Warning Sign: BarackObama.com Is Melting Down

I just did this a few minutes ago. I went to BarackObama.com and then I clicked to go to the dashboard. It took more than three and a half minutes to load up. I have had this problem for over a week now.

That is not a good thing.

Well, it is a good thing. This means many many people are visiting BarackObama.com, which is exactly what we have wanted to happen all along.

But it is not a good thing at all that the pages are taking so long to load. Or maybe it is not all the pages, just the dashboard for an active volunteer like me who is currently ranked 38th overall. That is a great ranking. I am thinking there are close to half a million people who have signed up at the site by now. I know the number was 300,000 months back.

I am ringing alarm bells.

This can not be forgiven. We as humanity already figured this out more than a decade ago even at a mass level. This is not rocket science. This is not expensive. You just increase the bandwidth substantially.

That is all.

At this rate the site is going to crash on January 4. That can not be allowed. We work so hard to get people to come to BarackObama.com. The greeting has to be a good one for when they do show up.

This is still a TV election. 2008 is not an internet election yet. But it is an internet election to the hard core. BarackObama.com is that space where the volunteers congregate.

This has to be taken care of now.

If there is even a single crash any time between January 3 and February 7, I am going to lose respect for the people at the Chicago headquarters for the first time. This absolutely can not be allowed.

You don't go on vacation when it is harvest season. January is harvest season. We worked so hard to get here. Most people will never see Barack Obama in person, most people will not go to an Obama event, most people will never meet an Obama volunteer, let alone an Obama staffer, but many will go to BarackObama.com as and when they finally get interested.

That interest will spike on January 4 after our Iowa victory. And to let the site crash even for a minute would be as good as sending our candidate off on a world tour in January. You are not needed in South Carolina, go see the world.

This is not complicated engineering at all. I am surprised I am even having to bring this up. Obama 2008 otherwise has been an organizational marvel. How did this escape attention?

Is it possible that the top staffers don't log into BarackObama.com several times a day? What's going on?

BarackObama.com is your office if you are a staffer or volunteer. That is where you go. You go elsewhere later. You go to an event later, after you first go to BarackObama.com.

Jack it up all folks. Purchase so much bandwidth the site flies through January just fine.

Don't you let it crash for even two seconds.

And make the loads fast. It should not take me three and a half minutes to load up my page on BarackObama.com, it should take two seconds, maybe three. And my broadband is actually slightly faster than normal cable broadband. This is not good. This is not good. This is not good at all.

Take Camp Obama Online: Cash On The Enthusiasm

You should be able to do it through MyBO. There should be a manual that you should be able to read online. And there should be tests you can take and get certified right there at MyBO. And it should show on your profile that you attended the Camp Obama Online.

Why? Because we got to scale this thing. Training thousands is not enough. We got to train tens of thousands all over the country, in small towns, and not just in big cities. We got to totally translate enthusiasm into organization. We got to get sophisticated. Otherwise we stand the risk of squandering the amazing grassroots response Obama 2008 has generated so far. We owe it to our army of small donors and volunteers to go all the way.

The Grassroots Power Woman
Zip Code By Zip Code: Synergy Needed Between Local Groups And The National Email Treasury
The Countdown Has Begun: Marathon Now Turns To Sprint

We will soon be into the sprint phase full blast.

This is a movement you are talking about. This is not your traditional presidential campaign. When we say change, we mean it. We mean every letter of it.

We are using online tools better than any campaign. But we can do much better. We need to do much better. The competition is not with the other campaigns. The competition is with our own benchmarks.

The course online has to be evolving and interactive. It should be a tool to be build community online and offline.

We have got to go online, because we have got to mass produce.


In The News

Obama getting tough as going gets rough Chicago Sun-Times his strategy: to introduce himself as a Washington outsider but someone who understood the global stage and who believed in consensus. ..... For months this strategy had little variation. ..... And then the crowds started to dissipate. Obama didn't do as well as his aides had anticipated in the presidential debates and forums. He paused a second or two too long at times. He seemed awkward. He made a few gaffes. A poised Hillary Clinton was often declared the winner. ....... CNN's in early August: Clinton 40 percent, Obama 21 percent. Rasmussen's in late August: Clinton 39 percent, Obama 23 percent. People were getting to know Obama, but they weren't certain about his ability to don the presidential cloak. ...... as he shifts the gears of his strategy, taking bolder attacks against Clinton (note his description of her as "Bush-Cheney lite" on foreign affairs); retreating from many debates and presidential forums; presenting more detailed policies, as in his recent outline about how to resurrect a New Orleans still suffering two years after the debacle of Hurricane Katrina. ...... John Kerry was "at 4 percent in the polls before he won the Iowa caucus," adding, "I am happy to concede these polls in August. I am more interested in January." ....... Obama's tougher strategy may well give him the push needed in the early-voting states.

2008: Endorsements, Fund-Raising and Primaries New York Times Obama won the support of L. Douglas Wilder, the mayor of Richmond, Va. and the state’s former governor. Mr. Wilder, who was also the nation’s first elected black governor, predicted that Mr. Obama would do well among Southern voters. ...... McCain’s presidential campaign is eligible to receive public financing
Dodd Catches Fire Yahoo! News
Fire Fighters Endorse Dodd Hartford Courant
Senator Craig Insists He Is Not Gay Miami Poetry Review
Why Apple Can't Stop iPhone Hackers BusinessWeek 17-year-old .. Hotz hacked his iPhone and unlocked it so that it can be used on a variety of cell-phone networks
What Will Fix the Mortgage Mess?
Corporate E-Mail on the iPhone
Lawmakers sound off on Gonzales’ resignation The Citizen's Voice
2 Years After Katrina, Bush Sees Hope in New Orleans New York Times
Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast struggling 2 years later CNN
Jailed dictator Noriega a hot potato Melbourne Herald Sun
GOP Plans Early-Primary Penalties New York Times
Castro: Clinton-Obama ticket a winner Houston Chronicle a "seemingly invincible ticket" of Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama would easily land in the White House. ..... mockingly wrote that Obama and Clinton, both Democrats, "feel the sacred duty of demanding 'a democratic government in Cuba.' " ... Castro said Bill Clinton was friendly and intelligent, and that Jimmy Carter was the only U.S. president he has met who "was not an accomplice to terrorism against Cuba."
Fidel Castro Death Rumors Give Way to Clinton-Obama Support National Ledger
Fidel Castro Wants Clinton-Obama White House Judicial Watch
White House pranksters deck out Karl Rove's car with 'I love Obama ... CBC Nova Scotia Rove's car is easily recognizable because of its "I love Barack Obama" bumper sticker
Pranksters Wrap Rove's Car Forbes
Rove's Ride Pimped The Gate - National Journal
Karl Rove's Car Vandalised at White House ShortNews.com
Obama unveils radical mortgage plan Financial Times Unscrupulous lenders who deceptively sold subprime mortgages to millions of Americans should be fined and the proceeds used to help bail out borrowers facing a wave of foreclosures, according to Barack Obama ..... “Our government failed to provide the regulatory scrutiny that could have prevented this crisis. ..... “While predatory lenders were driving low-income families into financial ruin, 10 of the country’s largest mortgage lenders were spending more than $185m (€136m, £92m) lobbying Washington to let them get away with it,” he wrote, citing figures from the Centre for Responsive Politics. ...... Obama said the government needed to “stop the unlicensed, unregulated, fly-by-night mortgage brokers who are hoodwinking low- income borrowers into loans they can’t afford”. ...... Curtailing undue corporate influence on policymaking in Washington is one of Mr Obama’s signature issues. ...... “There needs to be rationalisation – more centralisation – of how mortgage lending is regulated.”
Obama would target sub-prime lenders United Press International
Google expert says 'TV is dead' Telegraph.co.uk One of the founding fathers of the internet has predicted the end of traditional television. ... television was approaching its "iPod moment" ...... viewers would soon be downloading most of their favourite programmes onto their computers. ..... 85 per cent of all video we watch is pre-recorded ... Cerf, who is now the vice-president of the Google ...... some internet service providers, have warned that the internet will collapse under the strain of millions of people downloading programmes at the same time. ..... Over the next four years, it is thought that the number of videos watched over the internet will quadruple, with people moving from short clips to hour-long programmes. ..... "I want every one of the six billion people on the planet to be able to connect to the internet - I think they will add things to it that will really benefit us."
Google: censorship is not up to us Times Online
Google CFO to Retire At Age 53 ABC News
Google CFO Out Forbes
Original Document: Obama's Field Director On Enthusiasm And ... Atlantic Online crowds of more than 20,000 in Atlanta, GA; 20,000 in Austin, TX and a historic crowd of 10,000 in Iowa City, IA. ...... how are we going to channel this enthusiasm into an organization capable of delivering victories in the early states and the February 5th states? ..... marrying traditional field organizing training with the community organizing tactics Obama learned as a young man on the south side of Chicago. ...... Camp Obama: Turning Enthusiasm into Organization ..... the last three months, the Obama campaign has trained thousands of volunteers and supporters at “Camp Obama” trainings. ..... almost twenty Camp Obama trainings across the country including Burbank, CA; San Francisco, CA; Atlanta, GA; St. Louis, MO; Salt Lake City, UT and New York City, NY. In October, we will hold trainings in Birmingham, Alabama and Memphis, Tennessee and will continue the trainings in Chicago. ..... What happens at the trainings? .... a marriage between community organizing and traditional organizing tactics .... a vigorous two to four day program that includes training on setting up and running phone banks, planning and organizing a door-knocking program and role playing common scenarios from the campaign trail including the process of registering voters and speaking with voters about Obama’s leadership on key issues. ...... community organizing tactics—like relationship building and the ability to find common interests in people and employ them ....... building local leaders in the communities and fostering long-term relationships to support our common values ..... mini-campaign offices with these groups—self-sufficient, interdependent teams that take responsibility for all aspects of a campaign within their congressional district. ....... provide supporters and volunteers with the tools to take organizing into their own hands. ...... enthusiasm alone will not win the nomination ...... turning energy into action all the way to the White House. ...... local people are the everyday experts on the issues important to their communities .... equip the everyday experts with the same organizing tools and the roadmap to victory that our paid campaign staffers rely on across the country. ....... Ben Turner, 17, Student, Atlanta "For me, Barack Obama is a symbol of what's to come, of an entire movement. Just like MLK ...... the February 5th states where most candidates are struggling to decide if they should invest resources. ..... investing in everyday people and encouraging them to be our ambassadors, our organizers and our voices in places where we don’t have paid staff or official offices yet. ...... early states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina and in February 5th states like California, New Jersey, New York, Georgia and Missouri. ...... a winning campaign will need deep organizations in dozens of states to prevail. .... We will have the largest and most committed grassroots organization in the race, allowing us to build our support, chase absentee ballots, conduct early vote programs and turn out Obama supporters in any state we need to.
The Battle for the Democratic Nomination: Hillary Clinton vs ... TransWorldNews (press release), GA
Countdown begins for real in America's first billion-dollar ... Times Online In five days most Americans will begin enjoying their long Labor Day weekend - the traditional end of summer - in the usual way: barbecuing, a final trip to the beach and watching sport. ...... two of the whitest and least populated in America ..... Labor Day also marks the traditional start of the presidential primary campaign ... the moment when many voters begin to focus on the candidates and the issues. .... the longest and most expensive campaign in US history - it will be the first $1 billion election ..... “Tsunami Tuesday” ... America is probably only 20 weeks away from knowing who its two main candidates will be. .... The 2008 race is the first since 1928 in which both parties have genuinely open primary contests ..... In four out of five times in the post Second World War era - 1960, 1968, 1976 and 2000 - the party holding the White House for two consecutive terms has failed to win a third. ...... In 2002 party identification split evenly between the two parties. Now only 35 per cent of Americans call themselves Republican - compared with 50 per cent who say that they are Democrat. ...... Mrs Clinton fares the worst. She is in a statistical tie with Mr Giuliani and just ahead of Mr McCain. This is feeding Democratic fears that although she is a prohibitive favourite for her party’s nomination, she will prove too unpopular and polarising to win a general election. She has the highest “negatives” - unfavourable ratings - of any candidate. ...... She has run an utterly disciplined primary campaign. In debates she has been relaxed, confident and clearly the most knowledgeable and experienced. Her “negatives” have also started to inch downwards. She has been a better candidate in the skills of one-to-one retail politics than most predicted. Her closest adviser is America’s shrewdest political tactician: her husband. ......... Nationally her lead over Mr Obama is 16 per cent, 38 per cent to 22. That has edged down from 20 per cent from two weeks ago, and in the early nominating contests of Iowa and New Hampshire it is far closer. Mrs Clinton, Mr Edwards and Mr Obama are in a statistical tie in Iowa. She leads Mr Obama by eight points in New Hampshire. ..... his greatest challenge is to convince enough voters that he has the gravitas to lead America in a time of colossal foreign policy uncertainty. ..... Mrs Clinton’s relentless exploitation of it ... unlike the New York senator, had the judgment to oppose the Iraq war ..... a relatively stable two-horse contest. .... a personal wealth of $250 million ..... He is a hugely successful venture capitalist who rescued the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. He desperately wants to be president. He is the Republican most on the rise. ...... A possible entry by Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, this year will shake up the already volatile Republican race even further. .... US presidential politics is a mercurial and brutal affair where conventional wisdom is often turned on its head. Michael Dukakis warned his party this week how quickly things can change. He should know. In July 1988 the former Democratic nominee held a 17-point lead over George Bush Sr. Three months later he lost in a landslide.
Stories and Numbers - a Closer Look at Camp Obama Huffington Post, NY No one who attends a "Camp Obama" training weekend can deny that something truly beautiful is taking place inside the Barack Obama campaign. ... lead by Harvard Professor Marshall Ganz ..... applying story telling, emotion and faith to politics. .... He was there when Robert Kennedy was shot .... says that for America it's been 40 years in the desert since that time. But he says he's beginning to see an out. ...... Almost every sentence Ganz speaks is at the same time intensely intellectual and intensely emotional. ...... telling our stories to each other ..... learn how to tell our own stories ...... how to "put into words why you're called, and why we've been called, to change the way the world works." ...... recruiting and motivating volunteers and building relationships. ..... emerge being able to tell their "story of self" in less than two minutes ..... I wasn't prepared for anything like who the people in this room turned out to be when they began to tell their stories. ...... two different professors tried to steer her towards a major in education. One told her, "This isn't a field for black girls." ...... Another told her he was sure she was being set up by affirmative action for failure, though actually her scholarship had been awarded for academic performance only. Despite that discouragement, she stuck with it and now does some crazy high tech job for NASA .......... After hearing their stories, I certainly was looking at this group differently than when we first sat down. ...... In just that first morning session, this group of "ordinary campaign volunteers" had been revealed to actually be a group of insanely talented, wise and courageous leaders. Now that that had been established, the real work could start. ...... This potential-revealing process of story telling ... a key tactic of every social movement from the American revolution to the Great Awakenings to the Civil Rights Movement. .... first appeared: as "ordinary volunteers." Because that's how organizers saw them, and how they saw each other, that is how they functioned. ...... the nuts and bolts: training and exercises on how to function as an effective team, skills training for volunteer recruitment and voter contact and review and explanations of field plans for Georgia, South Carolina and the rest of the South. ...... a process of setting goals and making a plan to achieve them ...... While still at the training, thirteen different teams scheduled thirteen different volunteer recruitment meetings back in the districts--and picked up their cell phones to get 284 commitments to attend from friends and neighbors. ..... the closing ceremony ... was incredibly high-energy and emotional. ....... establish parallel teams of five to eight people to be responsible for cities and neighborhoods all the way down to the precinct level. ...... There's no question that Camp Obama is a beautiful thing. ... communities benefit from the leadership development that takes place at Camp Obama. ..... But is there time for this meticulous organization-building to make any kind of difference in the vote in the "Super Duper Tuesday" February 5 nationwide primary? That all depends on the actual numbers of high-functioning teams that Camp Obama graduates are able to create in their districts, and the actual numbers of voters those teams are able to persuade and get to the polls. ..... the vast half of the country that votes on February 5. .... the hard numbers of this great experiment.

Obama's campaign gets mobile boost from Bellevue startup Seattle Post Intelligencer allows supporters of the Democratic presidential candidate to receive news and other information on their mobile phones. The service, which also was built by Distributive Networks, includes ringtones with excerpts from Obama's speeches.