Archive for January, 2007
Interesting Nielsen results for newspaper sites in a Huffington Post piece by Blake Fleetwood: The NY Times is well ahead of the Washington Post, something that surprises me, considering that the Times has blocked access to many stories for non-subscribers and the Post has been very aggressive in adopting social media techniques to build an audience. The Post is down 2% over the last year, while Times readership is up over 20%. Significantly, newspaper blog traffic is up 210%, though it still seems to be below 10% of the total traffic to the newspaper sites. The article also looks at the gender imbalance in the overall news site audience (more men than women go to news/opinion sites) and lists the top (U.S.) online news sites. Well worth checking out for anyone trying to get pickup in media outlets online.
– cpd
January 31st, 2007
Trackback
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Heather Greenfield called a couple of weeks ago when she was working on this article, and National Journal’s Technology Daily has kindly given permission for me to reprint it.
YouTube Boom May Mean New Jobs On Campaigns
by Heather Greenfield
Online campaign strategists are predicting such an explosion of video-sharing next election cycle that they said campaigns should add online video experts to their staffs.
Last election cycle, many of the bigger campaigns had Internet strategists either on staff or as consultants. Those experts handled anything from maintaining online communications to contacting bloggers and monitoring video-sharing sites like YouTube. But the job of monitoring what is being said about campaigns on YouTube is growing as video production becomes cheaper, more people learn to do it, and free sites go online.
(more…)
January 30th, 2007
Trackback
Bookmark on del.icio.us
My-head-is-still-on-the-slopes catch-up edition.
- Drudge, global warming shut down Senate site. Website fall down, go boom.
- A new online Capitol Hill news site launches, and Wonkette sneers sneeringly.
- Your PCs forecast climate future. Distributed computing for advocacy purposes — SETI Project, you are not @home alone.
- Marketers Get Weak Signal from Users on Cell-Phone Ads. Apparently, people aren’t too excited about phone-spam. Shocker, that.
- How to Improve Email Deliverability: 3 Steps Tested by Real-Life Mailer. From MarketingSherpa.
- Micropayments, Political Giving and Microsoft. Can tiny amounts of money add up? What about FEC reporting requirements?
- Two articles from Democracy in Action: A Website By Post, Or, How They Communicated Before the Internet (you’ll never look at direct mail the same way again) and a bit of Convio/GetActive Merger Scuttlebutt.
- Two YouTube articles on ReelPopBlog: YouTube rolls out some site improvements and Google integration with YouTube bumps YouTube market share 18%.
- Attack ads go online and underground. Online political videos gone wild!
- Speaker Pelosi’s Blog Outreach. Apparently, they’ve lost my number, though — the phone is tragically silent…
- 23 Ideas for Finding New Readers for Your Blog. More good tips from ProBlogger.
- Counterculture-joy link of the day: Kucinich to oversee Office of National Drug Control Policy!
– cpd
January 30th, 2007
Trackback
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Quite a few folks have been writing about the 2008 candidates online in the past week, with the bulk of the attention focusing on Hillary Clinton. Though Hotline writes about good Alexa numbers for her website, most of the coverage has been critical of a strategy seen as cautious and conventional. Personal Democracy Forum, for instance, has two skeptical articles, Controlled by Control (no free-wheeling social media effort here) and Clinton Ahead of the Pack? (apparently, no). Beltway Blogroll jumps in as well, talking about her carefully scripted online chats. Bloggers and online-politics smarty-pants aren’t all that Hillary has to worry about, though, with Air Congress reporting on a Swift-boating attempt using online video.
In other notable stories about the candidates, Hotline also reports on strong facebook support for Obama (159,000 members in his Facebook group) and MediaShift takes another look at the presidential hopefuls’ blog ads. Update: don’t miss Cristen Perks’ Presidential 2.008 Site Analysis and two articles from the Bivings Report that I linked to on January 18th.
– cpd
January 30th, 2007
Trackback
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Comment spam. If you don’t run a blog or online discussion group, you’ve probably never heard of them, but spam comments (fake comments submitted en masse and intended to send traffic to a splog or other money-making site) are a real danger for sites that want to encourage public discussion. I use the Akismet plug-in with my WordPress installation to screen out the spam, but that means that occasionally I’ll end up accidentally deleting a REAL comment. Other sites have required commentors to register or have turned off reader contributions entirely.
(more…)
January 29th, 2007
Trackback
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Hey kids, I’m outta here for a week or so — heading West to plummet down powdery slopes in Park City and to cadge free drinks and catch a few flicks at the Sundance Film Festival. I’ll think of you all as I mingle with the beautiful people. Oh, the difficult life of a Famous Blogger! Will I have room on the ski lift for my entourage? What if we run out of limes for our gin and tonics — it’s Utah, after all. The horror! The horror…
January 20th, 2007
Trackback
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Will with onNYTurf writes in with more examples of Google Maps (he did the backend work on the hospital closure map from a couple of days ago), in particular one that shows which city councilors oppose or support a New York City proposal to limit the right of free assembly. Other maps are here, more good examples of how an advocacy campaign can use mapping applications to illustrate a point.
– cpd
January 19th, 2007
Trackback
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Woo ha! The day is almost at hand…time to Cry Havoc and Loose the Dogs of Rock! Details below…
[Note: the upstairs at Solly's is fairly small, so come early to guarantee your spot on the dance floor. You can always grab a pre-show drink at the first-floor bar. Come say howdy if you go — I'm the guy on bass.]
January 18th, 2007
Trackback
Bookmark on del.icio.us
It’s not exactly wiki-ing the power structure in the sense that I talked about it a couple of months ago, but it’s probably a more practical approach to using a wiki to influence government policy. As Elizabeth Williamson wrote in the Post on Monday (in an article tucked into the bottom of the Federal Page, if I remember right), a site called WikiLeaks.org has been set up to allow anonymous posting of sensitive government documents from around the world. As their site says:
(more…)
January 18th, 2007
Trackback
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Checking my server stats today, I found a slew of referrals from searches for some combination of “Convio” and “GetActive” — close to two dozen, with most coming from Google but several from Technorati, the blog search engine. Considering that I only wrote about the merger mid-afternoon yesterday and that the stats updated at 4 this morning, that’s a BUNCH of activity for such a short period of time. Another indicator, along with email traffic on advocacy lists, that this development in the industry has people interested and in many cases concerned. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of losing diversity among vendors and also don’t want to lose the good qualities of GetActive, a company I’ve been using for two years and several of whose employees I’ve come to know well. We’ll see how this one shakes out.
– cpd
January 18th, 2007
Trackback
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Online advocacy professionals have been burning up the discussion groups this afternoon with questions and observations about the just-announced merger, with some folks concerned about the loss of competition in the field, others worried about transition costs and a few predicting a stronger product as the end result. EchoDitto has started a blog thread to keep up with latest developments and to serve as a center for conversation. Update: Democracy in Action responds to the merger.
– cpd
January 17th, 2007
Trackback
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Big news in the online advocacy world! As a GetActive customer (at NET), I just received this email from GA CEO Sheeraz Haji:
I’m writing to share the exciting news that GetActive is to be acquired by Convio, Inc. This is a significant milestone for the nonprofit sector, our company, and our product. But most important of all, this is great news for our clients.
This agreement with Convio combines the resources of the two leading software companies serving nonprofits to create a clear leader in this fast evolving market. GetActive has the best Advocacy and Website management products available and Convio is recognized as the industry leading eCRM and Fundraising solution.
The client focus and market understanding you’ve come to expect from GetActive will not go away. Our staff will become employees of Convio — virtually doubling the new company’s ability to develop new features and offer new services.
The note goes on to talk about the eventual migration of GetActive customers into some Convio products and also about maintaining customer service continuity, etc. I’ll write more as I find out what’s up. Nothing posted about it on the GA site yet. Update: there’s a press release on the Convio site.
– cpd
January 17th, 2007
Trackback
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Mike Connery of The Opportunity Agenda writes in to talk about an excellent use of mapping and data by an advocacy campaign he’s involved in:
It’s a Google Maps Mashup displaying hospital closures in NYC in 1985, 1995, and 2005 layered over race and economic demogaphics of the 5 boroughs during those decades. A pretty interesting mix of technology, research and advocacy, I think. www.healthcarethatworks.org
Groovy stuff — it illustrates their point far more immediately than text alone would have done, and the ability to toggle between different years and different kinds of data lets you pack a lot of information into one screen. And of course it’s married with an email-your-state-officials function, tightly linking activist education and action. My only suggestion would be to maybe make the Take Action link a little more prominent — it usually doesn’t hurt to hit people over the head. I would bet that we’re going to see more and more uses of mapping technology for advocacy purposes like this in the future. Thanks for sending it along.
– cpd
January 16th, 2007
Trackback
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Previous Posts
