Old Guys and the Internet

I am always impressed when people who are in their "later years" keep up with the times enough to use the Internet. My grandpa, for example, is probably a better emailer than me. He spends time online each day and knows his way around. That earns points in my book!

Another thing that really grabs my attention is when a company or individual that has been around for a while not only uses the web to market themselves, but actually does things that haven't been done before. I won't make any political speeches here, but 72 year-old Texas congressman Ron Paul has completely changed how politicians can use the web to get their message out there and gain support. Mainstream media companies have not really publicized him much, yet he has been gaining momentum thanks to outlets such as blogging, youtube, social bookmarking, etc. He has also set records for fundraising (I think he's raised $5 million+ in a day TWICE) using his website to collect donations. What's really amazing about that is the average donation size is something like $100, so it's a LOT of different people donating, not some giant corporation contributing most of the funds.

Just to illustrate the success of his web efforts, take a look at this Compete.com graph of daily web visitors to each candidate's website:



RonPaul2008.com (the blue line) is currently receiving more visitors than any other candidate website. It had twice the traffic of Hillary Clinton's website in December 07. I would say that's an achievement that is not really reflected in media coverage. Especially for an old guy. :-)