Archive for July 17th, 2006
Last week’s launch announcement for Hotsoup.com, particularly Howard Kurtz’s profile in the Post, cast my mind back to some other erstwhile political portals that have come and gone in the past 10 years.
Kurtz mentions Grassroots.com and Vote.com, each of which is still with us but as a much different (and infinitely less ambitious) proposition than it began. But remember Politics.com, whose url supposedly cost a cool $1,000,000 back around 1999? Voter.com? Votenet.com? Policy.com?
These sites, and I’m sure a lot more whose names escape me, foundered in part because they tried to be THE online destination site for politics and/or policy, following the classic dot-com-boom-era portal model.
(more…)
July 17th, 2006
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So your organization has a MySpace site — great, one more chunk of text to edit constantly or let fall out of date. You could restrict your content to evergreen background about your issues, but wouldn’t it be better to have news? Displaying an RSS feed would be perfect, but MySpace blocks javascript.
Turns out some guys have come up with a solution that’s about as crafty a hack as I’ve seen in a while — a site called MySpace Feed will take the contents of your RSS feed and display the headlines as a .gif image. It updates just once per day, only contains the headlines and has limited formatting options, but it works — I’ve been using it for several weeks now on the National Environmental Trust MySpace site. The individual headlines aren’t linked to their stories, but we link the whole image (which has a fixed URL) to our news headlines page. It’s a clunky solution, but it’s probably the best we can do these days.
– cpd
July 17th, 2006
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I haven’t been to any NetSquared events before, but the topic’s certainly timely.
What: NetSquared DC- July Meeting
When:
Tuesday, July 18, 2006, 7:00 PM
Where:
Science Club
1136 19th St NW
Washington , DC 20036
202-775-0747
Description:
Beyond the Logic Puzzle with Ryan Ozimek, CEO of Picnet.net
Making it easier for our supporters to communicate with Congress is key to
many of our organizations’ tatical goals. While there are many passionate
opinions on this new technological challenge posed by the Congress logic
puzzles, tonight’s discussion will focus on going beyond email. What is it
that congressional offices really want from our organizations? Why do
office’s interns hit “Select All – Delete” when we send our thousands of
emails? What can our organizations, and our fellow supporters, do via
technological means to make sure our messages are heard?
– cpd
July 17th, 2006
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