My techPresident feed
What Ever Happened To ... GOP.am?
Larry Ward, the president of Political Media, says the joke's on anyone who tried to exploit his company's unintentionally hilarious GOP.am URL shortener when it launched last December.
When the site launched, people on the political left had entirely too much fun using the shortener, which adds a hat to the linked site in the style of ow.ly, to put the official Republican Party seal over the website of their choosing. (The website of Communist Party USA, to pick a safe-for-work example, if the link still works. It did when I checked earlier today.) The GOP apparently protested having its official stamp in use, and it was replaced with an unofficial logo shortly after the service launched.
"[There were] a couple thousand links out there that were all porn and stuff," Ward told me. "I was sitting there thinking, 'why am I just turning these off? I should point them somewhere' ... So we did, we pointed them to all these different sites based on which action of the day was going on. Now I think it's pointed to a health care petition on the GOP page."
Local Politics Wins: PdF Network Call with Rob Willington on Scott Brown '10
When Scott Brown's campaign was winding down, his web/political strategist Rob Willington — a former executive director of the Massachusetts Republican Party — bought massrecount.com. Just in case.
Obviously Brown didn't need that particular URL this year. But it was one of the strategies Willington explained to PdF Network members on a conference call yesterday, to wit: Be an early adopter of social media memes, like relevant hashtags (for Brown, it was #MASen); on social media, build personal connections with people, rather than just blasting on-message comments and repeating press releases; use developing technologies like the ability to geotarget Google search ads; and when you meet a voter, always get their data.
PdF Network: How Obama did online video
Kate Albright-Hanna just wrapped up an hour-long talk with PdF Network members about how Barack Obama's campaign used Internet video. Albright-Hanna, now at the online news and entertainment organization VBS.TV, was responsible for the campaign's online video operation.
Wild Horses: Data.gov Proves Good Stats are Hard to Wrangle
Not to knock the plight of the wild North American horse, but it isn't clear to me how population counts of wild burros and mustangs are the most important data the Department of the Interior has to offer for its eager public.
Along with every other federal agency, Interior had until Jan. 22 to respond to a Dec. 8 directive from Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag by posting, on the Obama administration's Data.gov open government data repository, three "high-value data sets." Their response was a list of volunteer opportunities from serve.gov; a list of government recreation facilities; three data sets concerning wildland fires; and an elaboration on the United States' dwindling stock of wild mustangs.
So I asked Interior: What makes the wild American donkey so important?
On PdF Conference Call, a Talk About 350.org, and People Power
CORRECTED
350.org // via FlickrFor an hour or so this afternoon, Michael Silberman of EchoDitto and Phil Aroneanu of the climate change advocacy network 350.org talked with Micah Sifry and members of the PdF Network about how to engage large groups of people with, in financial terms, practically zilch.
Haiti: A Fresh Look, From the Air
Google put together this before-and-after shot using newly available imagery of Haiti, post-earthquake.
Google announced last night that it has released a map layer with up-to-date imagery of Haiti.
The imagery, which Google wrote on its blog was captured yesterday morning by the firm satellite and aerial imaging firm GeoEye, shows the devastation wrought upon the heavily populated area around Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake.
"The imagery is remarkably sharp,"Google Earth Blog, which is not affiliated with Google, observed. "[it] shows some amazing scenes such a a soccer field turned into a make-shift camp (shown above), and smoke continuing to billow out of some buildings."
How Much to Spend Online, and Other Tips
In a wide-ranging conference call with Micah Sifry and members of the PdF Network, Engage partners Patrick Ruffini and Mindy Finn filled in a lot of the gaps in knowledge about Bob McDonnell's successful, online-powered campaign to become governor of Virginia, as well as about the ascendancy of the netroots on the American right.
Springtime for Republican Political Technology?
Bob McDonnell's Virginia gubernatorial campaign was just one example of a maturing Republican political technology industry.
How Nonprofits Can Make the Most of a Google Grant
When Aaron Friedman found out in November 2009 that his nonprofit, Make Music New York, had won a Google Grant, he was excited.
Then he had to figure out exactly how to use the grant, through which Google gives each qualifying nonprofit in the program up to $10,000 worth of pay-per-click online advertising each month, and the excitement started to dim.
PdF Network: How Obama did mobile, text messaging and SMS
Revolution Messaging CEO and Obama campaign External Online Director Scott Goodstein took an hour Thursday to be the guest on the latest PdF Network conference call, where he dished some advice on mobile messaging and gave people a glimpse under the hood of the Obama campaign's SMS and mobile communications efforts.
What does Joe Lieberman want?
Mat Honan has done it again.
The WIRED contributor and author of Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle — a page that explains what Barack Obama did or is doing in some absurd alternate universe, i.e. "Barack Obama set your voice as his ringtone," "Barack Obama made up your bed," and cycles through sentences with each mouseclick — launched Joe Lieberman Wants You Dead, a website with the same gimmick but different theme.
"Joe Lieberman wants you to know that everyone he thinks matters will be covered," this website explained to me this morning.
BigApps knows where alternate-side is in effect
At least parking might get a little easier.
A first look at the contestants in New York City's BigApps contest — in which a $20,000 prize is up for grabs to the developer or developers who make the best use of a data dump the city made several months ago — shows some interesting stuff, but a lot of fluff, too.
Look familiar? Old campaign tool, new advocacy purpose
SEIU's latest online health care push recycles technology from the 2008 Obama campaign, but adds a new Twitter twist.
