Is the Right Starting to Get Web 2.0?

I came in this morning to post a couple of items and found an interesting comment waiting for approval. It seems that someone has decided to set up a Digg type site for conservatives. It’s called GOPhub. This is an important step forward for the conservative movement.

Why is this even interesting, much less important? It’s simple. Conservatives may win the battle of ideas, but we are quickly losing the battle over Web 2.0. Last fall I read an article by Robert Cox in the “The Examiner” that discussed this very matter. Additional research proved (at least a large portion of) his hypothesis.

The RNC set up an excellent program for the 2006 election called MyGOP. It included some great grassroots organization tools including a tool to let you see where nearby Republican activists lived in relation to you. “Personal Democracy Forum“, an excellent review of technology and politics (but hardly a bastion of conservative belief) gave the system a great review when comparing it to a similar system launched by the Dems.

But what happened after the election? The RNC took a fantastic idea and let it die. The grassroots organization tools are almost impossible to find now unless you already had them bookmarked. It’s also obvious that they’re not using any additional resources to improve the system. The best grassroots platform out their is “CivicSpace” (based on the CMS Drupal) and just happens to be controlled by former Deaniacs.

Back to GOPhub.com and why it’s so important. I hope that this is the start of a strong conservative effort to engage individuals through social networking. GOPHub.com is put together using a platform called Pligg. I have to admit that this is first time I’ve come across Pligg, but it seems to be a pretty cool platform. It will be quite a while before I can tell you how easy it is to implement in comparison to other CMS’s like Joomla (zero to moderate difficulty) or Drupal (moderate to extreme difficulty depending on where you want to go with it).

Conservatives need to seize the web, just as we own talk radio. Why? We are successful when we wage campaigns of ideas. The web, just like talk radio, is “long format”. You aren’t limited to the 30 second “sound bite”. Blogs are a good starting platform, but we need to tackle more robust forms of social networking. Many of the tools are out there already. Using a platform such as Ning, any idiot can set up a decent social networking site. Blogs, forums, sharing comments and photos – all in one stop.

I hope that we continue to see more sites like GOPhub.com out their in the near future. If some are already out there, I’d like to know so that I can do my small part in helping to promote them. The web can be one of the greatest grassroots organizing tools of all time, and we don’t want to be steamrolled by a bunch of Soros-funded types who could wind up shutting down our access to those tools.

PS -
My only criticism of GOPhub.com to date is the name. The DeLay – Lott – Bush era has taught us that GOP is no longer equivalent to conservative.

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