Okay, so “notworking” is far too strong of a term, but I couldn’t resist the catchy title. TechPresident recently did a brief review of Hillary Clinton’s new Facebook app, mentioning that it’s pretty good but that it came around a bit late. This got me thinking about Obama’s Facebook app and the my.barackobama.com social network. Obama’s new media staff has done an excellent job of leveraging the Internet (or the Interwebs as some of us prefer), making it one of the driving forces behind the Obama campaign. However, the excitement over this new type of campaigning aside, I have two critiques of areas that I think could be improved upon.
The Obama Facebook application is very robust… once you actually go to the application’s canvass page. However, I would bet that the most important part of most applications, this one included, is the profile box. It is what my friends see when they come to my profile, and this is the part of the application that I deal with most often. I’ve only visited the canvass page a handful of times. When I want to interact with Obama content, I go to the Obama website or to Digg. When I’m on Facebook, I go to my profile, my friends’ profiles, and my feed.
Unfortunately, the profile box for the application is very limited. Currently, all it has is a thumbnail from a video about Obama’s win in the Maine caucuses. That happened over two weeks ago (an eternity on the Interwebs), and four states plus DC have held primaries since then. This space might be better used by feeding it content from a variety of sources like the Obama Digg account (get me to vote for stuff), the campaign blog (keep me up to date with what’s going on), or YouTube (show me one of those amazing speeches). This could be done automatically through a simple RSS aggregator like SimplePie. Alternatively, it could show me the latest actions that my friends have taken in the Obama application, like which stories they’ve voted for or commented on.
My point is that even though I am an avid Facebooker, I rarely get beyond an app’s profile box, and I’m guessing the same is true for many others.
As for the my.barackobama.com social network, my only suggestion is that they make it easier to find friends. Right now you can search by zip code, common groups, and name, but these are only helpful for finding Obama supporters near me (want to guess how many there are in Washington DC) or if I take the time to enter each of my friend’s names (not going to happen, too many friends). Consequently, I only have one friend on my Obama account, even though I live and work in the most politically active city in the U.S. In short, they need to implement a friend finder that searches e-mail contacts, much like Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, et cetera all have.
Again, these are relatively minor critiques, but I think they are important ones (especially the friend finder). On the whole, the Obama new media team has done an amazing job. I don’t think anyone predicted that online politics would be at this stage at this point in time.
Check out a great post by my friend Justin Hamilton, explaining why Hillary Clinton is pretty much done. I was thinking about writing something similar, but I figure there’s no need to re-invent the wheel. I differ on a couple of the specifics, but he’s pretty much got it. Obama’s lead is large enough that only a huge blowout in Texas or Ohio (and a win or very narrow loss in the other) could put her campaign back in the running.
So, my question is, what does it take for a website to become the next big thing? I recently launched polfeeds.com, which syndicates the RSS feeds produced by politicians. I thought (and still think) that it was a pretty good idea. It makes easily accessible a lot of information that a lot of people want.
At the same time that I was launching and promoting PolFeeds, I started this blog. I’ve written a total of 8 posts (9 including this one), mostly on politics, and my traffic here is currently significantly higher than my traffic on PolFeeds.
When it was initially launched, PolFeeds got written up on a few niche blogs and received a fair amount of StumbleUpon traffic. However, without telling you exactly how sad the traffic on PolFeeds has been recently, I’ll just say that this blog, which is getting more traffic, was visted all of 45 times yesterday.
Now, I enjoy writing, but especially considering that this is my first experience with blogging, I don’t think that these posts are of an exceptionally high quality. I certainly doubt that what I have here is more useful than a tool that allows you to keep up with a great deal of the goings on in U.S. politics. Of course, much of the traffic that I’m getting on this blog is from friends; bless you souls who actually read my drivel. However, the majority of the visitors are actually coming from StumbleUpon, a TechCrunch trackback, and Google. In fact, in a strange development, I am the top Google result for “obama donor counter,” right above Kos.
I imagine that part of what has limited PolFeeds’ growth is my own lack of knowledge about how to market a website like that. A blog is relatively easy. You write, link to others and get trackbacks, submit interesting articles to Digg/Stumble/Reddit, et cetera. This may not make you as popular as TechCrunch, but you’ll probably get at least some traffic.
So, what is the secret? How do you market a website that’s not a blog. There’s always AdWords, but there’s got to be more to it than that. What do you recommend? What does it take to be the next big thing? How do you become the next Facebook, or even just the next Xanga?
No time for a full post right now, but Barack Obama just broke a million donors.
No, no, I know what Facebook is, and I consider myself pretty adept at using it. Facebook the company confuses me. More specifically, Facebook’s designers confuse me.
I suppose the thing that baffles me most is that they don’t utilize the full width of a 1024×768 screen. Their current design creates just a bit of horizontal scrolling on an 800×600 screen. The simple addition of an extra column where applications could reside would alleviate most of problems with overly cluttered profiles. Even all of the empty space underneath the ad in the left-most column could be used for this.
Instead, Facebook’s designers are leaning towards a multi-tabbed layout that would effectively hide a great deal of the information available on a profile. I have quite a few applications installed, but I have them there because I want to paint a picture of my online and offline activity for my friends. I’d prefer this picture not be hidden. I am an active Internet user, so I have the Del.icio.us and Digg applications on my profile. I have a YouTube video player so that my friends can see some of the videos I produce for work. I have the notes app configured to import my blog posts, a posted items box, et cetera. I’ve got the Obama application installed, which is fairly important to me considering I’ve spent a couple of weekends in other states volunteering for the Obama campaign. In other words, my profile is not just a random collection of crap but a carefully crafted picture of my life, both personal and professional, online and off.
I would love to have the tools to make this picture sharper and more focused, but I don’t want to be told what can and cannot be a part of the picture, what is and is not important. I’m not looking for a MySpace like experience. I don’t need to be able to style my profile any way I want. I prefer a simple, orderly layout, but I most definitely want to be able to choose the content that fills this layout.
I know this sounds like I don’t like Facebook. In fact, the opposite is true: I like Facebook a great deal. I use it every day. I just want it to continue to be a place where friends can see who I am, not just the fun facts about me that others deem relevant. Facebook has a page where you can see the proposed changes, and you can send your feedback (and ideas) to profilespreview@facebook.com.
I just went to the Obama website and saw their donor counter. They’re very close to 1 million donors. I went back an hour later and it had increased by about 1000 people. It seems to have slowed down a bit now. I checked it 5 minutes later and it had 45 new donors. Even at that lower rate of 600 people an hour, that’s 9 new donors a minute or one new donor every 6 2/3 seconds, absolutely unbelievable.
Anyway, at this rate they should reach their goal by mid-afternoon today. I suppose it could take a bit longer, but I’m sure they’ll be there by tomorrow. Their take for this month is going to be insane. Some are predicting as much as $60-70 million for the month.
Last week I attended a panel discussion called “The Uncharted Political Terrain of Campaign ‘08 with Trippi, Walter.” The title is pretty vague, but it was basically a discussion of the use of a new type of politics that has risen in the ‘08 U.S. Presidential election (and an interesting although seemingly tangential presentation on voting trends within the Hispanic community). The panel was a fairly impressive group, including Joe Trippi, recently off the Edwards campaign; Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of Hotline (a National Journal publication); Simon Rosenberg, founder and president of NDN; and Andres Ramierez, VP of Hispanic Programs at NDN. It was moderated by Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute.
I’d like to focus on one important aspect of the discussion, bottom-up versus top-down campaigning. In short, a bottom-up campaign is one that involves large numbers of people doing the little bit they can, think Obama for America. A top-down campaign is one that relies on traditional political operatives/insiders exerting their considerable influence and expending their considerable resources. It is also tightly controlled from the top, and does less to encourage (and may actually discourage) independent action by supporters, think Hillary for President.
Joe Trippi argued that Hillary Clinton made a huge blunder by running a solely top-down campaign and that this was the last time that a Democratic presidential candidate would make that mistake. He believes that the Obama campaign has proved the superiority of the bottom-up approach. Hillary Clinton has, he says, the best Democratic top-down campaign in recent history, and yet the Obama campaign is still giving her a run for her money, even though it is only the second bottom-up campaign in modern politics. It seems his idea is that the type of campaign which has been mastered is in danger of being defeated by a type of campaign in its infancy.
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Amy Walter took a different view. She made the point that the success of Obama’s campaign may only be a result of a confluence of factors. She believes that neither candidate had much choice in the type of campaigns they would run. Clinton had extreme institutional support and was popular among Democrats but was a divisive figure among independents (and certainly Republicans). Consequently, she had to run a top-down campaign, as her appeal was to the Democratic base, not to the masses. This left Obama with no choice but to run a bottom-up campaign. She also points out that the political environment is ripe for change, as people have an unusually high level of frustration with government, and that Clinton had no idea that campaigns would or could be run in this bottom-up manner.
Walter also makes an interesting argument that this bottom-up campaign that Obama is running may not be able to win a general election. Currently, Obama is garnering most of the independent vote. However, he is actually a leftist who has been tacking to the left in an effort to appeal to the “lunch bucket” Democrats (her words). Consequently, McCain, who is actually moderate (even if his appeal to moderates is less than Obama’s) may be able to pick this vote back up, even while she recognizes that the political environment is more favorable to Democrats.
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Editorial Note: In trying to condense these views into a couple of paragraphs, I may have unintentionally distorted them. If you think so, please let me know in the comments. I’ve also embedded the videos so that you can judge for yourself.
I mostly agree with Trippi, but I do take Walter’s critiques seriously. I don’t believe that U.S. Presidential elections will ever be the same again, but I also doubt that many future campaigns will gather quite as much grassroots support as Obama’s. Candidates with the ability to inspire as Barack Obama does come around quite infrequently; Bobby Kennedy was probably the last one. Few politicians will be able to motivate and mobilize supporters in the way that Obama has. However, he has proven that the masses have great power. Candidates ignore them at their peril. A candidate who could garner one quarter of the grassroots support that Obama has would have a significant leg up on his or her opponent. In fact, it is arguable that in an election where there is no frontrunner with the name recognition and widespread support (in the Democratic Party anyway) of Hillary Clinton, that even a fraction of the grassroots support that Obama has garnered could be a huge factor in the contest. I would argue that Clinton could have made a greater attempt to allow her non-institutional supporters to play a greater role in her campaign. This is, of course, scary because you don’t know what’s going to happen when you relinquish control, but had she and her staff had the foresight to run a more bottom-up campaign, she may be faring better than she currently is.
I also take issue with Walter’s assertion that this type of campaign may not be able to win a general election. I suppose I could be wrong about this, but it seems that the abundant resources (i.e. record numbers of volunteers and record amounts of money) provided by a bottom-up campaign are exactly what a candidate needs in a general election.
Whether or not future candidates are able to leverage support in the same way that Obama has, it is undeniable that those candidates who are best able to do so will have a significant advantage over those who do not. We have yet to see how large this shift in politics is, but it is undeniable that the nature of politics has undergone a fundamental change.
Full Video:
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Thanks to the following sites for inspiration:
http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/22030/daily_digest_a_new_and_improved_youchoose_08
http://www.ipdi.org/blog/index.php/2008/02/20/the-end-of-an-era-obama-clinton-the-evolution-of-the-web-campaign/
http://www.washingtonindependent.com/view/trippi-talks
Check this out: http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Join_Barack_Obama_s_Campaign_Staff
Obama for America is looking for two short term employees to work on the e-mail team. Oh how I wish I could get the time off.
So… I’m going to go out on a limb and call Louisiana for Obama before the networks. He’s ahead fairly significantly in the exit polls, and with about a quarter of the precincts reporting, he’s up 13 points. I imagine this lead will narrow (probably 6-9 point spread), but he’ll maintain it.
Being married to a Lutheran means that I’m more aware of the Church calendar than my low church background would belie. Thanks to my wife’s influence, I’ve decided to give something up for Lent. I wanted to pick something that would have a definite impact on my life. I thought (ever so briefly) about foregoing my non-work computing, but I’m in the middle of a project that needs regular attention. I’ve given up sweets before (not for Lent) and TV would be rough during primary season.
What this left me with was something near and dear to my taste buds, something that stays with me for a long time (in the form of a few extra pounds). Yes, I’m talking about beer. Although I have cut back in recent weeks, I had been drinking quite a bit of beer. I wasn’t drinking to excess (only one or two at a time), but I wasn’t taking the best care of my gut and liver either. So, I have made the decision to give up beer for Lent.
Here’s the catch: I’m challenging you to do the same. This challenge isn’t for all of you, but for those who it is intended for, you know who you are. The way it works is that you abstain from beer all week, and then on Sunday you can drink it. The point is to give something up and replace that thing with God. It’s not a test of wills, and there’s no point if you simply stop drinking beer and get upset every time you can’t have one. The idea is to have your desire for what you gave up remind you of what God gave up for us on the cross.
If this won’t do anything for your walk with Jesus, don’t do it, but I would encourage all of you to at least consider giving something up for Lent. Again, it’s not legalism or pointless tradition, fasting is an essential spiritual discipline that can strengthen our relationship with God (perhaps more on that later, but for now see Matthew 6).
Lent begins tomorrow and goes through Palm Sunday (March 16). It’s 40 days long (not including Sundays). If you’ve decided to join me, let me know on Facebook or in the comments. Remember, this isn’t a test of wills; it is supposed to remind us of Christ’s sacrifice and teach us to rely on him.
On that note, I’m off to grab one last cold one…
