Tech Race 2008 - Part I

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This series will discuss the use (or lack thereof) of technology by the leading candidates for the 2008 race for the White House. I'll spend time on each of the leading candidates and analyze what technologies they're using and their implementation of each. The final part in this series will be an attempt to grade each candidate, ranking them one against the other.

The 2008 Candidates - in order of recent rankings within each party by RealClearPolitics (data collected on September 7, 2007)

Republicans

1. Rudy Giuliani - 28.0%


2. Fred Thompson - 17.0%


3. Mitt Romney - 13.8%


4. John McCain - 10.4%

Democrats

1. Hillary Clinton - 38.3%


2. Barack Obama - 21.5%


3. Al Gore - 13.3%


4. John Edwards - 10.3%

Let's get started, shall we?

Rudy Giuliani - Republican



The first, and most obvious segment of any modern campaign is the candidate's official website. Giuliani's website design is clean and all things important are available from the home page and easily found. There is a live feed accessible from the home page and appears to be updated regularly each day. The site also offers blog widgets that integrate Giuliani content into your blog. The widgets include a Contribution Form, Live Feed, and Badgets (support banners & images). The site effectively integrates videos in a YouTube style focusing on the latest Giuliani speeches and also incorporates Podcasts directly into the home page called the Rudy Media Center.

After browsing the site for some time I expected to find an "official" blog link. Much to my disappointment I did not find one. I did stumble upon a talk radio show locater which is a novel idea. You choose a state, city, and then a local radio show and it presents you with the contact number for the show. Since conservatives tend to dominate talk radio, this is probably a useful function for Giuliani's site users.

The site also provides The Buzz which appears to be a feed of news stories related to Rudy and the campaign including a badge that displays the number of views for the particular article showing popularity. There are many other typical functions that you'd expect to find including a Donate Now button, Get Involved, and the Rudy Store. Most pages present the common social bookmarking buttons for Digg, Del.icio.us, RSS, Facebook, etc. near the bottom.

From what I can tell, the official Giuliani MySpace page is located here: http://www.myspace.com/joinrudy2008. Strangely, the MySpace page is set to private. I've added Giuliani to my Friends list but have yet to hear a response. The design of this page is also the default MySpace design. It is questionable whether this is the official MySpace page for the Giuliani campaign. If it is, it's a huge disappointment. If it isn't, where the heck is it? Does one exist?

The Good:

1. Social bookmarking links available


2. YouTube style videos


3. Podcasts


4. Live Feeds


5. Radio talk show locator


6. Nifty blog widgets


7. Effective use of AJAX


8. The Buzz feed


9. Clean site

The Bad:

1. No official blog


2. Lack of participation in other blogs


3. Questionable MySpace presence at best


4. No text messaging updates

Rudy Giuliani's website is effective and has some pretty novel functionality, but is lacking in a few areas. There are two glaring issues with his campaign's web presence, the lack of an official blog and the oddly private MySpace page. Let's see how he stacks up against the other candidates.

Stay tuned...

Update

Since writing this article it appears that Rudy has addressed the MySpace issues. His MySpace page is no longer private, has a custom design and provides a few videos. We'll see how his MySpace page stacks up against the competition, as next week we'll review Hillary Clinton.