Validation

Yesterday I got an unexpected boost for a job well done last year.

You may recall that I spent half of last year as John Bonifaz's campaign blogger and internet person (that link is my LJ post where I link to some of my blog posts that I liked most). We got some good press for our online campaigning, in a campaign that was otherwise mostly ignored by the press. The Boston Phoenix had an article about blogging that said:

Only John Bonifaz, running against Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin in the Democratic primary, comes close to the real thing. According to campaign manager Juan Martinez, Bonifaz has "the only statewide campaign with a full-time blogger." And it shows. Bonifaz's campaign blog has all the proper accoutrements of the medium, [...]

In an article about campaign use of YouTube, they wrote "the real video savant this election year is John Bonifaz", and it got picked up in other papers far away. The only time we got a front page article in the Boston Globe was with a blog-driven story.

The campaign ended when incumbent Bill Galvin predictably won the Democratic primary last September.

Yesterday evening I went to this talk about Darfur * by a Wellesley professor who is also the UNDP's staff historian. After the talk, while some of us were milling around to chat with him, he asked me what I do, and when I mentioned that I worked on John Bonifaz's campaign last year he nodded in recognition. This is pretty close to how the conversation went from there:

me: Did you ever read the web site?
him: Yes
me: I was his blogger ...
him: You were good! His campaign used the Internet really well...
me: I was the Internet person, I posted the YouTube videos, ...
him: Wow. That was a good example of a campaign and issue I probably wouldn't have paid a lot of attention to, or given money to, if you hadn't used the Internet so well.

His wife apparently works at MIT on something related to "new media" and she had also been watching us for how a campaign can use the net well.

* ( Darfur... )