these new social networks and connection technology combined with the tools that are existing – we are still seeing revolutionary things happening in the political and social space.
Ron Paul and the incredible Libertarian energies
It is funny, because just last night, I was speaking to someone about the Ron Paul campaign and how it was able to use data that it gave access to the world freely to create new tools that would engage the electorate and his supporters. From freely offering the data from who was making online donations and how much to video engagement strategies that would make most Beltway campaigns cringe, the use of mashups and freely accessible data into incarnations that new software applications and platforms enable.
For example, imaging if Obama was offering a feed of donations to their campaign as an RSS feed and some person took that data, stripped out nothing but the dollars donated and plotted the information on a graphing solution like Trendrr. Now, imagine people are able to generate their own data and make their own assessments with the information, free from the opinions of the pundits and the “opinionmakers”. Whew!
Tags: Political Mashup
