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You don't say.

"Will traffic approach record levels? "?

Most likely!

Speaking from experience when we ran demconvention.com over the very busy Democratic National Convention week, traffic went from effectively nothing to massive spikes in hours.

All in all the website got 2.6 billion hits, 3.2 million visitors, 350,000 hours of video watched... in the four day/96 hour period of the convention!

This was about double the website traffic that the Republican convention (gopconvention2008.com) got.

It will be interesting to learn what sort of infrastructure and platforms are used to support the major election coverage news websites. DemConvention.com ran on just a few servers running the LAMP (Redhat) stack with the PHP5-based SilverStripe open source CMS...

http://gallery1.demconvention.com/

Yup, the Democratic National Convention site is Silverlight. The bandwidth isn't quite as impressive as it was while the event was going on. But flip through the site and check out the functionality.

As someone who has developed a bit with the beta Silverlight tools, I have to say it is an amazing platform. And I'm quite excited about using it in the future.

-Rick

Why'd they choose Silverlight over Flash?

I'm sure there are valid reasons, I'd just like to hear them.

(Parts of) reasons maybe found here.

This Page claims:

Building on a commitment to bring more people into the Convention experience than ever before, the Democratic National Convention Committee has taken a comprehensive approach to ensure the 2008 Democratic National Convention will be the most technologically-savvy event of its kind.

Really? If it were the "most technologically-savvy event" wouldn't it at least make an effort to support ALL operating systems, especially the one used mostly by the "technologically-savvy" people. It isn't a difficult feat to use technology which is supported by the three major OSes on the market. This isn't acceptable in this day and age. =/

So I am not tech savvy because I use windows for every day use? Nice stereotyping there.

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From: xxxxx xxxxx
Date: 26 August 2008 11:07:39 GMT+02:00
To: info@demconvention.com
Cc: news-tips@nytimes.com, letters@washpost.com
Subject: How much did Microsoft pay you?

Hi,

at http://www.demconvention.com/dncc-video/ clicking on the link asks me to install Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in in order to view the videos streamed there. Given that around 90% of the world's computers already have Adobe's Flash plug-in installed which is the basis behind sites such as youtube, etc (and, yes it does do HD video and streaming), and about 0.1% of the world's computers have Microsoft's Silverlight technology installed and that Flash works on all browsers on Windows, Mac and Linux (and most mobile phones), one really has to ask oneself what incentive Microsoft gave you to get you to use their technology, and how one can square that incentive with the claim that the Democratic Party is a party with a platform aiming to avoid the stain of lobbying and corruption?

One also has to ask oneself how and why a supposed convention interested in reaching out to as many people as it can is using technological means that almost guarantee a smaller audience than using existing ones.

I've already written to a number of newspapers, including the NYT and the WashingtonPost, alerting them to this.

I would truly love to hear what you have to say about it.

Regards

xxxx
xxxx
xxx

If it were the "most technologically-savvy event" wouldn't it at least make an effort to support ALL operating systems

It does support all operating systems that are capable of the technology. Can Linux do this: "owners of secure content may request that Microsoft revoke the right of Silverlight to copy, display, and/or play secure content."

The need for political parties to protect their content from hackers has been discussed on /. before and the Democrat and Republican national conventions have some similar, and some different, philosophies on handling information access and control.

"For virtual attendees, the Democrat convention site is providing a progressive web experience (high definition Silverlight video , Digital Rights Management), while the Republican convention site is providing a more conservative web experience of..." - excerpt from August 21st Journal

Complaining about this on Slashdot does little to change it. Instead, please send your complaints to: info@demconvention.com

"For virtual attendees, the Democrat convention site is providing a progressive web experience (high definition Silverlight video , Digital Rights Management), while the Republican convention site is providing a more conservative web experience of..." - excerpt from August 21st Journal

Building on a commitment to bring more people into the Convention experience than ever before, the Democratic National Convention Committee has taken a comprehensive approach to ensure the 2008 Democratic National Convention will be the most technologically-savvy event of its kind.

Really? If it were the "most technologically-savvy event" wouldn't it at least make an effort to support ALL operating systems, especially the one used mostly by the "technologically-savvy" people. It isn't a difficult feat to use technology which is supported by the three major OSes on the market. This isn't acceptable in this day and age. =/

Read the Supreme Court decision: basically, states are only allowed to regulate the internal business of political parties (such as how a Party chooses its nominees) up to the point where those parties are "state actors" -- which is a pretty strict test. Parties are private organizations; if the state of Florida decides it wants to hold a Primary election on January 29th, so be it, but it has *absolutely no expectation* that those of us who are Democrats from the rest of the country will honor the results. In fact, we have rules ( http://www.demconvention.com/a/2007/03/delegate_se lect.html ) to the contrary.

It's not unusual at all. Idaho has a Primary on May 27th; because the Idaho Primary is *not* restricted to people who are willing to commit to being Democrats (again, in response to the Jones decision), we have a *binding* caucus which has recently been moved up to Feb. 5th. I believe the Republicans here actually observe the Primary for Presidential delegate selection (that's *their* business), but the only part of it that is binding for Democrats is the election of down-ballot candidates (and the overwhelming majority of those Democratic Primary races are generally uncontested anyway).