A quick tutorial for the uninitiated. Twitter is a micro-blogging service that asks you the question, “What are you doing now?” (Or “What were you doing?” if you believe @davidrussell.) It’s widely used by people interested in technology and serves as a combination IM/forum for the discussion of the latest trends and tips in technology… and whatever your dog happens to be doing at the moment. Seriously, you don’t have to be all that into technology to get a lot out of Twitter.

If you’re like me, Twitter is how you keep up with what’s going on. I follow some of the big names in the tech and political worlds (not to mention the politech world), plus three of my pastors, some co-workers and friends, and a couple of Congressmen (don’t know of any Congresswomen on Twitter). It’s also where I make semi-poignant observations about things going on around the web. So, for instance, if a widely used web service goes down, I mention it on Twitter. That leads to the question, “What do I do when Twitter goes down?” as it often does. I suppose I could always write a blog post about it, but that seems like a pretty heavy tool to make such a minor observation. Funny how quickly a web service can become integrated in every aspect of my life. Yes, even this blog post will end up on Twitter via Twitterfeed.

If you’re not following me on Twitter, give me a shout at http://twitter.com/willfjohnston, and if you’re not on Twitter, by all means sign up. But you’ll have to wait a while to do either of those; Twitter is down right now.

Update: Must have been a short one, Twitter is back up now (9:38 P.M. EST)

Or at least those willing do some research. Brian Stelter of the New York Times is something of a phenom when it comes to news about the TV industry, having started the influential blog tvnewser.com and subsequently being hired by the New York Times straight out of college, but his article on the “It’s 3 AM and I’m ready to be President” campaign ads of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (embedded below – hat tip to TechPresident) shows that being an expert on one medium doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re qualified to discuss other types of media.

Mr. Stelter states that “Three days after it made its television debut, the Clinton commercial had registered more than 600,000 views on YouTube, and Mr. Obama’s recorded over 200,000, making the dueling advertisements the first breakout hits of the YouTube campaign. (Some campaign videos are lucky to receive 10,000 views.)”

While it may be true that some campaign videos don’t hit 10,000 views, I’m not sure what metric that Mr. Stelter is using to determine what makes a YouTube video a “breakout hit.” By far, the biggest video of the campaign season is “Yes We Can” by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, having received over 12 million views spread across the numerous copies posted to YouTube, but we can look back much farther for breakout hits. Perhaps the first big hit of the 2008 Presidential election was 1984/Vote Different by Phil de Vellis with over 5 million views (again over multiple uploads), and who could forget Obama Girl. None of these are candidate produced videos, but we need only go to Obama’s response to the State of the Union (1.3 million), Obama’s victory speech in Iowa (1 million), and many others to find videos that have been viewed many more times than either of these. In fact, Obama’s SOTU response has been watched more times than both of those ads put together.

I’ll admit that I may be overly defensive of new forms of media, be it blogs, online video, or social networks, but it irks me when someone in the mainstream press makes a blatantly untrue statement that trivializes the revolution that is taking place in the field of communications.

Since this is my blog, I’m also going to take the opportunity to editorialize on the videos just a bit and note that YouTube users have rated Clinton’s “3 AM” video with one star out of a possible five (Obama’s version has four) and that tens of thousands of her views have come from an extremely heavily trafficked DailyKos post slamming the ad.

Hillary’s 3 AM Ad

Obama’s 3 AM Ad

Yes We Can

1984

Obama’s SOTU Response

Obama’s Iowa Speech

Obama’s New Hampshire Speech (Just because I love it and because it’s been viewed more times than Hillary’s 3 AM ad.)

I’ll try to come back and clean this up later, add in a few links, but for now, here are the notes. WiFi is spotty here, so I can’t really liveblog anything.

Presenter: Tom Steinberg

I’ve got a more cohesive review here.

Important Note: All of this code is open source

MySociety.org – arguably runs the largest network of non-partisan democracy/e-government sites in the U.K.

Started by building faxyourmp.com

• Put in zip code to find MP
• 2000-2003 – won awards, incredibly simple

Wanted to build more things like Fax your MP

writetothem.com – tells you who all of your polis are (at all levels) and lets you write to them

• Survey for two questions
  • Did you get a reply?
  • Have you ever written to a politician before?
    • Important to know if they’re engaging new people
• Can figure out differences in wealthy and poor areas b/c you get zip codes
  • Roughly the same amount of communication to politicians
• What else can we use this information for?
• Very private, everything deleted from servers within a few weeks.

theyworkforyou.com – notifies people via e-mail whenever a politician votes on/acts on/speaks on an issue

• Available via an api
• Loads of information put together in a way that is easier to understand
• Instead of saying they voted for/against specific issues, aggregate into sentences, they voted for/against this most of the time

foi.mysociety.org – Freedom of information website (will be whatdotheyknow.org/com)

• People make request to the government agencies
• Very public, all of the government’s answers are posted

pledgebank.com – Peer Pressure – how to get people to do things

• Conditional pledges – I will do things if x other people will as well.

fixmystreet.com

• You stick a pin in the map with a problem in your area. The site then identifies the proper government authorities to fix the problem.
• Two weeks later it sends e-mail asking if it got fixed. If not, it sends you to writetothem.com so that you can directly contact your politicians about the problem

hearfromyourmp.com – Mailing lists of people who want to hear from their MP

Important to have an organization in place to escalate requests. In other words, fixmystreet.com works very well because it can send people to writetothem.com

petitions.pm.gov.uk

• At end of 2006, the PM’s office asked them to build a petition website
• Gov’t doesn’t own e-mail addresses so they can’t spam
• If they reject a petition, there is a public paper trail
• Two days in had the same number of users sign up as myspace
• Anyone can go to the site and make a petition
  • Basically can’t be vulgar or defamatory
• 30,000 petitions submitted
  • 15,000 rejected, most rejections due to duplication

Sctemviser (this spelling is way off) – who should I vote for website

• A Dutch website.
• They gave out 4.8 million answers – there are only 16 million people in the Netherlands

Demographic issues: Senator from Florida and Senator from North Dakota have very different volumes of mail.

• Solution: compare only like states

MySociety started when someone who liked faxyourmp.com donated 10,000 pounds for them to come up with new ideas

• Crowdsourced ideas through an open blogging platform

Someone donated 400,000 dollars

I’m headed eDemocracyCamp today, a conference about the use of technology and the internet in government. I just realized about 2 minutes ago that everyone who attends is supposed to do a presentation, so I’m hoping they’re not too strict about that. I may try to come up with something on the bus, but I’m guessing it wouldn’t be the greatest presentation ever. Anyway, I’m hoping there’s wifi so that I can provide updates throughout the day. Otherwise, expect a writeup when I get home tonight.

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?