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.
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.
If you’re trapped in the office on this pre-holiday-weekend Friday, check out the Obamafier from Slate. Not a translator, but clever way to show off some pretty painful Obama puns in the form of random definitions from the “Encyclopedia Baracktannica.” And they very cleverly made it a widget so that we can embed it and give them free publicity:
Ink Different. On the subject of cults of personality and Obama tattoos: “Shouldn’t this guy at least have waited for the general? Imagine someone walking around right now with a Lieberman tat.”
Samantha with Republican Quote of the Day writes in to show off her latest creation, a Mitt Romney iGoogle theme:
Click here for a larger screenshot, or here to see a live version of the theme or to install it.
I was going to go on a tirade about how the campaigns should do more to empower people to spread the word on their own and how an iGoogle skin was a good way to keep supporters’ eyes on your message and your candidate and why doesn’t Romney do more of that, but then I bothered to check his site and found that he already has lots of downloadable doohickies, including an email signature and banners for MySpace pages, though no actual widgets. So, cancel part of that rant and take the rest with a strong chaser.
In the new and evolving online world, the greatest momentum goes not to the candidate with the most detailed plan for conquering the Web but to the candidate who surrenders his own image to the clicking masses, the same way a rock guitarist might fall backward off the stage into the hands of an adoring crowd.
Powerful image! But some pictures hold less than meets the eye, and this might just be one of them. Are the presidential campaigns missing the boat, or do they know something we don’t? Let’s hear more from Matt first:
A quick thought about Google’s OpenSocial, which was unveiled a few weeks ago: while most of the attention focused on the use of OpenSocial Google Gadgets on social networking sites, Gadgets are actually web widgets that’ll run on most blogs and just about anywhere else. As campaigns and organizations develop little advocacy critters using OpenSocial, and as companies build theirs for commercial purposes, people may become more used to installing widgets on their own websites. OpenSocial may help spread widgets far beyond the walls of social networking sites — something to watch.
News arrived via Katrin Verclas today that online advocacy provider Convio (which recently ingested competitor GetActive) is opening itself up to the wider world of online advocacy. According to the company’s Open Initiative site, Convio is allowing programmers access to its API, giving outside developers the ability to write software that interacts with data in the Convio system. Besides this new toy for our friends in the ones-and-zeroes community, the company also has a Facebook advocacy aplication in beta stage, integrates its data with Google Maps and with Salesforce.com and other CRM providers, and is offering advocacy widgets for use on social networking sites and blogs.
Smart move all around: most online advocacy providers have traditionally tried to live in closed worlds, keeping their clients wedded to custom systems that generally aren’t flexible (I had a hell of a time getting one to dispay a YouTube video the other day, for instance). But as the variety of online channels constantly expands, and as we in the advocacy community get more experience using them effectively, we’re not going to be satisfied with tools that are rigid, limited and expensive. We need to reach supporters where THEY are, using the methods that they prefer. Traditional email lists will continue to be powerful tools for the foreseeable future, but they’ll be more effective if integrated with other forms of outreach, particularly using social networking sites. And, who knows what cool applications our programmer colleagues will come up with? Ultimately, opening its platform should only make Convio and its products more valuable down the road.
Here’s an interesting little feature that the Biden campaign has just started using — a tool that can combine several video clips into a single embed, even if they originate on different video hosting sites. Instead of displaying just one clip at a time, a Searchles channel embed creates an array of videos from which people can choose. Most significantly, once the content is embedded in a page, it will automatically update as new videos are added to the channel. This creates a widget-like way to actively push new content out to supporters’ sites, which makes a Searchles channel much more than just a video mashup tool.
The Searchles site is a hybrid — it combines elements of search engines, Digg, Del.icio.us and social networking sites (Searchles = search circles, get it?) to help refine the information that people receive. The video channel feature that Biden’s folks are using is a relatively new addition: the Searchles guys saw that no one else was aggregating video content in this way and decided to give it a shot. The result seems as though it should be useful for any campaign or organization trying to push content out to supporters or to any series of sites that would be a pain to update one-at-a-time. One important detail: a Searchle channel will take video from outside websites including YouTube, Google video and blip.tv.
One of Biden’s channels is below, and you can also see it embedded on his own site. Note that this isn’t Biden’s first video innovation — I’m still a fan of the concept behind his Head2Head site.
To see all of Biden’s Searchles channels, follow this link. A handy little tool — video podcasters might want to give it a shot.
In honor of his announcement last night, I just checked out Fred Thompson’s official site, and I gotta say, very slick Flash interface, guys. A few bugs here and there, though — when I clicked on some of the stories on the main panel at the top of the front page, I got error messages (better check that Action Script). Here are some general observations: (more…)
More news from the land of random widgetry: the Post’sThe 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).
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:
Hi y’all, I’ve been off in a print- and web-production frenzy the past few days, but the world of online politics never sleeps, so let’s dive right in with some revealing information about two much-hyped channels for online outreach.
First, according to MarketingVOX, Facebook is already the sixth-most-visited destination on the web, with users spending over 20 minutes on the site per day. They’re not all young: more than half of site users are out of school, and the site’s fastest-growing demographic is the over-25 crowd (which is what you’d expect, since it only opened to old people like me a few months ago). Users are also receptive to widget-like applications like those used for advocacy and fundraising, with over 75% installing at least one app. For those of you trying to go where your audience is, a good chunk of it may be hanging out on Facebook (particularly if they’re preps rather than nerds).
Unfortunately, Second Life doesn’t seem to be faring as well as a marketing tool: according to this month’s Wired,the site hasn’t lived up to its promoters’ buzz, with most commercial spaces unstaffed and rarely-visited. Those high traffic members (7 million!) are grossly exaggerated, since most accounts are quickly abandoned — over 85% of all avatars ever created are now ghosts in the immaterial machine. Though some visitors do become regular users, “the big draws for those who do return are free money and kinky sex” (god bless ‘em). The main benefit companies seem to have gained is press attention for the outreach effort itself. Who knows what they’re paying their PR agencies, but I’d love to see some ROI numbers for THAT little project.
Ben Rattray with Change.org wrote in this morning with the news that the organization has developed a Facebook application specifically to enable advocacy in the Facebook universe. How does it work? Once you install the app, you can choose from a variety of causes that others have created or you can make your own.
After you’ve added a cause, it appears in your profile and visitors can click through to view more information. You can also directly invite friends to join the cause, just as you can invite them to add other Facebook apps. Advocacy groups and political campaigns are going to be particularly interested in this feature: causes can be associated with particular nonprofits or candidates, and Facebook users can donate to them directly through the Change.org application. Interestingly, anyone who’s joined a cause can suggest fundraising targets — I just added National Environmental Trust to the list of possible Global Warming beneficiaries, for instance. Coming soon: the ability to run advocacy email campaigns. I asked Ben how that will work, particularly with the various email deliverability issues involving Congress. Here’s his reply: (more…)
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. (more…)
