Meetup and Blogging Stats as an Opinion Indicator?

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Tim O'Reilly
Nov. 23, 2003 03:29 PM
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Allen Noren sent me an interesting note the other day: "I took a quick look at Meetup and noticed the activity level for different political campaigns. Interesting datapoint." Here's the list:

1. Dean in 2004 (>144,200 members)
2. Clark in 2004 (>45,400)
3. Kucinich in 2004 (>18,300)
4. Kerry in 2004 (>16,800)
5. Democratic Party (>11,300)
6. Townhall (>8,400)
7. Join Arnold (>5,800)
8. March for Choice (>5,000)
9. Common Cause (>4,800)
10. Republican Party (>2,600)
11. Million Moms (>2,000)
12. Edwards in 2004 (>2,000)
13. Gore in 2004 (>1,900)
14. Bush in 2004 (>1,800)
15. Brights (>1,400)

Obviously, at this point, meetup stats aren't necessarily a good indicator of how well candidates can be expected to fare -- they may just tell us how clued in they are to the power of meetup. These stats will be more telling once meetup becomes a standard part of the organizer's arsenal. And clearly Dean has a big lead because he got there first. But it's interesting that Clark has also jumped on the bandwagon pretty hard, with Kucinich and Kerry battling for third place. It will be interesting to see how important meetup becomes in the early primaries. Unlike tools like blogging, which just help spread the word, meetup can be a hands-on method for both campaigning and building a local organization.

Meanwhile, a quick check of blogosphere stats via Feedster shows that Dean has a lead there, with Clark and Kerry battling for second place, and Kucinich a distant third. Here's what I get when I search Feedster for each candidate's name (as a quoted string):

Once the voting actually starts, it will be interesting to see how the primary standings correspond to the early internet indicators. Do these indicators lead or simply trail the buzz from other sources?

Meanwhile, in a perhaps more telling show, the Fundrace Money Map shows us that Bush's fundraising is far more evenly distributed across the country than Howard Dean's, which is concentrated in a small number of states. (Thanks to Dave Winer for the link to Fundrace!)

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is an activist for open source and open standards, and an opponent of software patents and other incursions of new intellectual property laws into the public domain. Tim's long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. For everything Tim, see tim.oreilly.com.

How important do you think Meetup and blogging are going to be for the coming US presidential elections?
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