ThinkStream

Last Friday, a revolution occurred on the floor of the House of Representatives. Didn’t hear about it? It wasn’t front-page news, because the MSM had already been “turned off.”

Nancy Coppock at American Thinker really pulls together the events and aftermath of the Republican debate on energy after Speaker Pelosi shut down the floor of the House to go on vacation. The lights, microphones, and video cameras were turned off, but that didn’t stop Republican lawmakers from debating, engaging the gallery directly, and getting their message out. If you’ve ever wondered about the value of emerging technology like Twitter or Qik, this is an excellent illustration of message propagation in the (forced) absence of traditional media.

American Thinker: Breaking Speaker Pelosi’s News Blackout: Thanks to Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) there was one small camera recording the events. Twitter messages alerted America to the historic events. Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) named the event “The New Boston Tea Party”, but that was quickly changed to “The Boston Tweet Party” by the new, tech real-time media. Messages flew across the country to anyone wanting to participate, as Culberson led the Real Time Media charge sending out live messages from the House floor…

Jon makes a point at the end of this article that is both fundamental and wholly misunderstood by people who run traditional campaigns: it takes real people communicating with real people to make online communication effective. I’ve added the emphasis below:

Know It All – - Rebranding via Blogging: “Large organizations like to adopt best practices that can be used by anybody, but a lot of things that are effective online are not easily duplicated – the natural interaction, the person-to-person communication. Campaigns tend to want templates and data dumps. If the vision is spamming people with press releases, it will have the appearance of what works, but it won’t work. People have the idea you can push a button to say ‘make it viral,’ but you have to provide something of value to the people you want involved – prestige, traffic, ideological progress – and in an attention economy, you have to get it to them quickly. That way, they’ll push it to the audience you want to reach. That’s what makes the Internet a social medium, they get value from distributing it.”

Kegerator Door Kit: Here’s how to turn any unassuming refrigerator you have laying around into a full on beer dispenser. If you’ve got the space, I think this might be a more economical solution to high volume cold beer distribution than an off the shelf kegerator.

Evidently the Bush tax cuts drew more tax money out of the rich than ever before. The WSJ says that Obama’s plan to further increase taxes on the rich will actually result in them paying less tax overall, since they’ll find ways to shelter themselves from reporting higher income.

Their Fair Share – WSJ.com: “The way to soak the rich is with low tax rates”

Over the 4th of July holiday I was fortunate to stay at the Hope & Glory Inn in picturesque Irvington, VA. The experience was incredible, and while I could go on in four more posts about it, the one thing that really struck me while I was there was the reaction of the Northern Neck boating community to the July 4th fireworks show put on by the Tides Inn.

We took in the fireworks with some other Hope & Glory patrons on a cruise boat. After steaming up Carter’s Creek to the Tides Inn we tied up at small dock and took in the spectacle. We were of course surrounded by boats on all sides of all kinds, either tied up or anchored in the “creek.”

What I noticed after the fireworks started was that after a volley of a few rockets, boats all over would sound off by blowing their horns. After a while it became clear that the more impressive volleys got more honks of the horn. The regular pace of the show lent itself to this instant feedback, with the best fireworks getting three or four quick honks.

It struck me that this was a great example of consumers giving instant feedback on a product or service, a veritable real-time focus group on fireworks displays. Instead of Gallup control groups turning a dial during a political speech we had Virginia boaters sounding off on their favorite arrangement of holiday combustibles. Crowds of course do the same thing via applause, but I think this method was made more poignant by the fact that while the people watching were dispersed over a large area, the sound of their boats’ horns was singular and carried over a long distance on the water.

This type of instant feedback is something I’m sure all the major brands out there would love to have from their consumers. As technology increasingly makes instant feedback possible, corporate entities, instead of asking consumers to respond directly to them about their products, are now able to effectively monitor the consumer “honking” via distributed communication channels. A case in point is Comcast Cable, which monitors Twitter for people complaining about their service. Comcast operatives even reach out via twitter to try and learn more about issues and lend whatever information they might have to help solve problems, though in my experience the later has been somewhat limited.

The art of this monitoring is something Jon Henke and company over at New Media Strategies have honed to a science, and to think that opinions that you as a consumer express online anywhere aren’t being exhaustively tracked is niave. But it is interesting to think that at the end of the day, it’s really just turning an ear toward who gets the most honks.

Rep. Culberson explains the issue and delves into the more ridiculous side of franking regulation. Some have called this a partisan power-play, but Culberson seems eager to address and fix the issue, saying he’ll approach Rep. Mike Capuano, Chairman of the House Franking Committee and say,

“Listen, Mike (Capuano), you have about as much chance of regulating the Internet as King Canute did at stopping the tide.”

Culberson, a frequent Twitter poster, tweeted earlier today that,

“Twitter is the Fifth Estate & far more powerful … because it is a true distributed network of We the People.”

Capuano was quoted in the Washington Post earlier this year with his wisdom on the Internet:

“I make no bones about it. I don’t know anything about this stuff,” Capuano said with a shrug. “To me, the Web is a necessary evil,” he admitted, “like cellphones.”

Andrew Feinberg’s interview with Culberson:

Great use of video here to describe T. Boone Pickens’ plan to supplant foreign oil as our primary source of energy. The use of good quality info-graphics, brief but poinient motion graphics, and actual footage of Pickens in front of a whiteboard really gives you the feeling that he believes what he says, and that the subject matter is understandable. I especially keyed in on the whiteboard footage, being a big fan of drawing out problems to find solutions and teach process to others. There is a genuine quality to this communication that is absent from most promotional communication, perhaps because Pickens doesn’t appear to be seeking office, though I’m sure he stands to profit nicely if his agenda becomes popular.

Praise from (not exactly Caesar) PageOneKentucky for the McConnell 2.0 website.

Patrick Ruffini makes some great points about the application of cognitive surplus on the Right having shaped the state of politics online so far. His key point is that what the Right really needs right now is infrastructure and distributed tools. There’s really no want for issue groups, and perhaps focusing all of our energy on an agenda, broad though it might be, isn’t as efficacious as developing the platform and tools to empower the movement in general.

I wonder if Mark Soohoo actually coordinated the message “John McCain is aware of the Internet” with the campaign’s communication staff, or just came up with it on his own…

From The Huffington Post:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYs8X0DZNI4&hl=en]