Will copying Obama’s campaign tactics work in Ireland or not? Mulley does a pretty good job bringing together the reasons why the answer is no if you think that the tactics merely involved lots of bells and whistles courtesy of the Facebook.

Here’s the one stat you need to know to understand why Obama schooled McCain:

30 million
versus
68 million.

30 million: number of voters contacted by the McCain campaign.
68 million: number of voters contacted by the Obama campaign.

All the interweb bells & whistles were just ways to make that level of voter contact possible.

Does voter contact matter? Any tallyman for the Soldiers worth his salt can tell you the answer to that. But if you’re unconvinced, ponder this — the Washington Post reported the weekend before the election that more than HALF of all Virginia voters (not voted Dem since 1964) had been contacted by the Obama campaign, roughly mirroring Obama’s performance in voter contact nationwide.

But here’s the REAL killer stat: among Virginia voters contacted in person, phone, email or text message by the Obama campaign - but NOT the McCain campaign - those voters favoured Obama by 75% to 22%.

Obama won Virgina with a margin of 232,000 votes - or roughly 7%.

So, Tubridy et al - and you’re welcome for giving your site some free exposure at Leviathan last week (and in a few presentations since) - you’d be better off focusing less on riffing on the Obama font (Gotham, in case you care) and more on the ground game. Then, even if you - like Tubridy - are the the whitest guy on the planet, you too can be about change. Yes we can, baby.

Man, you know the spammers are getting pretty good when they can manage to spoof the best and brightest. SocialMinder seemed like a good idea - manage all your contacts across all your social network profiles and your email.

So I got an email from Sam Sethi, the ex-TechCrunch UK editor, for whom I have a lot of time, inviting me to SocialMinder to enjoy all the benefits, blah blah blah.

Fortunately I left it aside until later. And in between a few other highly respected, unfortunate people who got fooled had managed to sign up for the “alpha” version, which led to their address books being sucked up and regurgitated in the kingdom of spamalot.

Sam has been apologising all afternoon via Twitter.

Bottom line: delete that email re SocialMinder.

This public service message was paid for by the Committee for Spammer Genocide.

Ok, so you can’t really resist the temptation of the lates poll data on the presidential race? Nate Silver breaks down each of the 8 national tracking polls, and what time of day they’re released. It’s something special.

I’m still waiting to see the tightening, and Pollster’s average says maybe a little:

But the tastiest bit for those of the “we must crush them” mindset (or as Kos prefers, leave everything on the road), Pew has a new poll out today. Obama 53 - McCain 39.

Well, maybe. But I still can’t help but think, please God, we need this break. No zealot like a convert I guess.

So, how is it exactly that a scheme initially budgeted for €19m a year has grown to €250 million a year?

Lest anyone think they are holier than thou on this issue, here’s Fine Gael in 2005:

Extension of medical card to over 70s/nursing home charges
The absence of financial controls and accountability for money spent on the medical card scheme was sharply criticised by both the Comptroller and Auditor General and by external consultants for the Department of Health, who investigated the scheme.

The initial estimate was 39,000 people aged over 70, at a cost of ?19 million. However, this soon proved to be “significantly in error” as by December 2001 some 63,000 new over-70s had registered. The first full year of the scheme (2002) cost €126m.

The effect of the extension of the medical card to the Over 70s on long stay charges was also not considered by the Government. The 2001 Act which introduced the Over 70s medical card left no doubt that people holding the card could not be charged for long stay public care. This oversight, has cost the taxpayer approximately €400m since 2001.

So, in 2005, the government’s over-generosity/recklessness with too much spending was the problem, now it’s that the government was fixing its mistake?

Can someone point me to a rational explanation of the cost explosion beyond “long stay public care”? And can someone ask Enda if he still thinks - as this implies - that “long stay public care” should now be charged to medical card holders over 70?

In the meantime, can someone explain to me how long they think the Coyote of Irish public finances could keep running over the canyon without looking down and succumbing to gravity? Ye voted them in. THREE TIMES.

Just got word confirming that next Tuesday there will be a Presidential debate sponsored by the UCD Law Society. (No link, time or venue as of yet.)

But I now know the panel includes myself, Kate Fitzgerald of Democrats Abroad, Kings College academic Rory Miller and…drumroll…Senator Mike Gravel, currently of the Monster Raving Loony Party.

So, point of order, is Gravel allowed to bring Obama Girl?

UPDATE: event is 7pm in the Newman Building on UCD’s Belfield campus.

UPDATE2: stupid typo pointed out to me. date is in fact in October. More caffeine please.

The always thoughtful Nick Carr has a great post from last week on the great expansion and contraction of the Web universe most of us experience.

Indeed, statistics indicate that web traffic is becoming more concentrated at the largest sites, even as the overall number of sites continues to increase, and one recent study found that as people’s use of the web increases, they become “more likely to concentrate most of their online activities on a small set of core, anchoring Websites.”

Is this simply a function of the web’s crossover to mainstream? Or is the effect exaggerated, as late adopters flooding into the pool of web traffic tend to stay in the brightly-lit corners of the web? And if true, are we poised to see the great shakeout - when content sites that, ala the Long Tail theory, might have had economic viability no longer have a future? Food for thought.

UPDATE: Carr’s piece also includes a lengthy riff on the migration from Bloglines to Google Reader - the problems with the former being reasons being something Mulley recently nodded towards…eventually, even the fiercest critics of the Google can be seduced by the reliability….

Online ads not the license to print money they were for a while, so the internet is doomed. Right?
In the UK:

Enders, a research group, estimates that the UK online display advertising market was at best flat in the third quarter, compared with the same period last year. Growth rates in recent years have been double digit.

The rates that media owners can charge for display advertising have fallen by about a third over the last year, it said.

“The phenomenal growth of online advertising . . . was always going to slow down at some point,” says Simon Waldman, director of digital publishing for Guardian Newspapers. “The next 18 months will be tougher because of the overall economic climate.”

In the US, the picture is more mixed:

after 17 quarters of ballooning growth, online revenue at newspaper sites is falling. In the second quarter, it was down 2.4 percent compared with last year, to $777 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America. It was the only year-over-year drop since the group began measuring online revenue in 2003.

Overall online advertising, however, is strong. Display advertising, the graphics-rich ads that newspaper sites carry, grew 7.6 percent in the second quarter, TNS Media Intelligence reported.

Then there was this piece in the Sunday Business Post purporting to show a trend:

In June 2007, Irish advertisers spent €2 million on display ads; in 2008, just €1.8 million was spent. In July 2007, they spent €1.8 million online; in 2008, that dropped to €1.4 million.

In August 2007, €1.9 million was spent online. But by August 2008, the figure had plunged 30 per cent to just €1.3million.This is despite the release of a survey last week by Results International Group that predicted online ad spend would rise by as much as 200 per cent in the coming year.

‘‘What we seem to be seeing is a return to 2006 levels of spend,’’ said Michael Dwyer, chief executive of Pigsback.com, one of the most established online businesses in Ireland.

‘‘It’s clear to us that online in Ireland isn’t immune to the budget cuts that are happening everywhere.”

While it stands to reason that online display ad spend will certainly be affected by the downturn, there are a couple of things to be suspicious of here. First, the Irish numbers are affected by the fact that the IAPI database only measures a limited number of sites. Second, there is the Google, which posted better-than-expected 3rd quarter results last week on the basis of its ad revenue.

So we’ll see.

But newspaper sites are certainly not going to be the cash cows some had hoped.

Pity the newspapers here that failed to push the broadband agenda more seriously. If they’d gotten behind The Mulley in a meaningful way six years ago, they may have had a better time on the upside. Now they have to come up with online revenue models in a downturn. Then again, maybe those models are more robust than ones predicated on 20% growth forever.

Aileen O’Toole has been seeing this for months. It’s partly why she’s been advising media websites to diversify out of online display. I just don’t know that the affiliate relationships are really going the saviour.

UPDATE: A commenter from Results International Group below points out that the SBP misquoted the results of their survey - and I’ve corrected one other thing: I’d meant to put a question mark at the end of the headline, because I don’t think it’s entirely clear where the market is headed in Ireland. Will brand owners revert to conservatism and seek out better discounts in traditional media as prices fall for TV and outdoor? Or will online prove its flexibility and offer better discounts, with downward price pressure exerted by blind networks?

First Colin Powell, now Google. Seriously: “Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt will hit the campaign trail this week on behalf of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, signaling Mr. Schmidt’s push for a greater voice in politics while giving the Obama campaign a boost from a highly desirable constituency.” from the WSJ piece, which also notes that Schmidt’s endorsement will come as part of a group of tech CEOs.

Next up to endorse: United Mothers’ Association, Apple Pie Federation, Flag Unlimited.

The McCain campaign spent the last three days telegraphing that they needed to change the subject from the economy to culture war issues - Ayers, Wright, “terrorist“, “treason”, “kill him“.

But nothing from McCain to push it in that direction tonight (a fact that is turning the dead-ender right in knots). Why?

Did McCain wake up on Tuesday and have a moment of clarity through the senile dementia, remembering the man he used to [seem to] be? Did they figure out that Ayers attacks are not polling well - that the Keating counterpunch is too lethal?

Or have they just given up?

Story of the night.

Second story: Is Sarah Palin just totally freelancing now?

Will Wilkinson: “Obama owned it. This election’s over unless he murders and eats the flesh of a child on live television.”

Sabrina Dent: McCain raises army…of Dead White Guys. Awesome.

[McCain]’s standing there on stage next to a vibrant, engaged, youthful opponant[sic], and the political references McCain made were to:

Herbert Hoover - Born August 10, 1874. Current age: 134. (Dead.)
Teddy Kennedy - Born February 22, 1932. Current age: 76. (Dying.)
Tip O’Neill - Born December 9, 1912. Current age: 95. (Dead.)
Ronald Regan - Born February 6, 1911. Current age: 97. (Dead.)
Teddy Roosevelt - Born October 27, 1858. Current age: 150. (Dead.)
McCain’s reference points for political leadership have an average age of more than 110. The youngest person mentioned is Regan[sic], who would only be two years older than McCain were he not mulching flower beds in California. They are uniformly white, uniformly male, and almost uniformly dead.

Kinda like that, yeah.

Andrew Sullivan: This was, I think, a mauling: a devastating and possibly electorally fatal debate for McCain… I’ve watched a lot of debates and participated in many. I love debate and was trained as a boy in the British system to be a debater. I debated dozens of times at Oxofrd. All I can say is that, simply on terms of substance, clarity, empathy, style and authority, this has not just been an Obama victory. It has been a wipe-out. It has been about as big a wipe-out as I can remember in a presidential debate. It reminds me of the 1992 Clinton-Perot-Bush debate. I don’t really see how the McCain campaign survives this.”

Marc Ambinder: McCain blew it.

Ezra Klein: The physicality of the debate means young, vigorous Obama pwned old, cranky, injured, short McCain.
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