Kristi Vandenbosch video showcasing the best of the US Presidential election online activity

The US Presidential primaries have now finished and Kristi Vandenbosch has put together a great video that highlights some of the most popular viral videos and online activity from the US primary campaigns. The video features the Jack Nicholson endorsement, Obama Girl, John McCain as the Fresh prince, Hillary vs Cookies and many many others!

You can watch it here:

Kristi Vandenbosch's US presidential election online showreel from the Advertising 2.0 US conference

This showreel demonstrates how dramatically the political campaigning landscape has changed in the US, with digital (especially user generated content) now playing a major role in US elections. It also shows how far ahead online political campaigning in America is versus the UK.

I wrote a number of pieces recently about the London Mayor election and the candidates' use of online. Whilst there were a wide range of new initiatives and some commendable activity through social networks and digital channels, when you see the US Presidential campaign highlights in the video, it shows how much more potential there is for UK politicians to use online channels to capture the public imagination – though I’m not sure we'll see ‘Gordon Brown girl’ any time soon!

UPDATE - Google have also published a review of the Presidential primary elections online on the official Google blog. Titled 'Elections in the internet era' it pulls together links to a number of YouTube reviews like 'Pop Culture politics' and 'Running the 21st century campaign.' Read more here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/elections-in-internet-era.html

Related articles on this blog:

London Mayor election review of online developments -

http://www.nickburcher.com/2008/05/london-mayor-election-online-web.html

London Mayor candidates online vs US Presidential candidates online -

http://www.nickburcher.com/2008/04/london-mayor-candidates-v-us.html

Baidu changes homepage logo to include Barack Obama

Google have traditionally changed the logo on their home page in line with topical events (http://www.google.com/holidaylogos.html) and Chinese Search Engine Baidu are starting to change their Baidu home page logo in similar fashion

(http://shanghaiist.com/2008/04/08/is_chinese_sear.php.)

Baidu had previously featured 5 different faces on their logo (from snowstorm survivors to Hong King entertainers) and yesterday the sixth person to grace the Baidu home page logo was Barack Obama.

Clicking on the home page image took users to http://renwu.baidu.com/ which contains lots of Obama information in Chinese.

There was no official explanation of the adornment of Obama on the Baidu logo, nor was there any official endorsement of Obama by the Search Engine. Slightly surreal, but given the size of Baidu's user base this is definitely something to pay attention to over coming months!