e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Experimenting with a Squidoo Lens

Hey guys, the folks over at Squidoo asked me to take a look at using their site, so I just finished creating a “lens” page for online political advocacy. What is Squidoo? A site that simultaneously tries to sort through the mass of information on the web by allowing “experts” to set up overview pages (lenses) on particular topics (kind of like a wiki) while also raising money for charities (lens owners can dedicate the revenue from Google ads on their pages to a select list of nonprofits).

At the moment, I’ve set up the online politics lens to see what kind of traffic it will draw and to experiment with features. Later, we’ll set up an environmentally-themed lens on behalf of my day job (National Environmental Trust) and see how effective IT is. I’ll keep you guys posted about how things go, and in the meantime you might consider setting up your own lenses to see what you can find. Establishing a lens may be a good way to position you or your campaign as a go-to source on your chosen topic.

Hmmm, I wonder if there’s a need for lenses on sloth and beer? Extensive near-lethal experimentation would be required…but I’d try to bear up nobly under the strain.

– cpd

2 comments January 4th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Raising the Bloody Flag of Revolution over…Data Integration?

Online campaigners unite! You have nothing to lose but oh, about 30 seconds of your time. A group of folks in the field, inspired by a discussion at RootsCampDC, has put together a brief manifesto about how nice it would be if our advocacy applications could share data easily, and they’re asking practitioners to sign on. I just did — who wouldn’t want all the parts of an online campaign to work together? Here’s a quick blurb from the organizers, among them our own Ha-Hoa Dang:

If you work for a progressive organization or campaign, you probably
struggle with technology. You probably have multiple databases and
tech tools that half-work, but don’t work together. Thousands of us
have struggled for years with fragmented systems that don’t fully get
the job done. If you want the progressive movement to have the
toolsuites we need to win, you should sign The Integration
Proclamation.

I’ll see you at the barricades. BTW, like the site, guys — nice and simple, good logo.

– cpd

1 comment January 4th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us