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Archive for January 2008

Interesting developments at AOL news

Posted on Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 7:17 PM by Andrew Chadwick

While there have been sceptics, something interesting is going on at AOL News. Most noteworthy are a) the very tight integration of user interaction with the story itself and b) the ability to "switch off" user comments. The first is classic low threshold web 2.0 but the second is obviously a response to perceptions of information pollution caused by user comments. Having said that, the comments facility on the site is slick and commenting volumes on some of the stories are very high indeed.

[Crossposted at the New Political Communication Unit blog]

Iowa and online politics - is there a story?

Posted on Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 2:01 PM by Andrew Chadwick

Picking through the bones of the Iowa result and its implications for online campaigning it is a reasonable hypothesis that the huge increase in the youth vote at caucus might have had something to do with the result itself. Clinton slipped badly while Edwards did better than expected and Obama did very well indeed. See this article by Michael Connery at the Daily Kos, which argues that

"Young voters are increasingly moving in the direction of Democrats, and tonight, the Obama campaign - thanks to a savvy youth operation that reached out on Facebook and MySpace, at high schools and on college campuses - was able to capitalize on that to attain victory."

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