Friendster: We'll pay you $2500 to be civically engaged
Has-been social networking site Friendster, subject of a post-mortem profile in Sunday's New York Times, is now sponsoring a contest for the best political video ad uploaded to the site. The contest, dubbed "Get Political," offers a grand prize of $2500, but Friendster has only received about 100 videos so far. The site launched its video section last month and claims to have 31 million users.
This is a great idea. It's too bad Friendster doesn't have the pull it used to. I've often wondered why YouTube hasn't contributed more new voices to the pre-midterm election conversation. Mostly what I see are taped segments of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. I also haven't seen many politicians uploading their commercials, or, even better, messages directly addressing the video-sharing community.
thanks for the link to the NYT article about Friendster. So sad.
Interesting to hear that US politicians are not taking advantage of YouTube to distribute their messages yet. May be they are worry about the people's ability to comment on their campaigns? May be the politicians still want to retain control of their messages even at the price of not getting the message out.
I've seen and read the UK Conservative Party leader has his own blog and a video journal (kinda). I suppose it is a good start.
Posted by: Kempton | October 16, 2006 at 10:49 PM