the Web Chef's e-Bytes

Campaigns in the Web 2.0 Era

2007 brought forth some seminal moments in politics with Senator Allen's Macaca Moment captured online and distributed widely among the more memorable moments.  Not to be outdone, MySpace is jumping on the political bandwagon with the announcement of their online primaries to be held on January 1 and 2nd of 2008.  The idea was reviewed in a recent posting on TechCrunch, where they revealed that Barack Obama was leading the pack with 89,465 MySpace "friends".  With the number of registered MySpace accounts creating a virtual community that would be the 11th largest country in the world, it will be interesting to see how this online primary shapes the real ones a few weeks later. 

MySpace has also launched the ImpactChannel, an online video channel focusing on the 2008 Presidential primaries according to the New York Times (registration required).  As of this posting, 11 Presidential Candidates were "working the streets" of MySpace. Missing from the list of angels, flip floppers, scoundrels and all around communicators was Wisconsin's very own former governor and recently declared presidential candidate Thompson.  Hmm is he campaigning for President or some other position>

In other political video news, we're seeing the growth of PoliticsTV.com, an online video site dedicated to covering the political scene.  As of this posting, they had an Alexa ranking of 478,248, an increase of 185,252 over the past 3 months.  Here's a clip of an anti-Senator Susan Collins ad that was posted on PoliticsTV and YouTube.

Not to be left behind, YouTube launched their political channel called YouChoose.  Also missing from the list of candidates was Tommy Thompson...

States Earn C Plus on Web Sites

The National Policy Research Council completed a review of all 50 state web sites along with many county, municipal and township sites to determine how well they were performing according to GovernmentVAR.  The evaluation "criteria included ease of navigation, the availability of interactive feedback froms, the presence of foreign language tools and enhancements for disabled users, and the amount and relevance of useful information".  Other factors referenced on the web site are epayment, epermitting, usability information quality and responsiveness. 

One problem identified was that government entities spoke in the jargon of their bureaucracies rather than thinking of how consumers would look for information.  An example cited was consumers looking to pay their water bill, might not know what department handles this.  The suggestion was made to facilitate this process by having a simple "want to pay your water bill?" link. 

Among the sites referenced were #1 Michigan, followed by Indiana and highly ranked Idaho.   I was curious to see what made these sites top rated, so took a look at the State of Michigan site to see what stood out.  Among the features I found that looked good were the following: they have short cuts to directories, forms, FAQs and services; include RSS feeds; have localized information like the weather and winning lottery numbers; provide usability benefits like increasing text size and formatting for print; allow for word of mouth marketing with mail to a friend capability on the page; have links to surveys; have a prominent and well-placed search engine and have visitor interaction opportunities for people to submit their best Michigan photo for inclusion on the site. The Idaho site adds a mobile version of the site to facilitate mobile web access.

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