93South - Thoughts on New England Web 2.0

I’m not actually sure what the reference in the title is but it jumped into my head when I watched Hilary Clinton’s “I’m In” speech posted on the Hillary Clinton campaign website.  The amount of incremental press gained from announcing her entry into the 2008 US Presidential Election via an online video is huge.  As I am writing this post, one of the major cable networks is running a story on the “role of the Internet” in the upcoming election with her announcement as the centerpiece of the spot.

Hillary was not alone this week.  Earlier in the week Democratic rock-star Barack Obama also made an entry into the online video space via local broadband video start-up Brightcove (which made it’s own fireworks this week via another round of funding). 

Here is the part in the video, posted on both the Barak Obama website, YouTube and tagged on Gotuit, where Barack does not announce his candidacy but does announces that he will think about and get back to you on February 10th.  Not to be upstaged, Hillary announced here candidacy today…online.  

This election promises to be one that will have the online world, including all of the Web 2.0 sites that did not exist back in the 2004, be one of the main battlefields for the candidates and their supporters.  I suspect that the candidates will spend a decent amount of effort trying to ”out-web 2.0″ each other.

The interesting thing will be how the candidates on both sides will be handled on sites like Digg, YouTube and others.  It is pretty certain that social media sites are very “left” leaning in bias so my bet is that the Dem’s will fair better online than their Republican counterparts.

This new interest in using the Internet as a platform for political campaigning almost makes Dean look like a maverick?

Today’s move by Hillary officially opens the 2008 campaign season and the hunt is going to be televised in a whole new way.  I just hope that my Apple TV shows up in time for the good stuff.

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