Rock the Vote September 1, 2008
Posted by skmak in Uncategorized.Tags: Election 2008, Facebook, MySpace, Voters
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The Rock the Vote website says that there are 44 million eligible young voters for this year’s election. In 2004, 20.1 million voters between the ages of 18 and 29 years old turned out to vote.
Candidates John McCain and Barack Obama are using social media to appeal to a larger demographic. Both have launched Facebook and MySpace pages, as well as Facebook applications. McCain and Obama have also each launched their own social community sites – my.barackobama.com and mccainspace.com. Many people question why they would launch their own communities when Facebook and MySpace exist, but I’m sure they did so to 1) collect more information about their community users and 2) better control the messaging and format of the site.
The interesting question is whether the online “friends” of these candidates are any indication of how the election will turn out in November. Here is a few stats (as of September 1, 2008):
- Barack Obama has 1,511,638 Facebook supporters
- John McCain has 256,138 Facebook supporters
- Obama’s Facebook application (Barack Obama Supporters) has 19,975 active monthly users
- McCain’s Facebook application (McCain: Get Involved) has 1,324 active monthly users
- Obama has 488,838 MySpace friends
- McCain has 72,323 MySpace friends
These numbers are changing by the hour – especially now that both candidates have announced their running mates.
What do you think? Are these any indication of future votes?
Oh, Look! She Started Blogging! August 20, 2008
Posted by skmak in Uncategorized.Tags: blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter
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My boyfriend’s 12-year old started a blog this month. She’s still getting used to it, so right now it mainly consists of what book she is reading and what she had for dinner last night. It’s really a way for her and her friends to keep in contact – I enjoy reading the comments more than her entries, sometimes.
So, it got me thinking. Here are some startling statistics for you:
- Facebook has 90 million active users, more than 75% log in each day and (in 2007) 22% of them were under 18
- MySpace, according to analyst Jeremiah Owyang, has 110 million active users, 15% of which are under 18
- In July, WordPress said that 257,163 blogs were created to bring them to a total of 1,102,039 active blogs
- As of January 2008, Twitter had over 700,000 users – as of today, they have 2,419,242 twitterers
The interesting thing is that the majority of Facebook and Myspace users are over 18! The other thing you should note is how quickly these communities are growing…and obviously this isn’t a comprehensive list! This isn’t just a “kid” thing. But, the digital generation is growing and kids find it second nature to share over the web.
Aw, look honey…she got her first comment! Go get the video camera, quick!
