Posts filed under 'RSS'
- Update: The Obama Camp Dials It Forward. Post-primary conference call plays it subtle, while all is well in ClintonLand.
- McCain Launches Spanish-Language Website. Wonder how the Minutemen (no, not THE Minutemen) will feel about THAT one?
- Bury bad news with online press releases. Somebody forward this to Hillary Clinton. C.f. Craigslist Ad Of The Day.
- The critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. From gin to sitcoms to lolcats, via Henry Copeland.
- Bunches o’ Studies and Stats on Nonprofit Marketing.
- How-To: 10 Tips for Launching a Solid Podcast.
- Two new guides to presidential online advertising from Clickz, Online Presidential Display Ads Leading to the 2008 Primaries and All Primaries Are Local: 2008 Presidential Campaigns Buy Local Online.
- The Tale of the E-mail. Hillary and Barack’s constrasting post-Indiana/NC notes. C.f. She’s Still In, And She’s Still In To Win.
- Pew Study Confirms Cell Phones Rule.
- Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth.
- Right now, I’m watching the President of the Utah State Senate on my desktop. Julie, you had me at “desktop.”
- Google Reader is becoming more of a social networking application.
- Twitter Post Rescues Jailed Journalist, but Egyptians ignore Facebook call.
- How the White House lost 5 million e-mails.
- Jailed Chinese Journalist Shi Tao’s Poem Follows Olympic Torch’s Route Online.
- Matt Stoller on how liberals rule the web, and The Baltimore Sun on how Matt and friends raised 400K for Donna Edwards. Via tPrez.
- Phantom Obama Vote Appears on NJ Voting Machine.
- Web Ads from Left and Right Advocacy Groups Signal More to Come.
- Media criticism in context: “Yes, it would be nice if the press spent less time on inanities and more time on how candidates planned to actually run the country. But this view of the media is just too simplistic.” Via Salon.
- North Carolina Radio Host Reports Anti-Obama Chain E-Mail Distortion As Fact. C.f. Pennebaker: Clip Doctored, about the Mickey Kantor video distortion. (also via tPrez).
- Union-organizing emails get employees of a social networking site fired! Sent around by Michael Whitney.
- Clinton’s and McCain’s Gasoline Tax Holiday Reimagined as a Phishing Scam.
- National Intelligence Agency Breaks Out RSS Feed.
- 6% are Natural Born Clickers.
- Twitter frenzy! Using Twitter for Your Organization, Use TwitterFone For Easy Voice-To-Text On Twitter, and Political Junkies Congregate and Comment on Election Results Through Twitter. Plus, 5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence and The Bivings Group Does Twitter.
- Yes, a Montana cattle ranch is using banner ads combined with search ads to sell their premium beef via the internet.
- 10 Valuable Tips for Shooting Web Video. Via Frogloop.
- Google, YouTube and the city of New Orleans try to host their own presidential forum. Via Mike Allen.
- Video: how primary-season attacks have been amplified in the general election.
- FBI Targets Internet Archive With Secret ‘National Security Letter,’ Loses.
- Harold vs. Markos. Not everyone wants a unified Dem ticket.
- META Keywords are Legally Dead.
- Be very afraid: Engineers find ‘missing link’ of electronics. Robots take next step toward world domination.
- A minute and a half with Shana Glickfield…is enough to spark any man’s dreams.
- Clone-tool war on nipples continues. Complete with tragic casualty figures.
– cpd
May 7th, 2008
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Yesterday, e.politics saw by far the most articles read via RSS on a single day ever, according to Feedburner. Analysis: sounds like everybody else was up late waiting for Lake County, Indiana, too. At least you guys could kill time better than the poor bastards stuck on camera — hours of nothing were a cable news producer’s nightmare. Though I gotta get me one those wall-sized touchscreen video displays with a Google Earth overlay like John King was using on CNN — that’ll impress the chicks, buh-lieve you me.
– cpd
May 7th, 2008
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These tips are for an Advocates for Youth/Choice USA online organizing training session on April 16, 2008, and you kids can look at them in greater depth in the relevant Online Politics 101 articles, particularly the ones covering marketing and promotion, websites, blogger relations and search engine optimization. They’re aimed at organizations and campaigns that are on the resource-poor side, since those won’t be able to do much paid promotion, but the basic ideas apply to most sites regardless of scale. See also that enduring classic from November of 2006, How to Build Traffic to a Blog: Ten Tips.
10 Ways to Build Traffic to a Website
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April 15th, 2008
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First fruits of RootsCampDC: time to experiment with a couple of site promotional tools. Look to the right, below the search box, and you’ll see a new content widget which you can use to put e.politics headlines on your site, blog, Facebook page or computer desktop. It takes this site’s RSS feed and packages it into widget form for use across the web; run by SpringWidgets, it’s one of the standard promotional tools provided by Feedburner. Just below that, I’ve also added a Feedburner-provided email signup form. E.politics has had an email subscription option since the beginning, but it was only on the Feedburner subscription page and not obvious at all (only two people have signed up for email, vs 600-odd RSS subscribers). The usual expectation is that having a signup form visible directly on your pages encourages signups; time for a little test.
Thanks to Michael Whitney for the suggestions — he ran a great RootsCamp session on getting the most out of RSS.
– cpd
April 14th, 2008
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With the long weekend and a relative lull in the presidential primary season, the political world seems to be catching its breath for a moment (it must be quiet for a story like the Obama/Patrick “plagiarism” affair to get as much attention as it has). Time for a little e.politics late-winter cleaning, and also a chance to catch up on some recent developments on the site. First, two milestones: the good news is that over the past couple of weeks, e.politics has consistently had over 500 RSS subscribers on an average weekday for the first time. Yay, readers! Thanks for sticking around. The less-good news: on Sunday, the site received its 300,000th spam comment, which was about as welcome as a skunk at a picnic.
As for the site cleanup, we now have an updated list of Highlights to the right — articles for which I have a soft spot in my heart, and a feature that came down a couple of weeks ago because it was gettin’ long in the tooth. Now, it’s back and no longer six months out of date. Next up, and here’s where you can help, is the blogroll, that long list of links below the RSS button. It also hasn’t been updated since at least last summer, and not only have several of the sites gone dark, I’m also missing good new ones. Want to suggest some additions? Email me or (even better) leave them as a comment below for everyone to see. After the links are fixed, next it’s time to rewrite Online Politics 101 — just a few things have happened in the world of online advocacy since September of 2006.
– cpd
February 19th, 2008
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- Users’ Online Time Spent Mostly on Content - Not Communications, Commerce. Content is king!
- Tech Savvy Protesters take on China, but when is it appropriate to spam the Great Firewall?
- Social networks not just for kids, as Boomer site pitches own political tent. See what all those Cialis ads have led to?
- Building a Successful Internet Presence.
- Sidestepping the ‘macaca’ moments. Politicians’ desperate desire to be boring.
- Democratic Advisers Take Posts in Group Opposing Wal-Mart.
- Cost of Saving the Climate Meets Real-World Hurdles. On problems with the selling of carbon offsets online.
- As Billboards, Public Phones Always Work. Does advertising assure the survival of pay phones?
- Army Reports Brass, Not Bloggers, Breach Security. “It’s clear that official Army websites are the real security problem, not blogs,”
- More military threats: Russia Orders Long-Range Bomber Patrols. Backfire bombers, coming soon to a backyard near you.
- How Google Works. Nice visual overview, suggested by my NET colleague Erica Peth.
- Which Presidential Candidates Have Mastered Google?
- Mobile Advertising is Irritating. Shocking news from the world of marketing.
- More fallout from Wikipedia edit tracking: Vote On the Most Shameful Wikipedia Spin Jobs, and find out about The Feds Who Edit Wikipedia. Lamest Wiki story, as noted by tPrez and about 10,000 NY Times commenters: Messing With Iowa.
- 13 Winning Ways to Make Enemies in the Press. Never too early in the week for self-sabotage.
- Rule #1 In E-Politics: Don’t Attack The Bloggers. But what if they’re annooooooying?
- Three Strategies for Thriving on the Decentralized Web.
- The continued usefulness of direct mail in the Internet era.
- A Simple Yahoo Pipes RSS Filtering Example.
- Investing In Netroots Innovation.
- Cheap media, cheap ads. Seth Godin takes on a common mistake.
- Facebook Opens Email Up A Little; I Want More. C.f. Newsweek’s take on Facebook, via David All, and Facebook rules for the rest of us (when is a poke not a good idea?).
- EmergencyCheese: A Citizen Journalist gets a taste of MSM.
- Beware the Dark Side of PR 2.0. Spoilsport.
- The Untold Story of the Cheney ‘Quagmire’ Video. The making of an Internet hit.
- Why the YouTube Election Should Evolve into the Gaming Election. Because we have 14 months to go and desperately need a distraction?
- Late addition! Google Maps are now embeddable, via Rochelle Robinson.
- A final sad note: the geek community loses a founder, as Joe Engressia, Expert ‘Phone Phreak,’ Dies. The first guy to manipulate the phone system by whistling in perfect pitch, he was an original hacker — you gotta love someone who picks a city to live in because he likes the quirks in its phone circuitry.
– cpd
August 21st, 2007
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My NET colleague Kymberly Escobar showed me a neat toy today — a video camera that’s designed for easy Internet connection, is about the size of a video Ipod and that costs about $100. She’s been using one to shoot videos of her kid, but she immediately saw the usefulness for online advocacy, particularly for field organizers or campaign volunteers.
The Flip Video camera shoots either 30 or 60 minutes of 640×480 video, depending on the size of the flash drive, and also contains editing software that you can launch when you hook the little critter up to a computer via USB. When connected, it’s designed to upload videos directly to YouTube — a great feature for newbies, and a clever time-saver for a lot of applications. From what I’ve seen, the image quality is quite good, considering the obvious resolution limits, and the camera includes a 2x (digital) zoom and the ability to capture stills. A nice extra: it’s small enough to escape notice much of the time, and if you (or someone else) should happen to step on it? While not quite disposable, it’s close enough.
Imagine the campaign uses: at a field event (protest, press conference, media stunt, punking opportunity), organizers or volunteers armed with these cameras and a laptop with wireless connection could very quickly shoot video and select and edit clips. They could then either post them to YouTube for the world to see (tag them with a common and unique keyword for easy searching and/or distribution via RSS) or email them to the campaign communications shop. Want a collective record of an event, to use for good or evil? Have several people armed with these machines in the crowd, supplemented as necessary by cameras that hold more footage or that shoot at higher quality, and wait for the Macaca moments to roll in.
– cpd
August 20th, 2007
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More news from the land of random widgetry: the Post’s The Fix column has its own RSS widget, which I just noticed today displayed in an advertising bubble between its first two stories. The other Post blogs I checked didn’t seem to offer a similar feature; maybe Fix author Chris Cillizza is a hardcore tech-nerd and made them do it (let’s ask). [Update: Chris says several popular Post blogs have them; I must have missed them. Another tactic: at the bottom of this page, note the topic-specific example that displays headlines about the Iraq war. But wait! there’s more.] One nice extra: easy instructions on the download page for installing on MySpace and common blogging plaforms.
I gotta get me one of these — that way you kids will never be too far from your favorite e.politics characters (action figures available soon).
– cpd
August 15th, 2007
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If you’re in the enviro advocacy world, you’re almost certainly familiar with the online magazine Grist, a widely read source of green news and commentary. To promote its coverage of the 2008 presidential candidates on the environment, Grist is providing readers a simple RSS widget that displays the latest headlines in their “How Green Is Your Candidate?” feature:
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August 14th, 2007
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Cross-posted on techPresident.
Hi, I’d like to ask all of our Republican colleagues to go to the bathroom or go watch tv or something.
Um, yeah, just kidding, but here’s why: I’m going to be talking about a damned interesting application that electoral and advocacy campaigns can use to keep their branding and messaging in front of supporters, and I’d rather that my Democratic friends get on top of it first. I’ve been impressed with the potential of widgets as an outreach and communications tool for months now, and a product has come along that looks to fill just about every role I’ve talked about an ideal campaign widget doing.
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June 29th, 2007
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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:
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May 29th, 2007
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Pre-holiday catching-up-with-the-blogs edition, carefully selected for easy beach reading.
- Much discussion of Facebook’s new Platform application. Todd Zeigler and The Good Doctor Rosenblatt think it’s a potential game-changer, but Donna Bogatin’s more skeptical.
- More fallout from Monday’s Post story on Democratic dominance online: Patrick Ruffini vs. Mike Turk (watch out man, Mike’s all kung fu and shit). On a related note, Do Conservative Bloggers Want to Counter Liberals?
- Payola, blog-style. A helpful how-to guide to corruption.
- The Netroots And War-Funders. Dems: “lying whore[s]” or “avatars of ‘learned helplessness?’”
- Whew, how about something more pleasant, like some nice practical tips? First, Best Practices of Online Strategies (via Patrick Ruffini), and next let’s learn to Make Internet TV (via the Idealware newsletter).
- Google buys Feedburner, apparently en route to buying everthing else. But did the company buy the PDF conference? Donna Bogatin says yes, and Eric Frenchman thinks she’s dead wrong.
- There’s still time to vote for Hillary’s song! (I knew you were worried.) Oh, and now she’s collecting email addresses, unlike at first.
- Social media meets groceries. Mmmmmmm, groceries.
- Online politics with an Australian accent. Let’s toss that Internet strategy on the barbie for a bit.
- A couple of good Blog P.I. articles: The Google Bombing Campaign of 2008, and All Political Consultants are Stupid (a more-skeptical take on cable tv advertising).
- On the virtues of organizing people rather than information.
- Dueling maps of the political blogosphere from Beltway Blogroll and The Politico. Notice anything missing?
- Some info on the weird Ron Paul online boomlet: NPR on Ron Paul and Games Ron Paul Supporters Play.
- And finally, the nerdiest way to spend your holiday: Make-It-Yourself ‘Star Wars’ (via Micropersuasion).
Have a good weekend, kids. And stay off my damn lawn!
– cpd
May 25th, 2007
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The major presidential campaigns have put tons of effort into creating websites, building their own social networks, creating online videos and reaching out to voters through Facebook and MySpace, but they’re so far mostly ignoring a simple and effective tool to help their supporters find volunteers, raise money and spread messages: web widgets.
Widgets are little snippets of HTML code that you can drop into a page, a blog post or a blog template to add a rich feature. For instance, the ChipIn widget lets you embed a donations collection tool into your site to support your own custom fundraising campaign, and many online publishers offer widgets that display headlines of recent stories. Widgets have a social media component as well, in that they can often spread from one site to another via a “get this widget for your site” link.
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May 16th, 2007
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Quick Hits Returns! (And this time it’s personal…)
- Al-Jazeera launches YouTube channel, apparently leaving film editor at home. On a related note, American conservatives launch a site to keep House Dems “accountable.”
- Internet Now Infested With Offensive Content. I believe my work here is done.
- Presidential Debates Go Online. See previous item.
- But wait! Is porn losing the popularity contest, or simply penetrating the popular?
- MySpace Launches Site For U.S. Spanish Speakers. Candidates, hitch up your translators and let’s go for a ride on the bilingual social networking frontier.
- But we’d better get there quick or people might think you’re a weirdo. Why come you have no MySpace? “In the future, those without profiles risk being ostracized. Privacy not as privilege, but as crime.”
- MoveOn vs. McCain: It’s Smackdown Time. Hotline has the numbers on MoveOn’s primary-state ad buy, and Slate thinks it might just backfire.
- Up the revolution — No More Landing Pages! (via AdRants). But wait, here’s an AdRants story worth landing on: short shorts return.
- Digg.com reveals news stories fade after 1 hour. I can think of quite a few that I WISH had faded after an hour.
- Is advertising being supplanted by conversation? Another AdRants find (clearly on a roll).
- 2,914 MarketingSherpa Readers Can’t Be Wrong. At least, if they’re talking about viral marketing.
- Why RSS can make your life better: singing the praises of Netvibes, and Jason Z. finds that stick people make the best RSS explainers of all.
- One hit too many: Bizarre photos from White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Wonkette readers unsure if Julia Allison was replaced by a wax dummy or just photoshopped herself into the pics. My, what a nice (and consistent) back-arch — you simply MUST refer us to your personal trainer.
– cpd
April 24th, 2007
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A couple of days ago, one of the folks behind a new site called Politickr wrote in to let me know a bit more about what they’re up to. Politickr turns out to be one of the few political sites I’ve seen that’s really using technology in a creative way to illuminate some part of the ‘08 campaign — they’re using RSS feeds and semantic analysis to show the presidential candidates’ recent blog posts side-by-side and to map the ideas on which each blog is focusing.
Glancing at the site today, for instance, we can see that Brownback’s taking a quick smack at Romney (nyah nyah, you’re not as conservative as me), Rudy’s touting his supply-side credentials, Obama’s talking about “substance” and Biden wouldn’t mind if we voted for him. It’s a quite easy way to see each campaign’s theme of the day (Kucinich’s seems to be, “look at me! I use Flickr!”) and to compare and contrast communications strategies.
My favorite part of Politickr is the visual representation of what the campaign blogs are covering — click on the tag clouds link and you’ll get a visual/conceptual map of each site’s recent topics. It’s a classic concept cloud approach, with more-represented subjects being shown in a larger and heavier font, and it makes it super-easy to see each site’s emphasis. For instance, “Iraq” tends to loom large on the Dem sites but is rather missing from on the Repub side. Some terms are a bit obscure (what is “myleftnutmeg” and why does Chris Dodd care about it?), but you can click on each to see a recent post in which it appears (ah, it’s the name of a blog on which he guest-posted). Very cool concept, nicely done — one of the few truly innovative applications of technology to politics I’ve seen in a while.
– cpd
March 29th, 2007
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