Kasim Reed wins Atlanta mayoral race, MyDD update

I couldn't stay up as late as it took last night to be sure that Kasim Reed won the mayoral race. And wow, what a close race. The tally currently:

Kasim Reed 41,901
Mary Norwood 41,143

Our WSG team has been working with Kasim Reed throughout his campaign, and a big hearty congrats to his campaign staff, the other consultants, and the candidate for a remarkable comeback. Just a few months ago, Reed languished in third at around 10-15% support, then made it into the runoff by finishing second with 37%, and wins the GE.

Norwood can request a recount, but 100% of the precincts have returned, and Reed has declared victory.

Also, MyDD is re-launching soon with a customization off of the WSG Netroots Platform. Its in staging right now, and zips along with ajax threaded & sortable comments, a strong back-end for community management (rec's flags, mojo), full integration with Twitter via a new BreakingBlue.com, and photo/content integration with Facebook (Google too soon). We'll launch with all of that within days or a week or two at max.

We also have a new Follow/Friend concept that builds off of what we used for OrganizeVirginia.com & SEIU local, and will integrate it with the event and action campaigns (& Act Blue)that are being revamped currently and will be added later. By the end of the week, I'll put out the staging info so a wider group of people can test it out and help make the transition smooth.

This will be MyDD4.0 and BB2.0 for those counting. Back in 2000, with Gray Matter, MyDD became one of the first community blogs, then relaunched successively on Movable Type in 2002, and then Scoop in 2004. We've been on this platform for 5 years, which is an awful long time. But in the meantime, the MyDD scoop platform also served for the SBNation.com rollout for the first couple of years, as we started up that company, and the energy thats went into SBN's current sites is amazing. I had started a rolllout of a new platform here a couple of times, but the technology was just not ripe enough for a new platform yet. The new MyDD.com will be Ruby on Rails powered, and its ripe. I love the new BreakingBlue.com, which will be bookmarklet & mobile-enabled to post content there that can be pushed to both Twitter and MyDD. The upcoming rollout will be just the beginning, and the goal will be the strongest political community blogging platform in the blogosphere.