Chicken John, SF Mayoral Candidate, has started a blog: Chicken John Rinaldi For Mayor of San Francisco, which includes an instructional video to help collect signatures. He needs to collect 10,000 signatures by Wednesday, July 25th to get on the ballot — go help him out!
Chicken’s joined facebook too on the advice of Scott Beale of LaughingSquid. Chicken’s also on that den of iniquity and bad design myspace and tribe. Next thing we know he’ll be on Twitter, Flickr, Pownce, Digg, Delicious, and of course YouTube — well actually Chicken is already on YouTube with a video of him eating a lightbulb.
So let’s tally up the scores of who’s the more 21st Century political candidate…
Google Name Recognition
- Gavin Newsom - 698,000 search results and an extensive wikipedia entry
- Chicken John - 78,300 search results and a pitifully small stub of a wikipedia entry
Web 2.0 Social Aptitude
- Chicken John - 1 facebook profile, 1 myspace profile, 1 tribe profile
- Gavin Newsom - 3 facebook profiles, 3 myspace profiles, and one Gavin Newsom Sucks myspace profile. {While Gavin wins by sheer number of profiles I have a strange feeling they aren’t really him, so I had to give this one to Chicken}
Blog-o-sphere Cred
- Chicken John - 1 fresh off the presses mayoral blog written by the man himself (when he doesn’t have the cold that is); hosted at Wordpress.com but with his own domain which adds a couple more cred points
- Gavin Newsom - 1 boring PR spewing pseudo-blog written by the mayoral toadies in Newsom’s name; hosted as a subdomain on Typepad. And 1 other boring PR spewing pseudo-blog with an unknown CMS with a lousy old HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype.
YouTube Stardom
- Chicken John - Aforementioned Chicken John eating a lightbulb and Chicken John Bus Trip to Locke, CA ( Footage of the Chicken John Bus Trip to Locke. With footage of Dammit the Wonder Dog)
- Gavin Newsom - Gavin’s meltdown and Gavin Newsom & the Man Code (reflect on Gavin Newsom’s betrayal of a good friend.)
From a mayoral gravitas perspective, I don’t think either candidate wins in this department.
So there you have it! Chicken John is the better 21st century political candidate! Gavin is more searchable by far, but Chicken’s web presence is more personal and web 2.0 connected — quantity vs quality.
Unfortunately, for elections it’s quantity that wins. No matter though it’s always worth it to add that little something else to spice up the pot, so go help Chicken John by signing to get him on the ballot!