internet

Earlier today I and a lot of other folks got an email from Vikki Porter, who's leading a Knight Digital Media Center conference for editorial page editors. "We are urging them to build credibility with their users by having the courage to send users elsewhere for info when they can't meet the need. As expected they are appalled. They want hard data to take home to convince their legacy managers this is a good idea."

My snarky reply was: "Yes, they do come back. And that's why Google's current market cap is 140.73 Billion USD." I refrained from mentioning McClatchy's plummeting valuation.

Snarky, but serious: Google has built an empire on sending people elsewhere while many newspaper editors seem to be living in the 1960s.

Get this point. It's a network, not just another distribution channel. Being part of it means linking and referring.

If my memory serves, I spoke twice at meetings of the National Conference of Editorial Writers in the mid-1990s, once in Madison, Wis., and once in San Antonio, Tex., about the opportunity that the online venue was presenting for a broader and deeper social conversation.

Of all the mini-disciplines within journalism, the opinion and community forum leadership role of the "editorial page" should be a natural fit with the conversational strengths of the Internet. And yet many editorial page editors seem utterly lost. Sad.

"Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain" is the headline on today's New York Times piece smashing yet another set of assumptions about who really does what on the Internet. "Research shows that among the youngest Internet users, the primary creators of Web content (blogs, graphics, photographs, Web sites) are not misfits resembling the Lone Gunmen of 'The X Files.' On the contrary, the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls."

I can attest to that. Not only do my girls have their own websites (Middle Daughter has posted more than 15,000 photos) but they hacked around the Myspace block that I had put on my network.

If you're in the media biz, don't take this lightly. Teen girls have embraced the Internet and they're not letting go. Project that forward ten years and think about it.

I generally don't regard Alexa to be a reliable source of traffic data for local websites due to sampling methodology and size issues, but when applied to the presidential race, it may provide a fairly accurate indication of enthusiasm about the candidates. Here's a snapshot of the last month's traffic for the Obama, Clinton and McCain campaign websites. It certainly doesn't look good for Clinton.

You can see the live data at Alexa.com.

[Update: I had generated a graph for hilaryclinton.com, which apparently is owned by a domain squatter, not the correct hillaryclinton.com domain. I've fixed that and the Clinton line is somewhat higher, but still badly behind Obama.]

Aaron Smith at Pew muses about the effect YouTube is having in the presidential primary race as Barack Obama's powerful Iowa caucuses speech is relayed around the Internet:

"it's likely that relatively few people, outside of the most inveterate political junkies, actually did watch the speech live and in its entirety. And prior to the days of broadband access and easily accessible online video, it's likely that most voters would never have seen more of the speech than an odd clip here or there on the cable and network news shows. Instead, more than 160,000 people have watched just the official campaign YouTube clip alone in the twelve hours since it was posted, in addition to the tens or hundreds of thousands more who watched from other video or news sites."

Things are different this time around. On the one hand, the explosion of media choices has fractured the audience so we have relatively few common experiences. On the other hand, the "word of mouth" power of the Internet allows an occasional experience to spread quickly, based on a chain of recommendations by individuals, not media power brokers.

One of the effects of this transformation is an increased volatility in public opinion. Three or four months ago most pundits claimed, and I tended to agree, that Hilary Clinton was an unstoppable juggernaut.

No longer.

I first encountered this effect in what I consider to be the first major campaign truly altered by the Internet: Jesse Ventura's 1998 election as governor of Minnesota.

Ventura's backers, many of them former Ross Perot followers, were able to connect, organize, recruit and communicate through the Internet in ways that previously had not been possible.

Political parties, pundits and mainstream media were caught off guard by a grassroots process that unfolded under the conventional radar, and Ventura, not taken seriously in the months leading up to the vote, "shocked the world."

In hindsight it was possible to find clues in the raw Minnesota Poll data about the volatility and dissatisfaction with the conventional candidates (Skip Humphrey and Norm Coleman). Lessons from that experience undoubtedly helped the Iowa Poll folks sharpen their pencils and come up with a much more accurate prediction in the final hours before this year's caucuses.

Now we have all sorts of predictions that Obama may become the new juggernaut. Maybe. But keep in mind that public opinion today is more volatile than ever, and a slip or unexpected turn of events could change everything again.