Online Media Cultist

During Sunday’s Republican presidential debate, Rudy Giuliani brought the biggest laugh of the night in answering a question about a defining mistake. “To have a description of my mistakes in 30 seconds?” he said, shaking his head. He added that he could only properly confess his mistakes to moderator George Stephanopoulos’ father, a priest.

Perhaps one of Rudy’s lesser life mistakes was not getting his 17-year-old daughter Caroline on board with his campaign. In fact, Caroline’s Facebook profile caused quite a stir this week when it was discovered that she listed her political views as “liberal” and proclaimed membership in the “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)” group. The profile, which is viewable by people who attend Harvard, where Caroline is headed, and the Trinity School in Manhattan, has since ended its affiliation with the Obama group.

Interestingly, Caroline uses a slight variation on her last name on her Facebook profile. However, that coupled with the fact that the profile was semi-public did not prevent the story from leaking.

Aside from shining some light on a major presidential candidate’s inner family dynamics, this story displays how the Internet and social networking sites are pulling control away from politicians, celebrities, and public figures over their image and public relations.

ParisLemon sums up this sentiment well, writing: “Yes, Facebook is indeed awesome. It is only here that we could see that Rudy Giuliani’s own daughter apparently doesn’t even think he’d be the best man to run the country - she’s supporting Barack Obama.”

Andy Beal thinks that this story may cost Rudy a few votes “a year from now.” I disagree. If Republican primary voters can get past Rudy’s multiple marriages, I doubt that his daughter’s political disloyalty will help to sway voters. However, it may help build an overall case that Rudy isn’t the traditional Republican savior that conservative primary voters are looking for.

The New York Times notes that Obama is besting Giuliani in the overall social networking game, with 500 Facebook groups devoted to Obama (”One Million Strong for Barack” has over 300,000 members). Obama’s MySpace profile has 160,000 friends as compared to 7,000 and change for Rudy. And on Facebook, the Giuliani campaign has yet to set up a presence.

techPresident has the best advice for both Caroline Giuliani and the youth population set worldwide when it comes to dealing with the Internets:

Hey kids, guess what! Put something online, and it might just be a little public.

I love Howard Fineman. He’s one of the best political writers in the business. He’s great on Hardball, and his coverage and analysis of elections and the pure sport of politics is second-to-none.

But still, it’s hilarious when non-tech savvy journalists wade into those electronic weeds.

The Internet is now a part of politics as it never has before. As Fineman rightly notes, it was Howard Dean’s (and Joe Trippi’s) success in raising money and building grassroots community online in 2003 that ushered political campaigns into a new era. Politics and politicians have always followed the money, and therefore 2008 presidential hopefuls are online and actively seeking advantage, dollars, and voters. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama broke away from the long tradition of officially announcing a presidential campaign in a hometown dripping from its very pores in Americana, for example, and instead announced via online video.

Politicians are now seeking ways to integrate technology into their relationship with constituents as well. Obama has made at least one appearance on popular left-leaning political blog Daily Kos during the run-up to the pivotal 2006 midterm elections, and ‘08 presidential aspirant John Edwards delivers regular posts on Twitter, the newest rage of the tech-bloggy set. (Edwards staff has thanked his “followers” on Twitter for all of their words of support over the recent announcement that Elizabeth Edward’s breast cancer has returned.)

Journalists are trying to keep up. It’s chuckle-worthy every time that Hardball’s Chris Matthews (another favorite of mine) announces that features and video clips can be found online. He has a look of smirking wonder that seems to say, “There’s this thing called the Internet and people actually do stuff there, can you believe it?”

This week, in the midst of an interesting-as-usual piece called “Out of Control,” which looks at how technology and the media now leave political candidates with less control over the message of campaigns than ever before, Fineman let this beauty slip: “Last time I checked, MySpace, by far the leading social networking blogosphere, had more than 60 million registered members.”

The leading social networking blogosphere. If only he had just scaled it back half a notch and left it at “leading social networking website.” Or platform, tool, place, locale, or e-shack of misbegotten ill designed schlock. But blogosphere has a pretty clear if broad connotation, representing that vast array of millions of blogs, most of which are separate online entities from one another.

MySpace certainly has millions of profiles, all of which have a blog feature. So I suppose it would be okay to call MySpace a blogosphere unto itself, though I would wager that’s going a bit too far. And it would be definitely be inaccurate to compare that “blogosphere” with the blogosphere.

So MySpace is not a social networking blogosphere. It’s a huge and monstrous social networking site. The blogosphere is its own universe (thus the ’sphere!) and many who occupy it are more than happy to not be associated with MySpace.

Howard, we love you, but you gaffed a little on this one!