Found this great post over at MyDD about the inherent weakness of the conservative "blogosphere", which is something I've been thinking and writing about lately. I went off on a rant a few weeks ago on Newsvine about all of the thinks I was sick of with conservatives, and then asked any conservatives readers to make their own list.
I thought at worst it would be amusing, though it might provide some valuable insight into what conservative voters didn't like about the way things are done in this country, something that would help us adjust our campaign messages and strategies to shore up conservative support and fulfill the commitment of elected politicians to serve the people, not serve only the people in their own party.
Not surprisingly, not one of them took the opportunity, but it got me thinking, how often did do you see conservatives reach out in any given community and tussle around? I know on Newsvine in particular, it's very common for liberals to show up in the comments of articles written by conservatives to keep them honest, but you basically never see the opposite.
I suppose it's just a fundamental difference between the two groups of personalities, where liberals to a degree are simply more interested in affecting change in the world for the better while conservatives are mostly content to sit still and cry about it louder than most everyone else.
That theme seems to match up with what Chris Bowers wrote yesterday, and I suppose there's nothing of real value there, but it's still interesting.
Moving from theory into practice, the Googlebomb campaign took place in the final weeks of the 2006 elections, and resulted in successful a search engine optimization project targeting 52 of the closest House and Senate races in the country. Over the final two weeks of the 2006 election, the Googlebomb campaign allowed negative information on the local Republican candidate--all from trusted local news sources--to reach 700,000 voters inside each relevant district (or, about 5% of the electorate in those districts). The total cost of the campaign was a piddling $350.
Predictably, the right-wing blogosphere freaked out when we did this, and the hate mail poured through my indox. However, it was a perfect example of what I predicted would happen sixteen months earlier. The greater size of the left-wing blogosphere, its far more pronounced bent toward direct activism, its independent, bottom-up communities, and its superior internal communication networks made a project like the Googlebomb campaign an incredible success. Utilizing Scoop platforms and private emails lists for volunteer recruitment and article research (click here to see how it all happened), progressive bloggers around the country were able to put the plan into motion in just three days. Then our vast size simply took over, once again with a huge assist from community building tools like personal signatures on Dailykos. By way of contrast, lacking both widespread implementation of effective community blogging software and a readership heavily engaged in direct online activism, there was no conceivable means for the smaller conservative blogosphere to match our efforts. As such, their counter Googlebomb was, in the vernacular of search engine optimization, a miserable failure (and a rip-off to boot).
Sorry for the large blockquote, but there's still plenty to read over there. I just wanted to point out that what I noted a few weeks ago is endemic of the GOP as a whole, where they simply are not interested in doing the grunt work to get what they want out of politics. If you take away the significant money advantage and the tendency to be sensationalistic little hate mongers, they'd probably have no national party either.
I keep hearing about this vaunted GOP technology machine that is decades ahead of what Democrats have but perhaps the reason for that disparity is the money involved, not really it's necessity or our lack of trying. And what has that machine gotten them recently other than a blow out in 2006?
You can argue, and I think I would argue, that the losses that Democrats were racking up before '06 were due more to the state of the country and the pervasive unfounded fear of terrorism and a casual complacency amongst Democrats with eight good years under Clinton than they ever did better organizational skills and activism interests.
