Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Web 2.0   [Jonah Goldberg]

Lots of interesting email in response to my post earlier today. Most readers seem to agree that the Wikipedia/Google nexus is a real problem, but it's entirely distinct from the fundraising stuff. For example:

Jonah,

First of all, you're right... Web 2.0 is a nonsense catch-phrase. In as much as it does mean something, it first meant the ability to create dynamic web experiences using a series of advanced technologies (and often integrating user-based content creation). It's come to mean "any internet project that is considered hip and cool".

This is why the bulk of Cox's piece is, to use the technical term, horse honkey. Web 2.0 has little to do with anything he's talking about... he just heard the buzzword and feels that the left is beating the right on the Internet.

Internet based funds raising is, as we've all seen, not a good indicator of "winability". The lefty blogosphere is excited because they feel that they were singularly responsibly for the shift in power last year, so they are giving more money because of this excitement (and their passionate hatred for Bush).

I think Cox has a better point when he talks about Google and Wikipedia coming to monopolize what people consider a source of objective information, but I think that if Wikipedia wanders more and more to the left, it will lose credibility. This is part of the reason that Google News hasn't taken over the news dissemination the way Google wished it would... because people don't trust Google to decide what is news due to percieved biases

Can I be your Web 2.0 guy?

Web 2.0 started out in 2004 as marketing spin, but has evolved to
encompass a variety of post-bubble software architectures, business
models, and concepts like social networking, blogs and wikis.

Conservatives seem to more than hold their own on blogs. We're weak
on social networking, mostly because of the age skew — young people
are more likely to hold liberal views (or at least use liberal memes
as a means for signaling group identity, but that's another
discussion) — so modern liberalism gets carried along by youthful
technologies: MySpace, et al; text message blasts; swarming.

A far more serious problem for conservatives is how we communicate
with people who aren't political junkies, and this goes beyond Web
2.0. The vast right wing conspiracy at some point seems to have
decided that we'll command, if not dominate, the following:

- Think tanks
- Talk radio
- Blogs

This strategy seems to depend on persuading opinion leaders of the
merits of our case, preferably using 10,000+ words to do so. The
opinion leaders then hold court at family barbecues, dazzling friends
and family with facts and logic and slowly converting them to our side.

That's a perfectly legitimate approach, but it has three problems
that make it less than sufficient as a marketing strategy: (1)
political junkies aren't necessarily opinion leaders; (2) the
arguments are usually too complex to be easily distilled into
something that could lead to opinion leadership; and, (3) it assumes
that people's views are shaped by facts and logic, when things like
the aforementioned group identity are at least as important among
many people.

In other words, we need counterparts to MoveOn and its ilk that can
succinctly and persuasively communicate meaningful information to
largely disinterested voters, and do so using the tools and tones
appropriate for our target audiences. Some of its vehicles are Web-
related, but most are still traditional: TV, billboards, posters, etc.

And I firmly believe our positions can be distilled into some
essential, topic-specific messages, having done this sort of
commercial/political undertaking before. But that, too, is another
discussion.

04/24 03:03 PMShare