That's Not How You Do It Obama

I had high hopes for Barack Obama's net savvy. But today his campaign blew it. I heard that he announced his candidacy for President today in Springfield, IL, where Lincoln did the same thing almost 150 years ago. I decided to go see the video. I went to Obama's website and clicked on the video. Turns out it only plays in Internet Explorer. Firefox and Apple users were directed to another link that didn't work for me. That sucks.

I don't know what they did today, but it didn't work. They've been using the Brightcove player successfully and I like the stuff they've done with that so far. I even embedded an Obama video in one of my earlier posts. But as Jackson pointed out in the comments, the Brightcove players requires Flash 9 and many don't have it. YouTube might not have the quality of Brightcove, but Jackson never complains about not being able to watch my YouTube videos.

So after being shut out of the video, I decided to play with the website a bit. It let's you create a profile. That's pretty neat. It says that they are trying to be inclusive. Anyone can have their own page on Obama's website. But "MyBarackObama", which is what they are calling the social aspects of the website, wouldn't load just now. Today's a big day, they are getting a lot of attention. It's not acceptable to be experiencing server overload.

So then I saw that they let you write your own blog. That's smart too. But what if you already have one? No way to import my political blog posts into my profile. The people who are most likely to blog for Obama already have blogs. It's silly to shut them out.

But despite all the bungles today and they made a bunch, I do think Obama's team gets the net. They just have some work to do to get it right. The Obama website is certainly a lot better than Hillary's. So is Edward's for that matter. Both Obama and Edwards have links to flickr, youtube, facebook, and myspace pages on their home page. That's smart.

My friends who are deeply involved in politics tell me that the Democratic campaign is going to be about money, big money, and that Hillary has the big advantage and it may be over before we even get to the primaries. I am saddened to hear that. Because although we could play the big money game, I hate it. It's not democratic. It's not of the people, by the people, and for the people. The net is. I hope the Net plays an even bigger role in 2008 than it did in 2004. And if it does, Obama, Hillary, and Edwards have work to do.

Comments

[Chris Gilbey]

Flash is the lowest common denominator video communications format. Quality is not the issue, ubiquity is.

Embeddability of video into blogs to create super-distribution is the present future.

Interesting that there are elections this year in Australia, and a long a and gruelling campaign trail in the US, and in Canada too, I believe. And some in the media are speculating about the role that online video will play. Which means that the mainstream media will have its eye on the web. Well, they have to, don't they? Most of the really interesting stuff can't be reported directly - too risky for the media owners to show the pictures, tell the stories directly. But telling the story about the story... its a get out of jail free card.

So the web is where the bleeding edge will be this year. And politics will ensure that there is a fast take up of new tools and methodologies. Which will in turn lead to the continuing acceleration of the re-imagining of the web...

And hopefully to a saner world along the way!

[Chris]

I had the exact, same experience. Excitement to watch, frustration in getting video on a Mac and "not so much" reaction in viewing the blog profiles -- agreed, agreed agreed...

However, if the quality of Obama's "social media features" and his fundraising challenges -- not his words or the significance of his candidacy -- is the core post on Obama for today, I think that misses the point.

On the fundraising point, I just don't get the money issue, at least not today -- Obama's going to get all the cash he needs. The last paragraph of this post, referencing "your friends who are deeply involved in politics" is like saying "my friends who work at Microsoft and who know software really well..." It's insider nonsense and it has nothing to do with today's news.

If you don't want it to BE about money and its influence on the '08 campaign, capture the moment and reflect what's important in the blog post -- did the content of Obama's announcement capture or sway you at all?! Am I really reading about broken streaming video links and lame social media features?!

The whining about the money is contagious and has me in a bad mood. I'm going back to the grainy video on USAToday.com (horrible-looking, I promise) to think about Sen. Obama's message and announcement, which was amazing.

[Chris]

I had the exact, same experience. Excitement to watch, frustration in getting video on a Mac and "not so much" reaction in viewing the blog profiles -- agreed, agreed agreed...

However, if the quality of Obama's "social media features" and his fundraising challenges -- not his words or the significance of his candidacy -- is the core post on Obama for today, I think that misses the point.

On the fundraising point, I just don't get the money issue, at least not today -- Obama's going to get all the cash he needs. The last paragraph of this post, referencing "your friends who are deeply involved in politics" is like saying "my friends who work at Microsoft and who know software really well..." It's insider nonsense and it has nothing to do with today's news.

If you don't want it to BE about money and its influence on the '08 campaign, capture the moment and reflect what's important in the blog post -- did the content of Obama's announcement capture or sway you at all?! Am I really reading about broken streaming video links and lame social media features?!

The whining about the money is contagious and has me in a bad mood. I'm going back to the grainy video on USAToday.com (horrible-looking, I promise) to think about Sen. Obama's message and announcement, which was amazing.

[Rags Gupta]

Fred,

Not true that Brightcove requires Flash 9. Can you reproduce the issue? I just loaded the Barack video page on the following configs and had no issues watching the video:

Windows, Firefox, Flash Player 9
Mac, Firefox, Flash Player 8
Mac, Safari, Flash Player 8

Rags

[Andy Swan]

Why the Democrats would nominate a Senator again is beyond me.

Only two Senators in history—Warren Harding and John F. Kennedy—won their presidential races as incumbent senators.

Senators raise big money. Senators get easy TV time. Senators get very big early audiences.....and....

Senators get beaten....by Governors.

[Doug Karr]

It was an inspiring speech. I hope he maintains is outsider image and positive messaging. I also hope he continues to distance himself from the Washington mainstream Dems. I look forward to seeing what he can accomplish.

[Stephen L. McKay]

Fred,

I know they don't appeare to "get it", but as an educated, intelligent man, with friends involved heavely in the political arena, you also must know that most of this is just a bunch of advisors setting the stage for the campaign! Of course they "get it", but they are not going to "use it", because it gets them in trouble, IE. John Edwards, and his hired goons he calls bloggers. It's the old system, and we are only in our infancy when it comes to real change. The internet will only be a tool of progress, when we as a society progress, and use it properly.

[P-Air]

It's amazing to me that to this day very few of the social network platforms allow the import of one's existing RSS feed. This was one of the first modules available in Tribe profiles 2 yrs ago when they were made fully customizable, and it amazes me when so many social networks out there just ignore this key feature. The few that do carry this feature relegate the RSS module to being a 2nd class citizen and do not treat it like the blog section. Hence, friends don't get notified when your RSS module gets new content, only when the blog module does.

Two steps forward, one step back... :)

[Todd Zeigler]

Good post. The most interesting thing about the Obama campaign so far to me is the spontaneous support he has attracted on Facebook so far. One Facebook group has 250,000 members and another student lead one has 60,000 or so. No other candidate is close in those venues.

[Chris]

To my mind, the only advantage Obama's website has over Hillary's is the feed for blog posts. Hillary's doesn't have one. All the links to flickr and YouTube don't really improve the user experience if the campaign has enough web savvy to do everything on one site. It would be impressive to see a candidate come out with an OpenID enabled website.

[obamapedia]

You people need to get with the program and get IE7 - I mean quit complaining, it is the most popular software.

No one owes you anything for choosing an unpopular, unsupported platform.

Quit wining and get IE!

[Chris Kerns]

Fred,
I'm with you on being frustrated by sites that don't support Firefox, which has enough market penetration that people should seriously consider the consequences of shutting that segment out.

Your comment about the net (paraphrasing) being of, by and for the people, however, got me thinking. I personally concluded that that isn't really the case.

The internet and big money are so inextricably tied, that I believe it is a fallacy to believe the net is democratic, or at least any more democratic than most things in life.

I posted my thoughts to that point here: "The internet is democratic" Fallacy

--Chris

[Rob Hyndman]

I have no problem watching any of the videos on my MacBook Pro using Safari or Firefox. They play just as intended.

[keith bohanna]

Good to be back reading your blog Fred.

His site (as one or two people who bothered to actually check referred to above) does work in Firefox :-)

keith

[Jerry Bowles]

So, let me get this right. This post is at the coveted top of the page on TechMeme where it is sure to be read by thousands of people who now believe that the Barack campaign is anti-Mac, anti-Firefox when, in fact, the information you provide is demonstrably false and probably something you did to screw up your configuration. All because YOU (as in ME, ME, ME) couldn't get your browser to work. Maybe the web isn't mature enough to vote yet.

[Webomatica]

I'm on a MacBook - OS X, videos worked fine for me in Firefox.

Maybe they fixed something between the time you visited and today...

[Kevin at TasteTV]

Brightcove also allows you to use Flash 8, which is more ubiquitous. The Obama campaign folks must have made an error in going with the latest version of Flash, but they can fix it pretty quickly by re-encoding.

As far as the Internet Explorer issue: no good excuses there.

[Dick Costolo]

I can't get the brightcove player's audio/video to synch in Firefox/XP, and I've tried closing/opening the browser, clearing cache, making sure the printer is plugged in and taking my coffee out of the DVD drive/coffee holder. It's hard to pay attention to the message when barack the voice is talking and barack the face isn't! Nonetheless, i applaud the campaign for trying to embrace all this stuff at once. Hopefully, the team will react quickly to what works and what doesn't and can build a compelling social platform "for, by, and of the people".

[mike]

ANYONE but Hillary. PLEASE.

[John Dowdell]

Hmm... are you talking about this page?
http://www.barackobama.com/tv/

If so, then 3pm Sunday PST I see a big SWF there, in Firefox 1.5x/Mac. At first I didn't see it, but that was because their layout was strange... it rendered off to the right of the scrollbar in my browser. The SWF is set to be 620 pixels high by 790 wide, too, which means you won't be able to see it in many browser windows. Do you see it? Or perhaps you were referring to some other page on that site...?

(For subsequent comments, most consumers already use Adobe Flash Player 9. If Brightcove offers fullscreen playback (without browser chrome) then this is available in Adobe Flash Player 9.0.28 and above. Video quality can be quite high... depends on how you compress it (don't double-compress it!).)

jd/adobe

[Kosso]

It's playing fine here on Firefox - just missing the captions.

I'm British and not over-enamoured with your current Chief.

When I first thought about 'Obama' for President, it was very easy to say 'mo way' it's too close a name to 'Osama' - but since haveing a look around the site, and checking out the video offerings (in Flash) from Brightcove, I think he really could do it.

I seems like a good, smart man. True - they all do to start with. But I have a good feeling about this bloke.

[Kosso]

He* seems.. of course ;)

[Henri]

The video played fine for me in Firefox and IE.

[Vishal]

Net would have defintely make huge difference in my opinion when it will come to presedential vote.

But when it comes to picking up candidates fom within a party it might not play as big role as it will in other case.

Hillary with Clinton behind her will win this race all the way. She already has such a big public profile.
Obama will struggle to match her, even after applying Social Network skills ...

Vishal

[JEiden]

I live in Illinois so I saw it on TV.

I have some concerns about Obama. I don't think getting into an argument with the Australian PM is a good idea. The Australians shed blood with us in WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm and Now in this Iraq war.

If we ever want to go to Darfur, we don't want to alienate countries like Australia as they may not join us next time.