New York – The Internet battle over the presidential campaign is ratcheting up following announcements by social- networking site MySpace and video-sharing hub YouTube that they plan live webcasts of town-hall meetings and candidate debates leading up to the primaries.
Both said they seek to draw more voters into the political process, but the sites also are engaged in what is shaping up as an old-style media fight over online information consumers – and the ad revenues they bring with them.
“It’s almost like the ‘browser battle’: Which site is the new e-mail? Which is the new standard for how people communicate?” said Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org.
Credibility hangs in the balance as both sides seek to position themselves as more than “one-trick ponies” where users share passions for rock bands or post funny videos, said Josh Bernoff, a social-computing analyst at Forrester Research.
“Both MySpace and YouTube would like to establish themselves as serious political sites,” he said. “They want to be broader, more multi-dimensional.”
MySpace is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch; YouTube by dominant search engine Google.
Key executives from major Web companies – including Google chief executive Eric Schmidt – took part Friday in the fourth annual Personal Democracy Forum in New York, a gathering of people trying to use the Internet to find new ways of mobilizing people into political action.
The potential pool is huge. More than 21 million people viewed online political videos as of February, Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life project, told the conference. And, he said, more than 24 million people have participated in organized online lobbying campaigns.
Still, those numbers represent a relatively narrow slice of the total electorate.
The conference came a week after MySpace announced that it will hold a series of webcast town halls with presidential contenders, adding to a planned virtual “primary” in January.
Google’s YouTube YouChoose site followed with its own announcement that it will co-sponsor with CNN the first of six Democratic debates, and is in talks to co-sponsor Republican debates as well.
