Patrick Ruffini :: John McCain: Tolstoy in My Inbox

Patrick illustrates a point that GOP campaigns consistently refuse to get, time and again: email is not direct mail, and familiarity is more effective than stirring prose. As Patrick points out, the average online reader takes in only 20% of the content of the average email, so if your content isn't easily scanned, chances are your efforts are for naught. Especially when your 1,000 word missive hits my inbox at 5:30pm on a Friday.

How to Add Furl, Spurl and Del.icio.us Bookmark Buttons to Your Site with Javascript

Considering how easy it is supposed to be to integrate social bookmarking into your site, it took way too long to find this -- a simple Javascript driven way to add a del.icio.us bookmark link to a regular old web page. Thanks to blifaloo.com.

The operative code here being:

document.write('<a href=http://del.icio.us/post?&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+' target="blank">linked text</a>');

Political Implications of the Cognitive Surplus

Luigi Montanez serves up some commentary at techPresident that takes Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus theory and applies it to the online political world.

Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody explains "Cognitive Surplus".

Shirky posits, among other things, that Gin got humanity through the Industrial Revolution, and that today "Desperate Housewives" fills the same role.

Cognitive Surplus = Free Time

Of course it's more involved than that, and the ramifications are very important from an online political perspective when you look at the explosion in citizen involvement in politics ala the Obama campaign.

Basically, Shirky is saying that society is growing into interactive social media, and that this change away from one-way push media is going to become the dominant paradigm. Montanez extrapolates that out into a view of short-sided Beltway insiders talking about Obama's huge political supporter list only in terms of its ability to produce cash.

The real value, as Montanez cuts to, is the social network's ability to take action:

Political activism is no longer the domain of a few die-hard (and kind of weird) party activists and political junkies. As the Obama campaign has proven, it’s something within the grasp of all Americans, because with the help of social technologies political activism can now be on our own terms.

Introducing: The Next Right

Jon Henke, Patrick Ruffini, and Soren Dayton team up to produce what will hopefully be the place where GOP online activists can coalesce around winning message, strategy, and technology. Sign up for The Next Right and stay tuned.

Google New Media Party

David All at TechRepublican wraps up the players at Google's New Media May Day party. (When David All names you as a "key player," you know you've made it.)

Thanks David!

Emotive, llc wins Kintera's Partner of the Year Award

For the second time in three years!

I was happy to help Matt Briney accept the Kintera Channel Partner of the Year Award as the last act of the 08 Kintera User Conference here in Arlington, VA on behalf of Emotive, llc.

To Wit: Twittering - washingtonpost.com

The Post examins the Twitter phenomenon in layman's terms. While I think Twitter itself is more useful and important than the article claims, it's a good overview. The real value of Twitter is not the service or the communication itself -- it's the people that you follow. If you follow people who have intelligent things to say, be they professional, personal, etc, you can glean value from their communication. Something like instant crowdsourced news/analysis/thoughtstream where you have total control over the crowd.

The conclusion that Twitter will prevent people from living in the moment has been leveled against every new method of communication and recording ever invented and as such is banal.