Back in 2004 after Dean went down in flames and my brother Zack was out of a job, he started a website called Progressive Pipes. PPipes was an email listserv aggregator. He built it on Drupal. It was subscribed to over 20 progressive email lists that would automatically be fed into a queue to be edited and published. Zack passed off the administration to me at one point and I spend a bunch of time tagging them by message type (action, donate…) and subject (good government, environment…). It was getting thousands of page views a day. People liked being able to pick up the RSS feeds, or go to the website and not have to get all of the emails into their inboxes. It has been three years since then, but finally somebody else is using the concept to track Presidential candidate’s emails.

techPresident just launched Politickr, which is an email aggregator for each candidate. Obviously this does not represent each and every email being sent out, but you can get a sense for how often they are hitting up their full list and what they are emailing about. It would be fantastic if techPresident would put the time into editing the emails, categorizing them and making a counter: # emails raising money, # that have videos, stuff like that. Then we would really have some interesting data. That would take a lot of time (I know from experience), but it would be data not available anywhere else. It is a great job for an intern to do daily.

Very cool, but I want more!

[UPDATE] Check out this post by Michael Whitney on techPresident, where he did some added analysis of the emails. And don’t miss the comment from Zephyr Teachout at the bottom. She makes some great points.