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Ad Lib: Advocacy for Libraries

March 5, 2007

Courting the MySpace Vote

Newsweek is running an interesting story this morning looking at which presidential candidates are the most Web savvy. Not a lot of surprises here:

MySpace, apparently, is Obama country. About 48,000 members of the wildly popular social-networking site have added Obama to their online profiles as a “friend,” while only 25,000 have “friended” Clinton.
…
In recent posts, the site [TechPresident.com]…chided the major Republican candidates for not having a single, candidate-created MySpace profile among them.

Despite its stated premise, the article is really more about TechPresident.com than it is about candidates being Web-savvy, but it fits so well into the social networking discussion that I still thought it was worth paying attention to.

It seems like legislators like Congressman Mark Kirk and Senator Matt Murphy view places like MySpace as something significantly Other—a trendy thing for kids to do, sure, but not an inherent part of the community with legitimate social value. It’s perspectives like that that can make mandatory bans on social networking sites seem like a good idea. But candidates like Obama and Clinton (or, more likely, someone on their staff) do see the value of these sites, and so have made steps to use MySpace for what it’s designed for: networking.

posted by Alan at 8:23 am |

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