Friday, February 24, 2006

The Danger of an Offline Campaign

As of this morning, the campaigns of Michael Arcuri and Bruce Tytler are still running offline, failing to establish any campaign presence on the web.

The danger of such an apathetic approach to online campaigning became clear to me this morning as I was searching for information about the Arcuri for Congress campaign. I ran across what I hoped would be an independent blog entry about Mike Arcuri, but found this garble instead:

"Arcuri plans run for Congress ... It is also important for business people. Rising health care is a huge problem for them. Arcuri has not formerly ... . More on Snoopy Collectibles."


This snippet is blog spam - a piece of online garbage that is hobbled together automatically, by software that scans the web, in order to direct people to ecommerce sites that are of such low worth that they have figured no other way to get traffic. In this piece of blog spam, the words "Snoopy Collectibles" link to some kind of online antiques warehouse.

My point is this: A voter going online to search for information about Michael Arcuri's run for Congress would find this blog spam before they would find Arcuri's web site. By not putting any web site up, Tytler and Arcuri are allowing spammers to have more control over the online identity of their campaigns than they have themselves.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another case - if you google Ric VanDonsel, who might be Bruce Tytler's campaign manager since he signed the cover letter on Tytler's filing to the FEC, you get some reference to his divorce case where he was apparently engaged in some relationship with Mary Leonard, another former Cortland Mayor and his current roommate, while they were both married to other people.

I guess the Tytler campaign doesn't realize that when the Republicans do their opposition research, all the dirty laundry is going to come out. Don't think those moralistic right wingers aren't going to be hammering on it behind the scenes either.

Anonymous said...

From an anonymous poster who sounds a lot like a Homer fellow who hates Bruce Tytler. Quite the politico.

Winter is a bitch for vinyl hounds like myself. Especially for those of us poor bastards who live in small towns without a reliable record store. We're reduced to scouring auctions and yard sales to get our fix. And they're in woefully short supply during the winter. But, I thought I would start this thing for when I do start acquiring more vinyl. Give reviews, laugh at awful album covers (for example: I have an local pressing by a white gospel group from the sixties. The group is called The *something* Quartet. And there are six men on the cover.), weird shit (example: The How to Strip For Your Husband album complete with booklet).

Also, I'm finally in a house where I can actually set up my record collection and a good hi-fi system. So I'll be discovering music I didn't even know I had. Including a vast collection of 78's, most of which I've never played.

So stay tuned. Check back around May. One recent acquisition that I STILL haven't played is a recording of Shel Silverstien reading Where the Sidewalk Ends.