The BSD Blog

Blue State Digital client Chellie Pingree won her primary in the Maine 1^st Congressional district yesterday. Congratulations!

On the fourth straight day of sweltering humidity, blistering heat, and an all-encompassing mugginess that has settled over the Eastern Seaboard like ... like a bowl of grimy oatmeal (okay, nobody said we were poets), our thoughts naturally turn to global warming. And we wanted to make sure you were aware of the great work being done by the We Campaign, to mobilize a new kind of individual activism to help reduce carbon emissions around the world and mitigate the associated climate change effects.

The We Campaign's Web site is built on the BSD Online Tools, and it showcases some of the most reliable tactics for building an online constituency -- and some of the most powerful person-to-person functionality built into our tools.

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Earlier today, DarkSyde from DailyKos wrote a great review of the My.BarackObama system (which DarkSyde refers to as MyOB, but we usually call MyBO):

There are many related capabilities in the MyOB platform we hope to talk about in the near future. Those features include contact management, blogging, training for phone banking and other activities, and fundraising/tracking tools. It is the best suite of online campaign tools I've ever seen, head and shoulders above any that came before or exist elsewhere (So good in fact, how long before McSame rips off a cheap, s****y version?). After you point and click your way around you'll agree: geez, give the MyOB developers a raise!

This is the comprehensive, crisp, bottom-up, politically terraformed cyber-scape we could only dream of in past elections. This is one way to take the next step, become a player in history, at your pace, in your unique way, without having to leave your seat, fork over one dime, or download any software. All you have to do is move in to be, literally, Master of your own Domain.

Hear, hear!

For the past week, since Senator Clinton's withdrawal from the race this past weekend started to be widely predicted, we've been inundated with the pundits' points of view on what went right and what went wrong in the Obama and Clinton campaigns over the past few months. (Obviously, given that Senator Obama's Web site is built on the BSD Online Tools, we have plenty of reasons to have opinions of our own.)

Amid this tidal wave of opinion and information, here are some of the stories that we think provide more useful information per column-inch than the average.

• Chris Cilizza, "What Went Right for Obama," washingtonpost.com, June 5, 2008
• Peter Baker and Jim Rutenberg, "The Long Road to a Clinton Exit," The New York Times, June 8, 2008 (free nytimes.com registration required)
• Antony Young, "Hillary vs. Barack: Who Had the Smartest Media Strategy," Advertising Age, June 4, 2008

We also call your attention to Matthew Mosk's "Obama Rewriting Rules for Raising Campaign Money Online," from The Washington Post, which (while brief) does a good job of evoking the hard work that the Obama campaign did behind the scenes to capture the attention of supporters via Google ads and other Internet channels, and bring those supporters into the fold by linking into deep content on their BSD-driven Web site.

Karen Tumulty from Time Magazine explains how Barack Obama’s campaign was able to use Blue State Digital’s tools to help capture the Democratic nomination.

Obama's Chicago headquarters made technology its running mate from the start. That wasn't just for fund raising: in state after state, the campaign turned over its voter lists — normally a closely guarded crown jewel — to volunteers, who used their own laptops and the unlimited night and weekend minutes of their cell-phone plans to contact every name and populate a political organization from the ground up. "The tools were there, and they built it," says Joe Trippi, who ran Howard Dean's 2004 campaign. "In a lot of ways, the Dean campaign was like the Wright brothers. Four years later, we're watching the Apollo project."

Even Obama admits he did not expect the Internet to be such a good friend. "What I didn't anticipate was how effectively we could use the Internet to harness that grassroots base, both on the financial side and the organizing side," Obama says. "That, I think, was probably one of the biggest surprises of the campaign, just how powerfully our message merged with the social networking and the power of the Internet."

• Karen Tumulty, “How Obama Did It.” Time.com, June 5, 2008

Back in January, Blue State Digital re-launched the Web site of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU. The Brennan Center is a public policy institute based on the legacy and judicial philosophy of former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan. It employs a vast team of lawyers, policy analysts and organizers who work around the country on behalf of disenfranchised voters and other threats to our civil liberties.

Michael Waldman, the Executive Director of the Brennan Center, has written and spoken out extensively on civil liberties, ballot access, and justice equity issues, and he now has a new book out: A Return to Common Sense: Seven Bold Ways to Revitalize Democracy.

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BSD client Wal-Mart Watch is profiled in today's New York Times in a story by Michael Barbaro. The online campaign mentioned in the article was produced using the BSD Online Tools.

• "Wal-Mart's Detractors Come In from the Cold", The New York Times, June 5, 2008. (Free nytimes.com registration required.)

For years, Republicans have beaten strong Democratic candidates with their sophisticated system to turn out voters -- but things have changed.

Thanks to a joint effort by Blue State Digital, VAN, and the Democratic National Committee, Democrats won’t be playing catch-up with Republicans in 2008. Democrats now have a single voter file and revolutionary neighbor-to-neighbor voter contact system to find Democratic voters and get out the vote.

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Congratulations to Blue State Digital client Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic Nominee for President of the United States.

Senator Ted Kennedy is one of Blue State Digital's longest serving technology and strategy clients. We all consider it an honor to work for the senior Senator from Massachusetts, who we lovingly refer to as "Uncle Teddy" in the office.

At BSD, we've worked to help give Senator Kennedy a voice online to fight for a higher minimum wage, to bring the war in Iraq to an end, and to elect a stronger Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate.

When news broke of Senator Kennedy's diagnosis, BSD was left stunned and speechless.

Blue State Digital's thoughts, prayers, and best wishes are with Senator Kennedy, his family, his friends and his staff during this difficult time.

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