How Howard Dean revived the Democratic party

• Boston Herald "The pioneering that Dean and aide Joe Trippi did on Internet fund-raising served as a model for Obama’s greatly expanded operation which raised more than $100 million."
• Speech. We raised more money than the RNC, and we did so by attracting thousands of new small donors ... We trained tens of thousands of new activists ... Now we need to build on our successes while transforming the Democratic Party into a grassroots organization that can win in 50 states.
• Conservative view. "Part of what made Obama's vaunted online operation succeed where Howard Dean's fizzled—and this is something his online people themselves always stress—was that it was an organic component of the broader brick-and-mortar campaign."

Why Obama won

• Politico. "The campaign’s early decision to play on a more ambitious map than other Democratic nominees was the source of his mandate"
• Washington Post, Feb. 2007. "The gathering of several thousand students at George Mason University in Fairfax underscored the potential power of online communities in the 2008 campaign. Its genesis was a group created last summer on Facebook.com, a Web site frequented by college students who post profiles and assemble virtually." "Another Facebook group, Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack), was started less than three weeks ago and has already recruited 200,000 members."
• Advertising chess at the LA Times. "Obama has “stretched the playing field,” said Edward Carmines, who teaches political science at Indiana University. “Now, in the last month of the campaign, Sen. McCain is having to make very tough decisions where to spend his money.”"
• The $5 philanthopist @ givemeaning.com, Feb 2008. According to Barack Obama's official website, more than 280,000 people have created accounts on BarackObama.com. From those online accounts, 6,500 grassroots volunteer groups have been created and more than 13,000 off-line events have been organized through the site. Over 370,000 individual online donations have been made, more than half of which are less than $25 donations .And most interesting to me, personal fundraising pages (individual fundraising pages where you proactively recruit your social network to donate through your personal fundraising page) have raised over $1.5m.
• The Atlantic -- mid-campaign. Thoughtful. "Obama’s machine attracts large and small donors alike, those who want to give money and those who want to raise it, [emphasis mine] veteran activists and first-time contributors ... If the most that any one person could write a check for was $2,000 [it was said] then the important people suddenly became those who would put their hand up and say, ‘I’ll raise $50,000 or $100,000.’ ... North and Gorenberg borrowed the subscription model for their “Win Back the House” project. Instead of asking for a big check up front, as they would for a presidential candidate, they invited each of their House candidates to the Bay Area over the course of the year, so that supporters could give recurrent, but smaller, donations ... As before, the emphasis was not on writing big checks but on building raiser networks, including people who couldn’t contribute much themselves." "The purpose of social networking is to connect friends and share information, its animating idea being that people will do this more readily and comfortably when the information comes to them from a friend rather than from a newspaper or expert or similarly distant authority they don’t know and trust ... When My.BarackObama.com launched, at the start of the campaign, its lineage was clear. The site is a social-networking hub centered on the candidate and designed to give users a practically unlimited array of ways to participate in the campaign. You can register to vote or start your own affinity group, with a listserv for your friends. You can download an Obama news widget to stay current, or another one (which Spinner found) that scrolls Obama’s biography, with pictures, in an endless loop. You can click a “Make Calls” button, receive a list of phone numbers, and spread the good news to voters across the country, right there in your home. You can get text-message updates on your mobile phone and choose from among 12 Obama-themed ring tones, so that each time Mom calls you will hear Barack Obama cry “Yes we can!” and be reminded that Mom should register to vote, too ... It’s not enough to have a bumper sticker. We want you to give five dollars, make some calls, host an event. If you look at the messages we send to people over time, there’s a presumption that they will organize ... The true killer app on My.BarackObama.com is the suite of fund-raising tools. You can, of course, click on a button and make a donation, or you can sign up for the subscription model, as thousands already have, and donate a little every month. You can set up your own page, establish your target number, pound your friends into submission with e-mails to pony up, and watch your personal fund-raising “thermometer” rise. “The idea,” Rospars says, “is to give them the tools and have them go out and do all this on their own.” The organizing principle behind Obama’s Web site, in other words, is the approach Mark Gorenberg used with such success—only scaled to such a degree that it has created an army of more than a million donors and raisers ... The most striking thing about all this was that the headquarters is entirely self-sufficient—not a dime has come from the Obama campaign. Instead, everything from the computers to the telephones to the doughnuts and coffee—even the building’s rent and utilities—is user-generated, arranged and paid for by local volunteers. It is one of several such examples across the country, and no other campaign has put together anything that can match this level of self-sufficiency ... In February, the Obama campaign reported that 94 percent of their donations came in increments of $200 or less, versus 26 percent for Clinton and 13 percent for McCain. Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors through March is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete; she stopped regularly providing her own number last year. [emphasis mine] “If the typical Gore event was 20 people in a living room writing six-figure checks,” Gorenberg told me, “and the Kerry event was 2,000 people in a hotel ballroom writing four-figure checks, this year for Obama we have stadium rallies of 20,000 people who pay absolutely nothing, and then go home and contribute a few dollars online ... It’s possible to track the network effects [emphasis mine] in the growing fund-raising numbers that seem to arrive in ever larger denominations: $25 million … $30 million … $35 million … in February, the staggering $55 million—nearly $2 million a day.

Bad PR: This killer pop song's popularity is exploding!

Good PR: Here's a clip of Rick Astley singing "Never gonna give you up"

Billy Munnelly writes about wine in Toronto; my dad subscribes to his newsletter and even had him over to entertain some friends. It was a solid night.

He's got a wine guide out and as I began reading through it, I found it interesting.

I saw Sideways, and liked it. But I have no use for detecting notes of chocolate in fermented, foot-stamped grapes. 

For me, the LCBO (ie. the only place one can buy liquor in Ontario) is big and confusing. There are a lot of wines, and I think I'm in the majority when I say that I usually look for ones with cool labels, and that are Merlot or Pinot Noir. I did a tour of Jackson Trigg's once, and I drank Beaujolais Nouveaux in France for 3 weeks straight, so I have two points of reference. Other than that, it's a collage of neat labels. One picks one.

Now I pick two. Billy divides wine into three types: simple, medium or rich, and then white or red. He takes what the LCBO offers and selects only "good" wines, then categorizes them: simple, medium or rich.

This makes wine much more comprehensible. So now, I always buy two bottles; usually a simple and a rich one. And I drink both in the same night. Alternating glasses. You learn a lot about a simple wine in the context of a rich wine.

So, if you drink a lot of wine, and don't know what the hell it's all about (and don't want to detect notes of gooseberry), try Billy. 

I read another good quote today, which perhaps helps to clarify how we are governed. It read: "The prime minister is the person who can retain the confidence of the house."

Due to issues of marketing and branding, the spectacle of elections concerns party leaders. And, in fact, U.S. presidential elections really are about party nominees. But government is not marketing and the U.S. president is not the Canadian prime minister.

The flight back from Prague today will not be relaxing for our GG. The role is almost entirely ceremonial, but if in fact it were completely ceremonial, I think we would by now have replaced the GG with a piece of nicely carved wood, or something gilded and inurt.

David Frum makes a silly argument that it is unconstitutional (or practically so) for a parliament to chose a prime minister. Perhaps we (and by "we" I mean more than one Canadian) are confusing our system with the U.S.'s, in which the Presidency is an institution apart from the parliament. After all, Canadians seemed to follow the U.S. presidential election more than our own.

But Canada is different, and as long as we are not the U.S., we should perhaps see the prime minister's role for what it is. The PM is not elected by the people generally, and has no mandate independent of parliament. He is instead chosen by parliament; if that parliament wants to organize into parties and vote as blocks, the constitution could really care less.

So it is perfectly reasonable and normal in Canada for a parliament to change who is the prime minister. In fact, Kim Campbell and Paul Martin both became Prime Ministers without an election. If this parliamentry power doesn't feel correct, that suggests we have been influenced by the U.S. We can change the constitutionm but we cannot ignore the constitution.

I feel that, because it would be very easy for three opposition parties to merge into one party, it is also legitimate for them to temporarily form a coalition. A super-Liberal-NDP-Bloc party received about two-thirds of the votes in the last election; the Conservatives, about one third. So it is not wrong for them to control parliament, from where our PM springs.

At any rate, I think it's important to not attack the legality of the situation we're facing. Let's discuss the other implications for a Liberal PM leading a coalition government before Christmas.

Of most importance is the effect on Western alienation. Stephen Harper is a product of the rise of the West, and decades of anger at feeling outside the centre of power were somewhat alieved when a Reform-heavy Conservative party took power in Ottawa. The re-election of that party affirms that Canada does not reject the West.

So, for left-leaving, French-speaking, Liberal-appointed Governor General to take the country's leadership away from the West and hand it to a French-speaking, failed leader who is rejected by his own party, and who requires separatists to stay in power ... this will not play well out west. I think this would inflame Western anger more than any previous policy or slight. The optics are not entirely of Harper's failure, as perhaps they should be, but of a system stacked against the West.

I am not opposed to Rae or Ignatieff being crowned Liberal leader and PM. Both have considerably more government experience than Brian Mulroney did when he ascended to the highest office. Frankly, although Harper was a policy wonk, he had never really run anything more substantial than an SME before running the country.

But a Rae or Ignatieff appointment as PM again smacks of elitism.

All this said, I feel that a coalition government is a reasonable path for Canada. More than 300 MPs represent Canadians' interests in parliament; a group of about two-thirds of them came together and said that Canada requires a fiscal stimulus package, given the state of the global economy. I think they're right about that. And I think our system is right to allow them to remove from power a government that fails to deliver this.

For a brief period, just knowing what google was, and how to do a keyword search, made you a magic ambassador of factology.

But the value in web2.0 sites spills over into the commons; ie. these sites tend to organize the internet in ways other than keywords.

Del.icio.us is a tool for storing one's bookmarks in the "cloud". I've written before that its best use is actually clipping and sharing news stories -- a sort of live repository of external content related to what you care about (ie. you and five friends agree to store all articles on the business strategy of Furbees in there).

But Del.icio.us also works as a research tool. The site's designers chose to use a logical, word-based hierarchy for their URLs (there's a better name for that?!). Ie. if your name is david11, your del.icio.us account is del.icio.us/david11. 

What made Delicious (getting tired of the periods) unique when it emerged was its use of tagging. So, instead of just saving a news story or website to Delicious, you assign a few keywords (or tags) to it as well, allowing you to find this URL easily in time.

So, the spillover effect of most of the internet being tagged is that you can search for content by its tag, and with the logical URL system they use, that's as easy as:

http://del.icio.us/tag/a-word-that-describes-whatever-the-heck-you're-looking-for.

Even better, you can do a keyword search within this tag.

My last post was on Ryanair's business strategy. If you Google that, the results are annoying. Plan B is del.icio.us/tag/ryanair ... and then a keyword search for strategy (there are 11 answers, all of which are interesting).

Furthermore, I not only have 11 answers, but 11 people/accounts, each of which could lead to related ideas ... things I haven't yet thought of. Sort of like, if I like Fiest and RHCP, an algorithm predicts that I may like your cousins weird band from Wisconsin (most likely, I would hate it).

Google, you know algorithms ... get on this Delicious train! 

Ryanair is easily my favourite company. For me, business is about strategy and operations. 

I don't really care whether BCE is a private company focused on servicing debt, or a public company serving regulators. Their decisions around content, and the pipes (including mobile ones) through which they push that content is most interesting. 

Here's a quote about Ryanair: 

Geoff Van Klaveren, an analyst in London at Exane BNP Paribas, said Ryanair hauls in more revenue, relatively speaking, from "ancillary" sales than any other airline. In the last financial year, to March 31, 2008, this category was equivalent to 18 per cent of total revenues of €2.7-billion, up from 14 per cent in 2005 and 11 per cent in 2001. "This will keep climbing," he said, which is one of the reasons Ryanair is one of the few airlines that carries an Exane "sector outperform" rating.

When I worked for a gas station company, I learned that their strategy is to effectively break even on the gas (they buy it from people making money on taking it out of the ground), and sell a few $2.75 cokes and maybe a $6.00 bag of milk to everyone who passes through the door. 

In fact, if Ryanair trusted the right company, it could sell off its entire aircraft operations division and rent back the flights, then operate solely as an ancillary business. As I said before, their business model is merely to convince a large fraction of Europe to lock themselves inside one of their pressurized, tube-shaped stores for 6 or 8 hours a month.