Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

I’m confused by this TechCrunch end of year story entitled Top Social Media Sites of 2008. YouTube is nowhere to be found in the top 20..? Does this mean that YouTube no longer counts as a social media site or is it just that getting 5.4 billion views puts it in a rank all of its own? This chart from May 2008 puts YouTube at the pole position.

Regardless of rank YouTube had a great year; or rather companies who understood its power learned how to use it well. Salon.com points out in The Year of Viral Video that even political junkies jumped in, as can be seen in this example of a campaign message for Obama, a brilliant retelling of the “Wassup?” Budweiser ad.

As anyone who hasn’t been living under rock knows, SNL, Tina Fey and Hulu had a lot of fun at Gov Sarah Palin’s expense. Hulu, the joint NBC-News Corp. service, which launched publicly back in March, now ranks sixth among Web video sites. Between Hulu and NBC.com, more people watched “SNL’s” Sarah Palin sketches online than on TV. Their Clinton-Palin opener, which aired on Sept. 13, has been viewed more than 8 million times on the “SNL” Web site.

Salon also pointed out that “The smaller Web video site, Vimeo, continued to expand its catalog of beautifully produced videos available in HD and struck gold with Capucine, an adorable little French girl. The pint-size Amélie enthralled us with her storytelling, her imagination — and her accent. She even befriended a boy online; it was like e-Harmony for kindergartners.”

Capucine meets Alex from Capucha on Vimeo.

Now that Sarah Palin’s designer-laden $150,000 wardrobe expenditure has been confirmed, the Rebuplican party has pushed into overdrive with defensive responses. In the past few days, the McCain camp affirmed that she did none of the shopping herself and that once the campaigning is over, all of the clothing will be donated to charity.

The reason this expenditure raises so much worry is because Palin was billed as a working mom of five with blue-collar roots. This sudden shift to designer labels, whether it was her decision or not, was called out by Joy Behar, a cohost on ABC’s The View. “I don’t think Joe the Plumber wears Manolo Blahniks,” she said.

These expenditures have the ability to further alienate Palin from the working-class Republicans she has courted, since many of them are suffering so much in the weakening economy. Whether this will cause a permanent rift between Palin and the legions of “Joe Six-Packs” remains to be seen.

Chasing the story, chasing the numbers. This presidential campaign season is a tricky time for the TV networks. It seems that the network evening newscasts and network news divisions are struggling to pin down any hard stories. The media pundits are flailing around as the Democratic Convention didn’t go the way they had predicted, [Clinton this, Clinton that, disaffected feminists revolt etc,] and now with Hurricane Gustav hitting the Gulf Coast the Republican Convention has been downsized and all the top journalists and commentators have decamped to the storm zone.

It’s very telling, and yet still amazing, that here we are in 2008 with the networks covering the presidential race while looking longingly over their shoulders at the 2000 race, a time when YouTube had yet to make its mark. They have not been paying attention. The networks are still looking for ratings and are judging their results based on the number of viewers they attract. Yet, as Frank Rich writes in his op-ed article on Sunday, Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which monitors the intersection of politics and technology, points out that when networks judge their success by who got the biggest share of the television audience, “they are still counting horses while the world has moved on to counting locomotives.” [Rasej also runs TechPresident, a group blog that covers how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the web.] The Web, in its infinite iterations, is eroding all 20th-century media.

On cable, CNN consistently beat ABC, NBC and CBS in the ratings last week according to Nielsen, but as media are being transformed cable news channels may not last much longer either.

it was laughable seeing the networks fall over themselves as they struggled to understand how Obama got to the nomination. Obama’s supporters didn’t have that problem. As Rich says “the Obama campaign has long been on board those digital locomotives.” The Obama campaign has been telling its story online well beneath the radar of the mainstream media. When the networks focused on how many people turned up at Invesco Field to watch and listen to Obama they were counting horses. Meanwhile the real story lies in how many people are following the candidate’s every move online. Obama’s fund-raising and organizational networking online is unknown. That might give the networks another big surprise come November.

And then another fast-moving story breaks. As Hurricane Gustav moves over land and dies down the networks can switch their attention to the Republican VP nominee, Sarah Palin, whose 17 year old daughter is pregnant. That’s one that will have them horse counting.