St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Posts Tagged ‘politics’

That’s right, 55% of Americans used the internet to research candidates and issues in the last election.

If you are going to run for any office, from a local school board to President, remember this one thing:
It takes around 12 months to get a decent search engine presence.

the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 55% of Americans used the internet to not just ceck out a web page but:

• 45 percent of Internet users watched online videos related to politics or the election
• 33 percent of Internet users shared political content with others
• 52 percent of those on a social network used it for political purposes

By the way, it was only 11% in the 2000 elections. What do you think it’ll be by the 2012 elections?

If you have any doubt that a strong internet presence and an engaging website helped Obama secure the Presidency read this quote from the study:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama used the Internet to mobilize an army of volunteers that helped him defeat Republican John McCain in the November 4 election.

Obama supporters tended to be more engaged online than McCain backers, the study found. While 26 percent of Obama supporters active on the Internet posted their own thoughts or other content in an online forum, only 15 percent of McCain-backing Internet users participated, for example.

Still think you can run for office without at least one website?
Well, than keep thinking that, I guess we don’t need leaders who are so out of touch with the populace.

Writing about the Coleman data leak is going to be tough to do without sounding like a paranoid extreme left winger or an extreme right winger. Let me assure I’ve alway been disappointed with both parties and I am a confirmed independent.

With that out of the way, lets get on with the paranoia:

The Main stream media is definitely reporting untruths about this story. They are saying that the data leak was the result of a hacker and that federal crime has been committed. This is entirely untrue. the only person that’s even saying this is Colemans attorney, well I’m sure some extreme supporters are saying this too.

What really happened.
The developers running colemans site asking for donations to his legal fund screwed up the site. It left the website down for an extended period of time.
While investigating Adria Richards stumbled across the websites database completley unsecured. she did this with a web browser and nothing else. This is not hacking. This is “surfing the internet”.

links:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19912.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=Adria+Richards&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://butyoureagirl.com/2009/01/28/did-norm-coleman-fake-his-own-website-death/

http://washingtonindependent.com/33674/norm-colemans-donor-database-exposed-campaign-claims-political-motives

Here’s a message to our President elect. When Britain comes around asking for America’s help in further censorship of the internet. Just say NO.

It seems the UK’s government has taken it upon itself (no, the people don’t want it), to censor the internet, yup, the whole thing.

• They are pushing a plan to set up a government mandated movie style rating for web sites.
• Force ISP’s to display material appropriate for children only after a certain time of day.
• OR just not display any material not suited for children, ever.
• Changing laws to make it easier for someone to sue for Libel if it occurs online.

Does anyone remember when the last time we changed the rating system for movies in America? They made it easier to get the new “X” rating for a movie, calling it NC17 for movies that weren’t porn but were for adults. Theaters all across the country embraced these movies at first, (The cook and his wife were a big NC17 hit). Within one year the Christian “Conservatives” pressured all the major chains and then independent theaters into never showing a NC17 movie again. Now they just won’t make movies like that.

The same thing will happen with the internet if they do the same thing, duh.

Later I’ll add some links to sites that will probably get the new “X” (not “XXX”) rating, whatever they will call it and will probably thus be banned by every state in the union.
Sure, ever since the Civil War, we Americans have lost the ability to control our government, but we can’t fix that now (ever). Sure, our leaders say things like, “I don’t even know how to check my e-mail” (G.W. Bush and John McCain both have said this). But to maintain appearances of a Democracy, our government sometimes listens to large public outcries. It’s also true sometimes they make laws that sound like they are giving us what we want, but really actually giving the bad guys what they want (The CANN SPAM Act ring a bell with anyone?). Now is the time for one of those large public outcries.

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