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Jose Antonio Vargas from the Post has a good article up about the John Edwards campaign’s presence on a mind numbing 24 social networking sites. The experts quoted in the article are all complimentary of Edwards’ efforts in the social media space. I think the story is missing one thing: a strong statement of dissent.

So let me repeat that I think 24 is way too many sites for a campaign to maintain a presence on. I don’t think it is good strategy.

The whole thing takes me back to the peanut butter mainifesto written by Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse in response to his own company’s meandering stategy.

I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

I hate peanut butter. We all should.

Yup.

See also:

• JohnEdwards.com Is a Mess by Patrick Ruffini
• John Edwards NOT Social Networking for ‘User Generated Politics’ campaign 2008 by Dona Bogatin from ZDNet

I’m pretty sure John Edwards was the first politican to start a Twitter account.  But as far as I know the UK’s Alan Johnson is the first to actually integrate a Twitter account into a campaign website.  A nice job by Johnson’s communications director Stuart Bruce.

Kevin Anderson of the Guardian has a good post up about the McCain MySpace “hack” specifically and the use of social networks by campaigns more generally.  He sums up what I’ve been trying to get at this week with my Digg and McCain posts. 

Anderson writes about candidate presences on social networks:

It’s pretty easy to see through these cheap ploys, and they feel disingenuous. Setting up a static page on a social networking site actually makes it look even more static, not at all interactive. Just by being in MySpace, or having a Twitter feed or putting the odd video up on YouTube doesn’t make a media organisation more interactive if you don’t actually interact.

Publishing on an interactive platform is still just publishing. What happens when people ask your ‘content’ questions, and there isn’t a human being there to answer? Well, at the very least, nothing happens. People get bored and go away. But, sometimes bad things happen, especially when you’re not particularly clueful with your approach and don’t understand the space. If you want community and participation, be ready to participate.

Exactly.  If you are going to do it, do it right.  If you aren’t truly committed to it, stay away.

After my post about the Washington Post Express' website, I decided to do some more research and see what other free newspapers are doing online. I compiled a list of free papers in the US and checked out their websites, using some of the same criteria as I did in our newspaper study.  The object of this was to see if free papers are outperforming their paid-for companions on the Web. 

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(1) Redefining The IMG Tag from TechCrunch

“This morning, AdBrite launches BritePic to help people add a lot of new functionality around embedded images. Just by changing the embed code, web publishers can add a caption, watermark, zoom, share, resize and other features. And an advertisement, if they choose to.”  Very cool.

(2) Online news design - awful or brilliant? from Design 2.0

Article shows screenshots of the website of large newspapers around the world.  Interesting to compare. 

(3) Washington Post redesign to focus on video from MarketWatch

The Post redesigns their homepage.  Pretty subtle changes in my opinion - I had study a bit to notice the changes.  My biggest problem with the Post site has always been that I don’t ever feel like I can find anything.  This doesn’t fix that.

I got an email from my friend Chuck this morning pointing me to the recent overhaul of the print edition of my hometown paper, the San Antonio Express News. 

The Express-News writes about the redesign:

It's hardly breaking news: We're all awash in a flood of information, coming from an ever-growing number of sources.  We know our readers are more informed, more wired - and yes, much more busy taking it all in. 

So it's time that the Express-News front page reflect that reality.  Change comes today with a new format designed around two key goals.  First, we are providing readers with a larger menu of items, allowing the front page to be a better window into the rest of the paper.  Second, we're doing more to emphasize and develop our best story of the day, focusing as much as possible on local news you won't find anywhere else. 

Sounds good.  A couple of points here: (more…)

Techcrunch has the story of the hacking of John McCain's MySpace page by a designer unhappy with the way McCain's campaign used a MySpace template he designed.  Here's the scoop from Techcrunch:

Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by NewsVine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.

Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the site, he replaced one that shows contact information with a statement:

"Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between two passionate females."

As of this writing the prank message is still up.

This is another example of the point I made in my last post: if campaigns are going to play in these social communities they need to understand the rules and respect the culture.

Update: Here is a link to a screenshot of the defaced McCain MySpace page.  It has been fixed.

Update 2: David All points out a post by the designer who performed the mischief. 

My post about the use of Digg by Ron Paul activists attracted a strong response from Ron Paul supporters.  In comments on Digg and to my post, many folks acknowledged that they signed up for Digg specifically to submit and digg stories about Ron Paul. 

This was already pretty obvious.  If you click through on the profile of many users you'll see that all activity centers around Ron Paul.  Other users inject Paul-related content into unrelated discussion threads.  These folks are pretty clearly using Digg specifically to promote Ron Paul.

I don't think there is anything innately wrong with that.  But I don't think it is going to be effective in the long run and may in fact be counterproductive. (more…)

Update: This article was submitted to Digg by someone I don’t know and was starting to gain a bit of traction (28 votes and 15 comments as of this writing). However, the story has been prematurely removed from the upcoming queue for the US Elections 2008 section. Digg has confirmed that the story was removed because it was buried. Why was it buried? I can think of two possible reasons: (1) the story was lame or (2) because Paul supporters didn’t like the content of the piece and buried it. Decide for yourself what happened.

Digg launched a section around a month ago on the 2008 US elections.  I've been a semi-active participant in the section, digging stories in the upcoming area and occasionally submitting stuff there. 

The strangest thing about the section is the prevalence of information about obscure Republican/Libertarian Presidential candidate Ron Paul. 

A quick review of the Upcoming section shows that around 20% of articles are about Ron Paul.  And just about every one of these Paul-oriented stories attracts at least ten diggs.  This is extremely unusual, as the vast majority of stories submitted to Digg only attract between one and five diggs. (more…)

(1) Twitter: All Trivia, All The Time

Is Twitter a phenomenon or the Spring 2007 version of parachute pants?  BusinessWeek takes a look at the pros and cons of the service.

(2) Blogs turn 10–who’s the father?

CNET tries to figure out who the first blogger was.

(3) How Arianna did it

Jeff Jarvis breaks down the role of networked journalism in cracking the Vote Different mystery. 

(4) Fears of a YouTube Swiftboat

Wired: “Campaign finance lawyers and others in the realm of politics worry that the explosive viral dynamic illustrated by the Vote Different video could lend enormous power to disinformation campaigns — the swiftboating of YouTube. Anonymous advertisements show a new ability to exert an outsize influence in shaping voters’ sense of reality and the candidates’ messages, they say.”

Click on image above to launch Flash Review.
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Well, this is not what I expected to see, or watch, or have my browser crash from.  

Restarting browser…

The exploratory site was pretty presentable. Not much to it, but for what it was, I thought the designers did a perfectly acceptable job with it. I’m pretty sure these are not the same designers. This review could get wordy, I fear, so I’ll be mindful of the pile-on mentality of design critiques on blogs and keep it concise.

When I pull up the page my eyes go to the less than inspired Rudy logo and then to the unflattering screen capture of our candidate in mid explanation. Under his image I then read “A Time For Leadership”. That flow was all intentional and it worked just fine. Now what? Behind that inspirational tagline are my options to send an email, turn up the volume and scroll through something, I think. I honestly don’t know, and I do this for a living (I tried to click through and got an error). Awkwardly placed to the left is the button to play the video. While I appreciate that the video doesn’t start automatically, this navigation is just unnecessary in its overall size here. I would have thought that all of this could have been neatly placed under the screen.

Author’s note: At first glance I was sure that this video section layout was an html error, but I am leaning toward the designers again.

Clicking on any of the navigation for the video section, I soon learn, is a browser killer and after I make that mistake a few times, I get control of my OCD and bypass it altogether, instead moving right to the (wait for it) Action Items. Incorporating the highly sophisticated 1,2,3 numerological approach, I am invited to (1) Join, (2) Contribute and finally (3) Get Involved. The Get Involved section really commands my attention with the red on blue seizure-inducing palette. Can you feel the excitement?  The most pleasing design element is the link to the RudyStore (beveled edges though? Really?). Sadly, when I click on the link, my browser refuses me and eventually freezes.

Restarting browser …

Beneath all of this excitement are nestled Special Features and something referred to as Live Feed.

It appears that Special Features for now would be more correctly named Feature. And the feature today is a Photo Album. The designers just had real estate to fill here and they all know it. It happens. They’ll do something creative going forward I trust. The drop shadow on the photos was an unnecessarily homey touch. The Live Feed, it turns out, is really blog entries and press releases. I don’t really understand why there wouldn’t be a section called Blog, and one called Press Releases here, but maybe I’m still goofy from the seizure a few paragraphs back.

The oddest thing about this homepage is the layout. For some reason the page is falling out of the right hand side. All content is within the internal boundary of the site except the action items and the store, which appear to be forced outside by bad coding, but (as noted above) is actually intended. This is such an odd presentation that I have to think it was pushed out the door just a bit before it was ready. Low marks for the Rudy2008 design at this point.

• Click here to launch Flash review.
• To read previous design reviews, go here. 

Gary sent me a link this morning that made me laugh (cry?) out loud.  Apparently, a US government agency has begun using Wikipedia as a source of basic intelligence information.  No kidding.

Via Secrecy News:

The collaboratively written online encyclopedia Wikipedia, created in 2001, has steadily grown in popularity, credibility and influence to the point that it is now used and referenced in U.S. Government intelligence products.

A March 19 profile of Indian Congress Party Leader Rahul Gandhi prepared by the Open Source Center (OSC) of the Office of Director of National Intelligence is explicitly derived from "various internet sources including wikipedia.org." A March 21 OSC profile of Rajnath Singh, president of India's Bharatiya Janata Party, is likewise "sourced from wikipedia.org."

An OSC report last year on the leader of the terrorist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Velupillai Prabhakaran, noted that he and his wife "have two children, a girl and a boy. According to wikipedia.com, the boy is named Charles Anthony and the girl, Duwaraha."

Let's take a step back here for a second.  Secrecy News claims that this Wikipedia-supported report was written by the OSC for the Director of National Intelligence.  According to its website, this is what the DNI does:

The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) serves as the head of the Intelligence Community (IC). The DNI also acts as the principal advisor to the President; the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council for intelligence matters related to the national security; and oversees and directs the implementation of the National Intelligence Program.

The OSC provides support to policymakers with media analysis and reporting.

If this rumor is true, I find it incredibly shocking (disappointing?) that key US intelligence agencies would use Wikipedia for such basic information about foreign officials.  Secrecy News notes that it's a "healthy development" for the government to be paying attention to "unorthodox" sources like Wikipedia.  I see the author's point here: there is definitely value in the fact the government is paying attention to the information accessible by everyday Americans.  However, does this information have a place in formal intelligence?  I don't think it does. 

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The American Society of Magazine Editors has announced the finalists for their annual National Magazine Awards. The finalists for outstanding online program are belief.net, businessweek.com, ESPN.com, People.com and Slate.com.  

Fill out the poll below to let us know which one you think is the best.  If you think the best magazine website is not listed, let us know in the comments.

[Poll=7]

Arianna Huffington has a blog post up exposing the maker of the now famous “Vote Different“ Hillary Clinton attack ad as Philip de Vellis, an employee at the Democrat web consultancy Blue State Digital.  Background on the situation is available here.

I’d like to personally thank Huffington for breaking this story.  I was suffering from a serious case of parkridge47 overload. 

Here are some others on the story:

• I Made the “Vote Different” Ad - Philip de Vellis
• My Thoughts, Before This Gets Out of Hand - The Beta Stage
• What de Vellis? Obama Consulting Firm Employee Made The Act - Hotline On Call
• ParkRidge47 Mystery Solved by HuffPost - Tech President
• Creator of Anti-Hillary “1984″ Video Revealed - The WP Fix
• Anonymity Sucks - Tech President
• Surprise! Obama’s web team is ParkRidge47 - David All

Here’s the video for those who haven’t seen it.

John Edwards just started Twittering  a few weeks ago.  In that short time, he has already accumulated 1,261 followers and 1,341 friends.  Not bad.  Based on the Twitterholic leaderboard, John Edwards is probably one of the top five most popular people on all of Twitter in terms of friends/followers (although he is not yet on that list).

Undoubtedly part of his popularity is due to the curiosity of having a Presidential candidate on Twitter.  But I actually think the structure of Twitter works well for campaigns.

As Brad Levinson notes, Twitter feels a bit narcissistic self indulgent.  Do people really need to get these constant updates about my whereabouts every few minutes?  Nope.  Most normal people will play with it for a few weeks, realize no one cares about their cat and that they are writing for an audience of one, get bored and move on to other things. 

But Twitter is perfect for folks with a bit of name recognition who can build a list of followers and have a desire to live in the public eye (it is actually amazing to me that people have the time/energy to update 20+ times a day).  That's why the hype is largely being driven by prominent bloggers and Internet famous types who can pull an audience. 

The dirty little secret here is that Twitter is actually a bit of a top down system.  Regular blogging allows for trackbacks and commenting which flatten things a bit.  With Twitter these sort of connections are possible but are opt in.  While many (like Scoble) are using Twitter to make connections and have conversations, it can just as easily be used as a sort of newfangled version of direct mail.