Online Media Cultist

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign broke news of an online sort this week in announcing the endorsement of Hollywood mogul Steven Spielberg. The online part comes in where the announcement was made: HillaryHub.com.

Billed as something of an anti-Drudge Report, HillaryHub.com is a really tidy and clean one page source for all things going on in Hillary world… of an upbeat and positive and PR-approved note, of course.

From a design standpoint, I love this site. A left column displays stories “in the news,” the center column features “on the blogs,” while the right column has two “latest videos.” This is a pretty great and straight-forward model that personalities and politicians should take note of when trying to insert their own position and agenda into the overall conversation.

To help celebrate its 25th anniversary, USA Today is running 25 lists of 25, neat and tidy and concise, as Seinfeld famously once helped to drive home. How the Internet took over does a fun job of blasting through the Internet Age. I’m positive that we all could argue about what should and should not have made this particular list, but I think it’s more useful in this case to just kind of drink it in and realize how far and fast we’ve come in so short a time.

Bloggers rock in at #22, just after The Drudge Report, a site I tried to put somewhat in its place over the weekend. One surprise is no mention of YouTube or the rise of video, though broadband does check in at #5. Interesting to see the mention of Craigslist at #23, which I suppose is a stand-in for how powerful organic and grassroots-led efforts can be online.

“Gaming and virtual worlds” ends the list at #25, and that’s as good a place as any to lead off the edge to the next 25 years or so. The rise of MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online) has already begun but has yet to penetrate the mainstream public. Avatars, virtual guides, and fully immersive and interactive 3D worlds where people get social, learn, flirt, play, and communicate will be the norm much sooner rather than later.

I just related earlier today to some colleagues about my first experience with what later became known as instant messaging. Down at the “computer pod” at Binghamton University, this would be circa 1992 or so, you could see who else was at one of the work stations and message them. The pod was the first place I can remember using e-mail as well, which I found to be a rather amazing thing to behold. Little did I know what would lie ahead!

Thanks to JD Lasica at Social Media for pointing out that Joseph Farah’s book, “Stop the Presses!” heralds Matt Drudge’s famous/infamous Drudge Report as the entity that inspired “the ‘blogosphere’ today.”

Certainly Drudge holds a certain place in the web ecosphere. I stop by Drudge every so often – it’s a fun place to get kind of a quick grab-bag collection of what’s going on in the world and on the Interwebs at any given moment. A major grain of salt has to be consumed each time of course to account for the rightward tilt of the story headlines and particularly its “exclusives.” It’s also a place where rumor mingles merrily and openly with truth.

Drudge rose to popularity during the Lewinsky scandal days of the Clinton administration. To claim that the “‘blogosphere’ today” was inspired by Drudge is downright silly. It’s not really a blog, for starters. And the blogospheric revolution would have undoubtedly gone down with or without Matt and company.