Friday, April 06, 2007

Sleeping Around For Traffic: User Forums on Candidate Sites

Sleeping Around For Traffic: User Forums on Candidate Sites

Second highest traffic day yet at John Deeth Blog Wednesday with the Hillary-Edwards Blog-a-thon. Really a new record, since technically Election Day `06 was the record but I really didn't do anything due to my job.

As a total traffic slut I went to the Edwards site and slapped up a quick diary: "I live blogged this, here's a link." Just like I did with Obama in February. And just like after Obama, the traffic from suppoters hungry for on-the-ground-in-Iowa stuff arrived immediately.

So, continuing my sleeping around, I tried to post a similar bit at Hillary's site. Not an option. The "Blog" section has some posts by prominent names; the one up top was from a former Vermont governor. No, not that former Vermont governor! I mean Madeline Kunin. Comments are allowed, but there's no user-space to grow your own.

This prompted a quick search of the next tier. Dodd, Biden, and Richardson also have comments but no user forum that I could find. But Dodd did give me some link love from Saturday's off year caucus and even fixed one of my live-blog instant typos. Richardson doesn't own myname dot com as the other candidates do (or, heck, even I do); looks like someone squatted on billrichardson dot com. You have to drop down to the third tier and Kookcinich and Gravel to find forum sections that resemble what Edwards and Obama have. Gravel's site is gravel08.us; what's he gonna do when he runs for re-election?