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How Presidential Candidates Are Using the 'Net

by Terrence O'Brien on July 23, 2007 at 04:08 PM



John Edwards

Edwards may have the biggest case of ADD of any of the political candidates out there. If there is a social network out there the Edwards campaign has a presence on it. Here is a quick list: Twitter, Eventful, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Partybuilder, 43 things, Ning, Metacafe, Revver, Yahoo 360, del.icio.us, Blip.tv, Vsocial, Tagworld, Collective, Bebo, Care2, E-ssembly, Hi5, Xanga, Gather, Livejournal, and The Hill. Try saying all of those in one breath. We're still not sure what all of them are.

Edwards gives it an honest go and succeeds more often than not, but it seems he's stretching himself a bit thin. Some of his content falls flat and is duplicated across sites. His MySpace blog, Xanga blog, and (shudder) Livejournal all share the exact same content. His Del.icio.us account is filled with links to blogs about himself and his campaign blog, rather than articles he finds interesting, which could provide an interesting insight into Edwards's interests, policies, and thought process. Edwards also lags far behind in the race for friends on both MySpace (a few shy of 46,000) and Facebook (10,796). He falls somewhere between Obama and Hillary as far as his use of the Web. Though he makes better use of social networking and online services than Hillary (and belongs to more than Obama), Edwards's content is often less personal and engaging than the other candidates.

His most interesting idea was explained in a video on his YouTube channel in which he announced a contest via Eventful, in which he promised to attend a Q&A session wherever he is demanded most. Keep an eye out for further interesting developments, though, since Joe Trippi recently signed on with the campaign.


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