By Melanie Hoffman
I found this article talking about how Obama is winning the Web 2.0 election. The article talks about how Obama has the most Facebook and Myspace friends, and the most YouTuble videos. His videos also have the most views compared to McCain videos and other presdential nominee’s videos.
Everyone heard about the Obama girl, but that video was only the begining of political videos on YouTube. Today, videos associated with Obama have had 84 Million views, while McCains have had only 22million. In addition, the article states that Obama has 2 million facebook friends, and mccain only has 564,000. lastly, Obama was mentioned 10,291 times in online blogs in a week, while mccain was mentioned 3,924 times.
Obama is clearly winning the Web 2.0 election, but does this mean that he will also dominate the actual election?
For Ron Paul (who won the web 2.0 republican primary with similar ratios) this was not the case. he dominted online, but only won about 4% of the popular vote on election day.
Web 2.0 is used more as a tool for campaigning, but when a candidate has a significant lead like this, how can you not connect eventul sucess in physical polls to success online?
4 Comments
October 29, 2008 at 2:41 pm
I think that in todays society, the internet plays a very large role with the population. People are constantly searching online, blogging, facebooking, you name it. With the elections coming up, I’m not surprised that people are searching possible presidential candidates. I think that Obama having a more popular search rate online doesn’t necessarily mean that he will dominate the actual votes come November 4th, but it’s really hard to tell. Looking back to 8 years ago, technology wasn’t as advanced, and people like Obama and McCain weren’t considered celebrities as much as they are today due to the internet, and TV. A lot of this is a result of the younger voters, which is something that has improved this year with voting, and what may add to Obama’s actual success rate in the polls.
October 29, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Though it may be apparent that Obama is winning the web 2.0 election, I don’t think anyone could know for sure that it ill translate into actual votes. One of the reasons that not all the online Obama supporters will show his support at the actual polls is convenience. Anyone can click on Obama’s friend request button on his facebook from the comfort of their own home. Voting, on the other hand, is a more in depth process. With all these deadlines to register to vote or sending in your absentee ballot by, some may forget or are simply just to lazy. Also, many might just friend Obama to say that they are facebook friends with him, and not necessarily meaning that they believe in his views on topics and will end up voting for him.
October 30, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I believe that the internet should not be used to predict the outcome of an election for it is not a strong source to draw this correlation from. By counting up the number of people who have contributed or heard about Obama based websites and you tube videos we are forgetting that there is still a portion of the united states that receives no internet or that simply does not care. I do however think that this observation helps prove and show the amount of young supporters a candidate has. For instance, when you look at blog posts as well as youtube ones, it would be evident (upon research on their screen names) that many of the people commenting and viewing such things are teenagers and young adults between the ages of 17-26. Maybe McCain and other politicians have other sources in which represent the amount of maybe older Americans that support them.
November 10, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Now that we know the results of the election, I find this article even more interesting. The fact that Obama won the Web 2.0 election was definitely a prediction of him winning the actual election. However, it is very interesting that Ron Paul had similar statistics but did not win the primary. This also makes one doubt the accurateness of the Web 2.0 predictions. It is difficult to decide wether or not the results were accurate for Obama because of the age group that supported him were the main users of the internet. I am certain that by the next election the online predictions will become much more accurate, but for now we are sill left to wonder why the online world has accurate information in some cases and not in others.