Intellectual Property Law

A group of young Hillary Clinton supporters in New York City have had it. They're not going to take it anymore.

Fed up of being out-voiced by the seemingly innumerable supporters of senator Barack Obama morning noon and night -- on YouTube, MySpace, generally on the web, television, the streets and anywhere else you can think of, this coterie of New York City's creative class decided that it was time to create the Hillary Clinton Video Organism.

"We were talking about ideas to make a simple YouTube video," says Alex Lasky, a 35-year-old television and online content producer, one of four New York City professionals who came up with the idea for the site Hillaryspeaksforme.com. "But with the amount of negativity that seems to be pumping out from somewhere, we thought that there needs to be a single place where our voices could be heard."

The site, launched Thursday morning, is a place on the web  where footage, video testimonials and other kinds of artifacts of support for Clinton are constantly streamed and updated using software from SplashCast, an online television and social networking company in Portland, Oregon. A firm called Aquaboogie built the accompanying MySpace page.

"It's the first time in any campaign that we've seen a video organism," says 32-year-old Reshma Saujani, a lawyer for a financial services firm, who's one of the minds behind the project.

She sees the site as a place where voters can safely advertise their support to their peers in states that have yet to hold their primaries-- without fear of being ridiculed and bullied. Everything submitted to Hillaryclintonspeaksforme.com has to be approved by the site's administrators.

"It's somewhat of a coming out process," she says. This is a "safe community where you can speak your mind."

"It seems as if everywhere you look, you see people trying to voice their support for Hillary, but then there's all this negative bashing," adds Lasky.

SplashCast ties together YouTube supporter-submitted video testimonials and footage from Clinton rallies and debate appearances. It provides the usual embed code that users can seed into their own favorite social networking applications. 

While some of the footage, such as Clinton chanting "Yes, We Will" repeatedly at a rally is cringe-inducing, other testimonials from immigrants, teenage boys, and small children are alternately  both entertaining and compelling in an anthropological sense.

For example, one of the first videos in the mash-up currently features a tot saying: "If Hillary Clinton can be president, we can be president too." (Her even younger sister, obviously under strict instructions, shoves her arms up in the air to bolster her sibling's statement.)

It's an interesting turn in the dynamics of the 2008 race for the Democratic nomination for president: Both Clinton and Obama's campaigns have been wagging their fingers at each other's negative campaigning tactics. Now that line of rhetoric seems to be spilling over to the electorate. 

Both Lasky and Saujani says the purpose of the site is also to showcase the very real support Clinton enjoys from young voters.

"If you read the press, you have to be a 60-year-old fuddy duddy to support her, and that's not true," Lasky says.

"The other thing that we wanted the world know is that this isn't too little too late," says Saujani. "When Clinton kicked off [her campaign] a year ago, it was with 1,000 young people at her town hall."

Lasky and Saujani collaborated on this project with 26-year-old Genevieve Labean, a dancer, singer and ballerina for the New York City ballet and and 29-year-old Matt Paco, a freelance online producer. Saujani says that they also received a lot of input from a lot of other Clinton supporters.

Saujani says that she calls the project a "video organism" because  of the way it's growing. After the group sent out mass e-mails to friends asking them to send in their video testimonials, the collection of footage has been growing exponentially. They've received 300-400 video submissions through YouTube since they sent the e-mails out over the week-end.

See Also:

• Clinton Chasing Youth Vote: 'We Should Have a Government Blogging ...
• The Smart Mobbing of Super Tuesday
• Comedian Starts a Wiki To Track Attacks on Obama
• Superdelegates Under the Spotlight

(Hat tip to Joshua Levy at TechPresident.)