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McCain Campaign Uses Spider/Diff Against Obama
Vote McCain in 2008! writes "McCain's campaign is doing everything it can to erase Obama's online advantage, this time they ambushed Obama by detecting edits to his website when he updated some of his policy positions. This isn't the first time the Republicans have shown up the Democrats with their web savvy — you may remember the previous reports about the Republican Web 2.0 Consultants and their online campaigning game. This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks." Assuming the spider adheres to robots.txt, this is clever and well done.
Barackobama.com doesn't even have a robots.txt file.
"Are you kidding? The Republicans have been embarrassingly behind the times when it comes to IT stuff."
That image has helped the Republicans immensely. Emails? We... uh... we lost those. Sorry. Never underestimate the other side.
A two party system is a bit like a beach with two ice cream vendors (gather around kids, it's story time!).
Imagine a long beach. Maybe a mile long. You have people on the far left, people on the far right, and a lot more people lying somewhere between those two extremes. And you have two ice cream vendors. One sits at 25%, the other one at 75% of the beach.
That works pretty well for a while. Both have ample business because the one on the right gets the people on the right, the one on the left gets the people on the left, everyone's happy.
Until one of them starts thinking. "Hmm... I could move more towards the center. That way, some of the guys that go to my competitor today would go to me instead, 'cause I'm closer. The ones on my far end have to go to me anyway, because the other guy is even further away". And so he moves.
This doesn't go unnoticed, and the other vendor moves towards the center too. After a while, they're standing back to back dead in the center of the beach, and they both make less business now than they originally did. The one on the left doesn't attrack anyone right of him anymore, and the one on the right doesn't get anyone left of him as customer, since his competitor is closer. The people on the edge of the beach, though, decided the ice cream just isn't worth the way, it's so far away from where they are, they'd rather not get any ice cream from the vendors.
And this is where a new vendor would have to come in, positioning himself at 25 or 75 percent of the beach again. Brand recognition may give the old vendors an edge for the people who have it as far to them as to the new guy, but the new vendors sure attract the ones on the far end of the beach! And over time, they just may have more business than the ones who are bickering in the middle about how much the other one is infringing on their turf.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.