"MySpace and YouTube would like to establish themselves as serious political sites."

[DeepModem Mom]

LAT: YouTube and MySpace campaign for political positions
The popular websites are branching out for '08, joining a growing online trend.
By Scott Martelle, Times Staff Writer
May 20, 2007

NEW YORK — The Internet battle over the presidential campaign is ratcheting up following announcements by social-networking site MySpace and video-sharing hub YouTube that they plan live webcasts of town hall meetings and candidate debates leading up to the primaries.

Both said they seek to draw more voters into the political process, but the sites also are engaged in what is shaping up as an old-style media fight over online information consumers — and the ad revenues they bring....

Credibility hangs in the balance as both sites seek to position themselves as more than one-trick ponies where users share passions for rock bands or post funny videos, said Josh Bernoff, a social-computing analyst at Forrester Research.

"Both MySpace and YouTube would like to establish themselves as serious political sites," he said. "They want to be broader, more multidimensional."

MySpace is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, YouTube by dominant search engine Google.

In a measure of the growing significance of online politics, key executives from major Web companies — including Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt — took part Friday in the fourth annual Personal Democracy Forum in New York, a gathering of people trying to find new ways of inspiring political action via the Internet....

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-web20may20,0,24100.story?coll=la-home-center

[Robbien]

1. YouTube is going to be one of the media sponsors of the

Democratic Debates.

It has been officially announced that the Dems are dropping out of Fauxnews sponsored debates and have picked up YouTube as one of the sponsors.

Good.,

[Nite Owl]

2. That's great news!

I'm so glad they dropped out of the Faux debate, it would have been awful, whatever they said would have been spun all over the place. Murdock is slime, we shouldn't be supporting his projects against us.

[PresidentObama]

3. Social networking sites really are the future of internet politics.

MySpace is a great tool to tap into the youth of this country, and YouTube makes it easy to broadcast entire campaigns from speeches to townhall meetings to live webcasts. I'm really glad our candidates especially are using MySpace and YouTube to their advantage. It's a wonderful tool, and inexpensive way to reach voters!!