Web site tracks politics on Net

TechPresident.com is a bipartisan group blog for political junkies.

WASHINGTON POST

NEW YORK — Exactly how much will it matter, all this online activity among the presidential hopefuls?

There are Sen. Barack Obama’s Facebook groups. Rep. Ron Paul’s MySpace friends. And John Edwards’ Twittering. (That is, he’s telling supporters, via text-messaging, what he’s doing at any given moment.)

“The holy grail of online politics is converting online enthusiasm to offline results,” says veteran journalist Micah Sifry, as he sits in his colleague Andrew Rasiej’s spacious SoHo kitchen.

Rasiej and Sifry are founders of TechPresident.com, a one-stop site for anyone trying to make sense of the Internet’s influence on 2008 presidential politics.

It’s a diverse, bipartisan group blog written, read and dissected by the who’s who of the growing online political digerati — made up of academics and young political operatives reared on the Internet, all Web-savvy enough to know the difference between MySpace and Facebook.

(MySpace is like Los Angeles: chaotic, a tad bawdy, a maze of overlapping freeways. Facebook is akin to official, buttoned-up Washington: cliquish, orderly, business-card ready.)

And TechPresident is like the Census Bureau, tracking the number of YouTube views, MySpace friends and Facebook supporters of each candidate.

But, more important, it tries to put them in context — what the numbers could mean for campaigns and voters.

Sampling

Typical postings on TechPresident: “Rudy Giuliani’s been pretty late to the online video game, and he’s been reluctant to use the Web for anything that smells of voter engagement. ...”

“Hillary announces her campaign is a conversation. But her site looks like a re-direct from www.RiskAvoidance.com. It’s the site of a front-runner thinking the goal is hers if she just doesn’t make any mistakes.”

Sure, the Internet played a key role in Howard Dean’s insurgent campaign in 2003, but Facebook, MySpace, et al., weren’t factors then.

YouTube wasn’t born yet. Indeed, it’s a sign of these hyperkinetic times that a site that’s merely eight months old — and draws no more than a few thousand page views a week — has already found its niche.

Accolades

Last month, TechPresident won the $10,000 top prize at this year’s Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.

“The site not only reports on, but encourages, citizens to participate more directly in the political process,” the judges noted. It was recently named one of PC Magazine’s Top 100 undiscovered sites.

“It bridges the gap between technology and politics as effectively as any site I’ve ever seen,” says Peter Daou, who authored the popular Daou Report, a comprehensive snapshot of the blue and red political blogosphere, before joining Sen. Hillary Clinton’s team as Internet director.

Adds Robert Bluey of the Heritage Foundation, where he’s tasked to reach out to the conservative blogosphere, “There’s really no one else doing what TechPresident is doing, and doing it as consistently.”