MyDD

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MyDD is a popular left-wing political blog specializing in American politics started by Jerome Armstrong in 2001. Its name was originally short for "My Due Diligence." In January 2006, the name was changed to "My Direct Democracy" as part of a site redesign, with a new tagline, "Direct Democracy for People-Powered Politics". All the authors of the blog, who currently include Chris Bowers, Matt Stoller and Jonathan Singer, support the U.S. Democratic Party. MyDD is among the most popular group blogs active today.

Contents 1 History 2 2006 Congressional elections 2.1 "Use It or Lose It" 2.2 GoogleBomb 3 References 4 External links

[edit] History

The first Dean grassroots web site ^[1] was created at MyDD in April, 2002. ^[2] In early 2003, Joe Trippi learned of Meetup through Armstrong and MyDD. ^[3] Armstrong shut down MyDD in 2003 to work on Howard Dean's presidential campaign. After lying dormant for a year, MyDD was re-launched with the Scoop blogging platform in March of 2004, with blogger Chris Bowers. MyDD was instrumental in online campaigning and organizing of grassroots action to elect Howard Dean as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee in January, 2005.

Several early contributors to MyDD became prominent in politics on the Internet. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of the most-visited political blog in the world, Daily Kos, began commenting on MyDD before starting his own blog in May of 2002, and refers to MyDD as his "blogfather".

Armstrong attended the California State Democratic convention in Sacramento in March, 2003 with Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos. According to Instapundit, they may have been the first bloggers to be officially accredited at a political convention.

Mathew Gross, creator of the blog on Howard Dean’s web-site, was another contributor to MyDD. Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean, met and hired Gross based on Gross' involvement with MyDD.^[4] "One day, soon after we'd moved to a larger quarters in a South Burlington office park, I looked up to see this tall young guy with an earring and a nearly shaved head wandering around the office. Security had just grabbed him and was hauling him away when he yelled out to me: 'Wait! I blog on MyDD.com!' This was, of course, the political Web site where I'd first heard about Meetup.com. 'You're hired!' I yelled."

Other notable bloggers on MyDD that went on to work with campaigns in 2005-06 include Matt Stoller with Jon Corzine, Scott Shields with Bob Menendez, and Tim Tagaris with Ned Lamont and Sherrod Brown.

The site garnered a great deal of attention during the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election for being the first source to break the exit polls.^[5]

MyDD was profiled in late 2005 as part of the article "Blogging Down the Money Trail" in Campaigns and Elections magazine. The article focused on the special election in Ohio's second congressional district and the ability of blogs like MyDD, Daily Kos, and Swing State Project to raise funds for Democratic candidates and draw national attention to local races. The magazine credits MyDD with being "the first major liberal blog."

[edit] 2006 Congressional elections

Chris Bowers launched two activist campaigns during October 2006 on MyDD.com: 1) A campaign, called "Use it or Lose it" to prompt "safe" Democrats to give 30% of their campaign funds to other Democratic causes and 2) A Googlebomb campaign to raise the site listings for negative news articles on a set of Republican congressmen.

[edit] "Use It or Lose It"

This campaign had Bowers calling on bloggers and Democratic activists to call up safe Democrats to ask them to give at least 30% of their campaign accounts to the DCCC or to Democrats in competitive congressional races (subject to FEC limits)^[6].

"Safe" Democrats was defined as those who were either running unopposed by a Republican, or whose Republican opponent raised less than $10,000 (and thus were not considered serious opponents). The lists of such Democrats were pulled from FEC filings.

It drew media attention^[7] and also brought MoveOn.org on board with their own page promoting the campaign^[8].

[edit] GoogleBomb

Almost immediately after starting the "Use it or Lose It" campaign, Bowers began a campaign to increase the search results of a set of negative articles about endangered Republican congressional incumbents^[9].

The idea was to reach less-informed voters who might use Google to search for information on candidates, most often by simply entering the person's name. Taking advantage of the Google indexing algorithm, having many people link to these articles using the candidates' names, would raise their prominence in the search results.

The articles chosen were to be from non-partisan news sources, and factually negative about the chosen Republicans. Local news sources were preferred over national news. The chosen list included mainly such sources, but also a smattering of Wikipedia pages^[10]. The candidates chosen were culled from an initial list (chosen by Bowers) of 70, down to 52. The candidates cut were those whom a suitably credible and negative article could not be found.

The concept drew criticism from right-wing bloggers^[11] despite the right wing using this strategy themselves (John Kerry in the 2004 election and "waffles") and interest from the media^[12][13].

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• MyDD
• Exit poll posting
• "Blogging Down the Money Trail". Campaigns and Elections. October/November, 2005. 19. [1]