Obama, The Web Candidate

The Senator Obama seems to be the most popular candidate of American internet users, in any case of all those who are actively involved in the election campaign. Not a single week goes by without the creation of a new website or blog supporting him and influencing public opinion or one of his videos  breaking YouTube spectator records. All the candidates have made extensive use of Internet to collect funds for  upcoming events. According to a study of Pew Research Centre, almost 25% of Americans go online to follow the presidential campaign, specially young voters who have been very active this year.

Since the beginning of the campaign, Barack Obama has cashed in heavily on the net by using YouTube, the most well known video portal to announce that he was going to run for the election. His aim has been to set himself apart from Hillary Clinton who is perceived as being part of the old political guard and overall, to be omnipresent onscreen. The aim of his official website is mainly to mobilise his supporters with the slogan, “ Let’s make a difference.”

The list of tools, initiatives and interesting events directly related to his online campaign is growing bigger day by day :

- YouTube: On this website, his videos are seen twice more often that those of Hilary Clinton’s

- You Bama: A video website where his supporters leave testimonials of encouragement and support. 

- Tech Crunch: One of the American blogs which has enormous influence on people’s opinions.(graded amongst the top 3 Technorati, 670,000 subscribers to its newsletter) consider Obama to be the democratic candidate with the best technology project.

- MoveOn.org: The strongest online movement led by committed liberals, well known for mobilising support for Howard Dean in 2004 has written to 3,2 million of its members asking them to vote for Obama. The site has been successful in collecting more than 500,000 dollars online.

- Facebook: More than 500,000 registered supporters, five times more than his opponent. One of the co-founders of Facebook Chris Hughes has joined the team of Obama in February.

- Second Life: A virtual headquarter for Obama’s campaign was created on Second Life since the beginning of summer 2007.

Will the mobilisation of his online supporters be enough to pave Barrack Obama’s path to the White House? It’s the challenge his team faces, which goes to show that the tools available online for the campaigners have made it possible to create 6,000 support groups throughout the country and 20,000 different web pages meant for fund raising till mid January.

In order to put things into perspective, we must remember that the most frequently internet sites for the election campaign are those of the media MSNBC, CNN or Yahoo news and that the television is the still the main source of information for Americans except for those less than 30 years old who prefer the web (42%) to the television (35%).