When we look back at the historic presidential campaign of Barack Obama, one aspect that sticks out was his ability to network. After watching the news for the past few days after the election, many stations are complimenting Obama’s campaign team, including the general public that volunteered to help him out. There was a lot of social networking on both the internet and in real life. Obama had roughly 1.5 million American volunteers doing everything from door-to-door campaigning to calling cell phones. The relationship between Obama’s campaign and Wikipedia is the voluntary services. The idea that both parties, Obama and Wikipedia, would be unsuccessful if it wasn’t for the help of the general public is true in this sense.
Wikipedia slowly grows, by roughly 7% a year, because of its volunteers. Members of the website have the ability to create new entries as well as edit existing ones. If it wasn’t for the enthusiasm of the Wikipedia volunteers to take pride in what they do by helping maintain a very popular online referencing website.
The Obama page on Wikipedia was updated the day after elections. I remember looking at it on Tuesday just to see what it had to say about Obama and they had already written him in as President-Elect Obama. He has quite a page with a lot of his history on it. The volunteers that made this page are a good example of the relationship between Obama and Wikipedia. As far as we know, the page could have been created by someone from Obama’s campaign, again reiterating the public’s enthusiasm of both working for Obama and Wikipedia.
The recent and fast growing birth of Web 2.0 has really opened the doors for all types of people and businesses. The ability to socially network millions of people through the use of one webpage can help spread the word for any situation. Whether it is a presidential campaign or just a simple advertisement for a company, Web 2.0 helps everyone out. Obama was smart about taking advantage of the internet by spreading the word of his campaign, using blogs to get people talking and interested, and many websites that encouraged people to vote by setting up easy to use voter registration techniques. For the 21 months that he campaigned, starting in Feb. 2007, Obama networked as much as he possibly could. Once again, the volunteering of the public to help create something shows great success if we look at Wikipedia and Obama’s campaign.
1 comment:
I really like how you organized this post, including and comparing Obama and Wikipedia. Looks like you did a lot of research for this post.
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