Chip Griffin: Pardon the Disruption

Bloggers Target FEC Regs

AP has the latest on FEC efforts to regulate politics online:

"I like to think of myself as just a guy with a blog, but it's clear that 'just a guy with a blog' is different today than it was when I started three years ago," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the Web log www.DailyKos.com. "One sign of having arrived is when government regulators start wanting to poke their fingers into what you do."

Moulitsas was to testify Tuesday at a hearing on a Federal Election Commission proposal that would extend some campaign finance rules to the Internet, including bloggers.

Moulitsas also is working with a lawyer who volunteered to help bloggers fight new government regulations and whose efforts were promoted in a PR firm press release Monday. He is prepared to lobby Congress himself if necessary, and he is the treasurer of BlogPac, a political action committee formed last year by bloggers.

Online or Offline News?

Reuters reports:

Nearly one-fifth of Web users who read newspapers now prefer online to offline editions, according to a new study from Internet audience measurement company Nielsen//NetRatings.

The first-time study from Nielsen//NetRatings found that 21 percent of those Web users now primarily use online versions of newspapers, while 72 percent still read print editions.

Email List Building

Three weeks ago, Kari Chisholm had an interesting post about how to build an email list. 

(I'm getting caught up on posting interesting reads today, in case you didn't notice the flurry of posts.)

Online Donors Give Much More

A Kintera/Luth study found that:

On average, online givers donate in total (both online and offline) more than 50 percent more than those donors who do not give online.

The Line Between Service Provider and Consultant

Kari Chisholm blogs about the current debate over whether Convio, a company that provides online advocacy tools, should be able to serve all non-profits, or just those with a certain agenda:

Most of Convio's current and past clients are lefty organizations - including the ACLU, Dean for America, Planned Parenthood, etc. Recently, however, they added the Alliance for Marriage; an anti- gay-marriage organization. Some leading blogs, including AmericaBlog and DailyKos, have called for a boycott - suggesting that Convio is violating its own prohibition against serving hate groups.

I agree with Kari's conclusion that since Convio provides a toolset and not overall strategic guidance, they should feel no obligation to limit their potential client base.  Each service provider must decide whether it makes for better business to serve only one portion of the marketplace or take all comers.  To be sure, there are times where focusing on one party only may be more profitable ... and Convio may be about to find out if spreading out is worth the risk.

Likely Convio would have been better off to diversify early on.  Then everyone would know they were a service provider.  Winding up with ideologically similar clients and then trying to diversify later always looks bad.

MoveOn's PBS Petition Nearing 1 Million

BL Ochman reports:

MoveOn.org, which was seeking 500,000 signatures on a petition against proposed Congress' cancellation of funding to NPR and PBS, has now reached almost a million signatures.

New CNN Show to Incorporate Blogs, Podcasts

CNN's replacement for the venerable Inside Politics will include a tip of the hat to the online world, with podcasts and blogs part of the coverage.  Let's just hope they incorporate it in a less cheesy way than the current IP blog segment.  CNN reports on its own format change:

"The Situation Room" will be organized in three one-hour blocks: the first will focus on political news, the second on security issues and the third on world and international news. Blitzer will convene teams of CNN correspondents and experts to offer up-to-the-minute reporting on everything going on in the world.

" 'The Situation Room' becomes a showcase for CNN's unparalleled, world-wide newsgathering operations," Klein said. "There will be no better place to monitor developments than in 'The Situation Room,' whose studio has been expressly designed to incorporate traditional reporting methods with the most innovative online resources, such as blogs, Web sites and podcasts."

Pew's Cornfeld: Bush Won Because of Internet

Did Bush win because of the Internet?

MICHAEL CORNFELD KNOWS WHY George W. Bush won last year's presidential election.  Bush's camp, said Cornfeld, used the Internet to find volunteers and then gave them information to spread--via any medium at hand--to friends and neighbors. "The Bush campaign married software to Tupperware," Cornfeld, a senior consultant with the Pew Internet & American Life Project, said Monday at OMMA West.

Comments to FEC on Internet Campaigning Are In

Washington Post reports on the gist of comments to the FEC on internet campaigning regulations.

My position will not be popular with fellow bloggers, but I do believe that if a blogger is paid to blog by a campaign, that should have to be disclosed -- just like real world political activities.  Now, if the blogger is taking money solely to run advertising, that's a different story -- the ad itself should carry the disclosure that the campaign paid for it.

Total exemptions for the Internet clearly are not in the spirit of current law.  The only way to have fewer regulations online should be to have fewer regulations on traditional campaign activities -- something I'm quite open to discussing.