It’s been a busy couple of weeks here in the Lone Star State: besides dancing with armadillos and tossing the occasional grenade, I’ve been wrapping up work on my second Joomla site, We Are Wetlands. It’s a project of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a long-time client whose main site I’m also in the middle of rebuilding (they have a custom CMS circa 2002 that’s flat-out abysmal). The site’s aimed at ginning up an email list of people in favor of wetlands protection.
WeAreWetlands.org itself is tiny, but I still got to use a couple of interesting Joomla features on it anyway. First, the Joomla native Newsflash plugin turned out to be perfect for a rotating “Did You Know” piece on every page — it pulls properly tagged items out of the database and displays a random one on each page (below the nav links). And, a free guestbook extension worked fine for their “Bog Blog,” which is a simple submit-your-content feature.
This was also the first time I’ve worked with a DemocracyInAction account, which turned out to be a joy after years of fiddling with GetActive (sorry, friends at GA). The setup was extremely easy and the site was free of the kinds of stylesheet clashes that have been maddening on other systems. And, their API works (unlike GA’s, which is no longer supported), so it was also easy to port the petition over to the main Wetlands site and have it interact with the DIA database seamlessly. Expensive legacy providers had better watch out — DIA’s gonna be eating into your bidness right quick.
OMG! WARNING: Over the top, offensive humor! Note comment: “Godwin’s Law: As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
Interesting new GOP anti-Obama site, via the The Caucus: CanWeAsk.com mixes social media techniques and video to try to undermine Obama’s credibility. The social media approach is the most interesting part of the site, since it’s soliciting text and video questions for the now-presumed nominee (The Caucus correctly notes that the very existence of the site helps to cement the impression that Obama has crossed the finish line). Participants can upload text questions directly to the site, but the video submission process requests YouTube links instead (free product placement!). The site also has a Donate link and a list of unfavorable GOP news articles about Obama.
To me, the video is the weakest part of the presentation, since it shows Barack in still images that are surely intended to paint him in a bad light, but except for the first one (in which his furrowed brow almost suggests devil horns), to me they actually generally make him look serious and sincere (he’s on-screen throughout the whole clip). The video also uses standard negative-ad “concerned” music, and tries to turn an Obama crowd’s “Yes We Can” chant into an affirmation of our right to ask the candidate tough questions, but in the end it actually just reminds me of the guy’s own message. I have to say, this clip feels like a backfire-in-progress. See what you think:
Update: While I was editing this piece, I let the video run in the background, where I could hear it but not see it, and it felt more effective that way. Still, every time the chant of “Yes We Can” came along, it still seemed to undermine the overall feeling of negativity. Maybe it’s just me.
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.
The folks at Slate have embraced widgets with a vengeance this year. Well, if you were Clinton or Obama, you’d certainly think of their widgets as being on the vengeful side of things. First there was the Obamafier, a fun take on the Obamamania that seemed to be sweeping the nation a couple of months ago (now…?). The latest widget from “the online magazine for the smarty-pants set” takes their popular Hillary Clinton Deathwatch feature (successor the the Aberto Gonzalez Deathwatch, among others) and makes it portable, so you can put it on your Facebook profile, MySpace page, etc. Why not install it now, while you’re waiting for results from Indiana and North Cackalackie? Go ahead, I dare you.
I’d planned to make the Deathwatch widget last week’s Friday Fun episode, but when my friend Rich MacKinnon installed it on his Facebook page, it started streaming porn images (bonus!) and I put it off until we knew more. He even wrote the incident up for Slashdot, but perhaps it was an isolated event, because he got no Slashdot traction and when I got ’round to installing the critter on Facebook and e.politics today, no such luck for me (damn). Give it a try and see what you find, though…you cain’t hardly GET enough porn on that there interweb, I tell you what.
I hate to risk alienating my new BFF Mark Zuckerberg, but has Facebook’s moment in the sun as a hot political tool passed? And if so, what does that tell us about the future of social networking sites for online political organizing, and even about the future of Facebook itself?
We’ve now seen more than a year of intense use of social networking sites by the U.S. presidential campaigns (and even longer use by issue-advocacy groups), which gives us a solid base of information and experience to judge just how effective Facebook is as a political tool — both for organized political campaigns and advocacy groups and for individual political activists. The verdict? Facebook has not lived up to a lot of its initial political hype, and for reasons that are perfectly natural considering what kind of a site it is. The crux:
Henry Copeland of Blogads: “As the social media winter looms, the winners will be the folks with strong relationships, low overheads, a strong commitment on innovation rather than coat-tail riding, and, most of all, a indelible passion for the business. We’re looking forward to seeing you after the bust.”
Wired’s Sarah Lai Stirland picked up on a revealing micro-scandal a couple of days ago: Obama supporter Lawrence Lessig has been getting beaten up on Redstate.com and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show over a video he’s used as a mashup example in presentations. The crime? The clip depicts a somewhat swishy Jesus singing “I Will Survive” before a dramatic run-in with a bus proves otherwise (note that the RedState author immediately jumps to the conclusion that this Jesus is gay — musical numbers are always a dead giveaway).
As the Democratic primary process grinds on, the candidates’ supporters are using just about every electronic tool available to swing the race their way. Two cases in point from the Obama side: super.del.egates.us is a wiki-based contact list for voters to use to reach the precious unpledged delegates to the Democratic Convention, while Yrmomma4obama aims to help young voters (and those too young to vote themselves) to use text messages to persuade their friends and family to jump on the Obama bandwagon.
Combine (1) this rule of Digital Omnipresence with (2) the rules of Off-the-Record/On the Record (i.e. — nothing is ever truly, reliably, off-the-record), then you’ve got Bittergate.
What’s the upshot? Campaign managers should consider, on a daily basis, reminding candidates of their Digital Miranda rights — call it the “Macaca Warning”:
“You have the right to be recorded — and should expect you are being videotaped and recorded 24/7. Anything you say can and will be used against you by your opponents. Beware that something that sounds OK in one setting may be a gaffe in another setting…”
Excellent idea! e.politics has been fascinated by the effects of portable video and audio recording on politics from the beginnings of the site in the Antediluvian days of 2006, and I’m damn jealous that Dan thought of that one before I did. Soon, only robots will be clean enough to run for office, and our fate as a species will at long last be sealed.
Jake Tapper’s smoke detector goes off at ABC News. “That fact simply highlights a growing narcissistic disease within the campaign press corps in which members increasingly see themselves as central players in the unfolding political production. Specifically, with regard to the Democratic primary, the press clearly views itself as the third candidate on the stage.”
Hi y’all, I gave a social media marketing training in New York on Monday, and I developed something for it that you might be able to use. The training was for the web staff of the local chapters of a large national nonprofit, and we covered the basics of using tools like blogs, online video, social networking sites and email lists and discussion groups to promote their activities and help with membership and fundraising. As a takeaway (a trick I learned from Michael Bassik — if you can, leave a little something behind for the crowd), I created a cheap sheet that looks at the basic social media marketing tools, their pros and cons, and the essential considerations involved in a social media campaign. Here’s a link to the PDF; details are below.
Science Link of the Day: “There you have it: the world’s most sensitive eyes allow them to be simple! And smash things! And it’s worked for 400 million years.”
Hi Pat, how’s things these days? Don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but there’s this device out there now called the “internet.” An interesting idea: the ‘net can put your words in front of a large audience. In the old days, you could say something relatively inflammatory, even in print, and generally have it read or heard really only by people who already agreed with you or at least shared your basic attitudes. Nowadays, though, someone like, say, Media Matters can pick up one of your columns and distribute it to a very different group of readers, including a few who might not share the assumptions underlying a statement like this, which you wrote yesterday in response to Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright’s now-famous screed:
America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.
Now, I’m not going to go into great detail about how I think you might just be missing the point, though I will suggest that perhaps you’d be more persuasive if you considered the question of whether anyone ASKED those “black folks” whether or not they wanted to be brought in chains to the New World, kept in servitude for centuries, stripped of their cultures and their very names and forcibly converted to an alien religion. Oh, and largely trapped in relative poverty and second-class citizenship up until my lifetime, and I ain’t that old. But I digress.
Greetings from New Orleans and the Nonprofit Technology Conference, where e.politics is bearing up nobly under the strain of going to fantastic cities and hanging out with bright and interesting people. Rough life, I know
As a takeaway for the participants in our online advocacy panel on Friday, below are a ton of articles on various aspects of the question of spreading a message and working to change politics and policy online.
Are big-name political bloggers just another endangered intermediary? That basic question came up in the Politics Online Conference session on Web 2.0 and politics, soon after the mention of the role of comments on news organization sites in helping activists bypass media filters. The basic point: just as commentors on mainstream sites can speak directly to those sites’ readers, political campaigns are working hard to reach voters directly online, without needing the support or even the notice of prominent bloggers to do so.
