Campaign From Home

The New York Times recently wrote that the 2008 presidential race is the first in which campaigns are “feeling the full force of the changes wrought by the Web … the most attention-grabbing attacks are increasingly coming from people outside the political world.” Word. From low-fi political YouTube videos gone viral (Like Robert Greenwald’s 2-million-view ‘The Real McCain‘) to Google’s alleged anti-Barack blog block, people with PCs and a passion have a hand in campaigning far more influential than obnoxious propaganda email chains from the days of old (aka 2000, 2004).

Among these guerrilla web efforts is a speculated political move via Google’s Blogspot.com. A handful of its anti-Obama blogs have been disrupted by misplaced spam flagging. Bloggers with “noObama” messages, or even just pro-McCain and pro-Hillary blogs, have been locked out by the Blogspot spam detection system, which apparently requires an excruciating verification progress to regain access. Some accuse Google, claiming the company is supporting Obama by surreptitiously harassing his blogosphere adversaries right off the cyber-map. Others assume it’s just the work of sneaky proObama internet folk who’ve decided to bring down opponents from the inside by falsely tagging their blogs as spam.

So cyber-grassroots.