Widgets Not Waiting for the Presidential Campaigns

Cross-posted at techPresident

Inspired by the May 16th e.politics/techPresident article on the conspicuous lack of presidential campaign widgets, a group of software developers has started to build their own — if the campaigns won’t help their supporters spread the word, these guys are happy to do it for them.

Based in the thriving tech hub of, um, Idaho, the folks at Widgetnest have taken the first steps toward creating a comprehensive suite of widgets for campaign promotion. As a start, they’ve built some nice-looking widgets to display RSS feeds for Edwards, Obama, Romney and Guiliani. Here are the ones for Romney and Edwards:


Nice work! Maybe the campaigns would like to follow suit and create their own? How about holding a build-a-widget contest, with the most useful widgets and their creators getting featured on the official campaign site and in outreach emails? That’d be a nice alternative to the omnipresent create-a-video contests. Encouraging volunteers to create outreach tools — that’s crazy talk. What is this Internet thing, some kind of conversation?

Check out the Widgetnest gallery for more widgets by the same folks; they have a nice display-any-rss-feed tool, for starters.

cpd

Written by
Colin Delany
View all articles
1 comment
  • We are geeks and don’t need the campaign to make us ‘widgets’.

    We use pledgebank such as this successful one here:

    pledgebank.com/ronpaul1000

    And can post our own links on our own sites that lead to the fundraising page on the candidate’s site.