Yes, this blog is still about political technology and how you can use technology to improve your chances of winning. So, why would the introduction of a $99 smartphone help you win?

Consider the fact that most "political operatives" have Blackberries (known as "Crackberries") and their own version of the treo (in 2004, I remember it was the hot thing to be seen chatting on your treo 600 and getting your email). Most of the senior staff have the Blackberry connection, but how about the rest of the staff? At the salaries they are being paid (or not), they were never going to be included in the information flow that existed at a higher level.

The Centro is one of the first entrants in the sub-smartphone market - or better said, the phone that other people (like your recent college grad or local volunteer coordinator) could purchase and get up to speed to be fully connected. The phone is easy to handle, clear and bright screen, and has all of the "kit" that the more expensive 755p treo has, with half the memory, but all of the buzz. It has a hardened shell and two attractive colors (I assume the after-market for phone kit will be available from treocentral).

Is it worth the purchase? That will be entirely up to you. I think it is a rreasonable entrant in the market, though not as sexy as the iPhone or business clean as the treo 755p. But, in terms of general staff use, well worth the $99 a pop.

Full disclosure: I am going to be testing out the Centro in the coming week on my network, after keeping my trusty 650 for the past three years. I will give you more, real-time experience feedback then.

Tags: Palm Centro

Why do I publish this article? Because many people who call ask me "Should I use Exchange to manage my team's calendars?" The challenge is that, aside from some new application services (like 30boxes), the major providers have yet to really offer something as powerful and as easy to use as google Calendar. And, in a later post, I will discuss the "new" google Political offering for campaigns that was unveiled at IPDI earlier this month.

Rock Your Google Calendar in 18 Ways

by Anne Zelenka

Google Calendar doesn’t get much love or attention these days. Some users are wondering if Google’s forgotten about it. Still, it’s a pretty cool web app, especially if you learn the ins and outs and use it collaboratively with colleagues, friends, or family.

If you’ve been using it since it was introduced last year, you may know how to do many of these things. Maybe you even have your own tips and tricks for making it really rock. If so, share them in the comments.

1. Add holidays, moon phases, sporting events, and other public calendars. Click the “+” button next to “Other Calendars” in the Calendars list on the left-hand side of the page. Select the Browse Calendars tab. You can add the holiday calendar of your choice and also add phases of the moon or a Google Doodles graphical calendar. Are you a devoted sports fan? Search on the name of the team and you’ll be able to add all their scheduled games to your calendar. Couch potatoes can add TV show schedules.

2. Customize your view. You’re not limited to just the view options showing in the tabs along the top of the calendar. You can change the tab “Next 4 Days” to something that works better for you like “Next 2 Weeks” or “Next 3 Weeks” on the Settings page under the General tab. That’s where you can also specify date and time format, what day your week starts, whether to show weekends or not, and show weather for your location. Use keyboard shortcut “x” to move to your custom view. I’m partial to “Next 3 Weeks” because that’s about as far in advance as I’m thinking.

If the standard options for the Custom view still don’t get you the time interval you want, you can always select a custom interval on the mini-calendar on the left-hand side of the page by dragging with your mouse.

3. See where you are right now on your calendar. Here’s a little greasemonkey script that adds a red line for the current time to today’s box. That shows you immediately when you’re coming up on a meeting or other event.

4. Turbocharge your quick add. You probably know you can enter events as free text. Hit the keyboard shortcut “q” or click the “Quick Add” link in the upper right-hand side of the page. Then enter your event: time and title are the bare minimum; GCal will schedule it for today or tomorrow if no date is given. You can invite people by adding on their email addresses, create a recurring event by specifying repeat information, and specify by duration instead of start end time, if that’s more convenient. The Google help page for quick add claims it supports time zones — which would be great for those of us constantly flummoxed by time zone confusion — but that doesn’t seem to work right now.

5. Add events without even being on the GCal page. Elias Torres has developed a GCal Quick Add extension for Firefox. It doesn’t support adding daylong events in Firefox 2 (you get an “invalid date” error), but you can add events with a date and time by hitting <ctrl> + ; and entering the information into the text box.

6. Receive event reminders and other notifications. GCal provides reminders by email, SMS, or pop-ups in the calendar itself. Specify your default reminder type under “Setting” > “Notifications.” To get text message notifications, you’ll need to verify your mobile phone number by specifying it on the Notifications page and then entering the verification code that’s sent to you by GCal. You decide what sort of notifications you receive about events and invitations. Note that event reminders only include those for your primary calendar.

7. Have a daily agenda emailed or text-messaged to you. On “Settings” > “Notifications” you can request that a list of events for the day be emailed to you. Another easy way to access your daily agenda is via SMS. Once you’re set up to access GCal from your mobile phone, just text “day” to short code 48368 (GVENT).

8. Access your calendar while you’re on the road. Text “next” to short code 48368 get your next event or “nday” to get events for the following day. Add events by texting event details, just as in the Quick Add on the web page.

9. Or access your calendar from your IM client. IMified makes it easy. Just add IMified to your buddy list and send a message like “help” to it. It will create an account for you. Add GCal to your IMified accounts by going to the Add/Edit Services link it gives you. Specify your time zone on the Account Settings page. Then when you send a message “M” to IMified you’ll get a menu that includes your calendar. It’s fairly minimal — one menu option for viewing upcoming events and one for adding an event. But when you’re on fire in your IM aggregator, it’s an easy way to check or add to your calendar quickly without going to another app.

10. Learn the keyboard shortcuts. Beyond “q” for quick add and “x” for your custom view, there are a few more keyboard shortcuts you’ll find useful. The keys “n” and “p” navigate forward and backward in whatever view you’re in. Use the escape key to exit from event creation or settings and go back to your default calendar view. See all the keyboard shortcuts here. If you’re a GMail user, you might want to install the GCalQuickTab Firefox add-on. It gives you a “g” and “l” keyboard shortcut to switch back and forth between GMail and GCal. Good idea, but the implementation is unfortunately flawed. Type an “l” into an email message and you’ll be switched to the calendar.

11. Add To Do lists to your calendar. Remember the Milk offers GCal integration — create a Remember the Milk account then tie it into your GCal. You’ll get a checkmark button for each date on your calendar that lets you review tasks that are due and overdue, add new tasks, and mark tasks as complete.

12. Get a bigger view of your calendar. If you’re using your calendar on a small screen, you might want to be able to maximize the calendar part and eliminate the list of calendars, the mini calendar, the search box, and other extraneous stuff. Try the Firefox Full Cal extension. It gives you a keyboard short cut (by default <alt> + <shift> + C) to go to Google Calendar and toggle between full view and regular view.

13. Share your free/busy information on your blog. If your email is overrun with back-and-forths about scheduling telecons or face-to-face meetings, you might want to let everyone know up front when you’re available. You don’t have to share all your event details; just go to “Settings” > “Calendars”, click on “Share this calendar” for the calendar with the information you want to share, choose “Share only my free / busy information (hide details),” and save.

Then, go back to the calendar page (by clicking on the down arrow next to the calendar name in the calendar list, and choosing “calendar settings”), click on the “HTML” button in the “Calendar Address:” area and click on “Configuration tool” in the dialog box that pops up. You’ll be able to generate HTML for embedding the calendar within a web page.

If you blog on Typepad it’s even easier: just use their GCal widget. If you’re using WordPress, you could try this Google Calendar Widget.

14. Synchronize with your desktop calendar(s). Calgoo, in public beta right now, is a Java-based application for Windows, OS X, and Linux. It handles Google Calendar, iCal on the Mac, and Outlook on the PC, uniting the reigning trifecta of calendaring apps. Read more about it in our review.

15. Add events from GMail. GMail includes some natural language processing that looks for event-related information and if it finds some, it will offer an “Add to calendar” link to the right of the message. Click on the link and you can edit the event information then save. Alternatively, if there’s event information but GMail didn’t catch it, use “Create Event” in the “More actions…” dropdown to launch an event editor popup form, where you can type in event information right as you’re reading it in the email.

16. Display an agenda in GMail. Want to see what your upcoming appointments are when you’re right in GMail? Install the Greasemonkey script Add Calendar Feed to GMail. Now create a Google Bookmark for your Google Calendar feed using your private XML link from the Calendar Settings page and be sure to give it the label GMgcal. Then run the GMail Agenda setup from Firefox (”Tools” > “Greasemonkey” > “User Script Commands…” > “GMail Agenda Setup”). You’ll get a list of upcoming calendar events displayed between your contacts list and labels list on the left-hand side of GMail. Confused? Here are more detailed instructions for setting it up. It’s pretty useful to have a listing of upcoming events in your email.

17. Add a popup agenda with notifier to your Firefox status bar. The Google Calendar Notifier add-on gives you a popup agenda as well as notifications of upcoming events. You can tie the notifications into Growl, if you use that on the Mac, get popup notifications, and be re-notified of pending events.

18. View the weather forecast for your location. Under “Settings” > “General,” enter your location information and choose C or F under “Show weather based on my location.” Unfortunately, it’s only available for U.S. locations right now.

"Twitter?", I hear you cry. Yes, twitter - the new microblogging service that the digerati and others are now using - which combines SMS and blogging into a simple 140+ character message that you can post anywhere and send to all who have subscribed to your twitter feed. You can use your mobile phone, your IM client or your web browser to microblog.

Recently, we have taken to using twitter for Gordon Winston-Smythe to put up his witticisms on the site no matter where he is and when the mood strikes him. The challenge we faced was keeping within the style/design elements - which twitter graciously offers a JavaScript version of their "embed" code - to allow you to modify the style. But, recently, with the increased growth of twitter, we have been finding that the page it is located on gets held up in terms of loading, which could potentially impact our revenue and/or customer satisfaction.

The Solution: iframes
iframes - that little feature kind of like AJAX, but not. Essentially we used a small bit of iframe magic and our own file for the twitter script to take care of the loading problem. Now, instead of waiting for the script to finish, we let the page load around the iframe, and the script finishes and fills in when the twitter server can.

It's that simple. Take a look at Goodnight Burbank to see what we mean. Twitter script found here.

I will divide these sites based on the features and capabilities (including ad insertion and Terms of Service), but will start with a simple listing of the ones I am aware of. Last Update: December 25, 2006

YouTube-like Sites
These sites are similar in nature to YouTube, providing hosting, directory services and syndication (read: embed tools) for distribution on blogs or websites.

• AddictingClips
• blip.tv
• Break
• Buzznet
• Clipshack
• Eefoof
• eSnips
• Fliqz
• Flixya
• Google Video
• Grouper
• Guba
• iFilm
• LiveVideo
• Lulu TV
• Motionbox
• revver
• Sharkle
• Stage6
• Veoh
• VideoJug
• Video Webtown
• Vidiac
• Yahoo! Video
• YouTUBE

• AOL Video
• Video Webtown
• Brightcove
• Bolt
• Castpost
• Daily Motion
• DropShots
• eVideoShare
• Eyespot
• Flukiest
• GoFish
• ImageEvent
• iMeem
• JumpCut
• Metacafe
• MotionTV
• Multiply
• MyHeavy
• MySpace
• Openvlog
• Ourmedia
• Panjea
• Phanfare
• Photobucket
• Pixparty
• Putfile
• Soapbox
• StashSpace
• Stickam
• Streamloader
• Treemo
• VideoAddon
• VideoEgg
• Vidilife
• Vimeo
• vMix
• Vobbo
• Vox
• vSocial
• You Are TV

• AOL Television
• ChannelChoser
• Channel King
• Choose and Watch
• Current
• Live Online
• Lord of TV
• Steamnick
• WWITV
• YourKindaTV
• TinyPic
• Fark Video
• Gotuit
• Flixya
• Guba
• ManiaTV

• Network2
• Podcast.com
• Podcast Directory
• Genwi
• MeFeedia
• PodcastVideos
• Vodstock
• Podcast Pickle
• Podcast Salad
• Podcast Style
• Podfeed.net
• PureVideo
• Singing Fish
• StumbleVideo
• Vidcast Launchpad
• Vlog Directory
• Yikers
• blinkx
• Blubrry
• Britcaster
• CastTV
• Click Caster
• Dabble
• Flixpo

• 4shared
• Democracy
• Filecow
• Mediamax
• Mediashare
• OneTrueMedia
• Pooxi
• Snapfish
• Spokeo
• Zippyvideos

Special shout out to Phil Harvey of LightReading, Mediathink and Deirdré Straughan of Beginning with I.

If you see any mistakes or would like to be added to this list, please comment on this post.

Tags: Video Sites, Video Aggregation Sites, Video Aggregators, List of Video Sites, List of Video Aggregators, List of Video Aggregation Sites, Video Hosting Sites, Video Hosting

NOTE: I have my own opinions on the material found within the document, and my goal is to suggest some of the pearls found within, as well as the amusing factors. All authors did an amazing job (my understanding was this was a hurclean effort in a very short time), but I have to poke a little fun at some...

The Good

• Introduction by Julie Germany, IPDI
  Very nicely sets the stage for the intended discussion found within. Builds upon the basic principles and explains them in clear language.
• Social Media by Colin Delany, e.politics
  Simple introduction to social networks and some case studies.
• Don't Let Go Yet! by Julie Germany, IPDI
  Again, a nice discourse on user generated media and the pitfalls and opportunities found with this tactic.
• How Howard Dean Turned Online Social Networks into an Offline Phenomenon by Michael Silberman, EchoDitto
  My favorite article on understanding it is the reaching across the virtual divide to "meat space" (as SecondLifer's call it) to reinforce the experiences and actions in the virtual world.
• Call In Now! by Chuck DeFeo, TownHall.com
  How TownHall.com uses cross media promotion (read: radio and web) with an effective incentive program to keep their activists involved.
• Building a Blog Network by Michael Kremppasky, RedState
  RedState founder discusses some of the history and some lessons gleaned from building the network - specifically: lead by example, give community some responsibility, don’t underestimate your constituents and let your message be one of many.
• Go With the Flow by Valdis Krebs, OrgNet
  Excellent discussion about social networks by one of the leading lights in social network mapping ending with a new mantra for politics: "be a good neighbor".
• Identity Information in Online Social Networking Sites by Mara Johanna Veraar, DIA
  Uses lessons gleaned from online dating sites to describe the importance of building an online identity that can resonate with online activists on other networks. Excellent collection of references in this article (from Danah Boyd).
• Take it Offline by Brad Fay, The Keller Fay Group
  A interesting paper from a marketers point of view on "social network marketing" and how effective it can be with a few lessons of "listen", "dialog" and "learn" about what the community does or is doing.
• Building a Network of Political Allies by Gideon Rosenblatt, ONE/Northwest
  Intriguing discussion of "Movement as a Network" focusing on People, Solution and Resource Organizations and how these three fit into the model, with a focus on environmental defense.
• Videogames are Political Tools by Nicco Mele and David Cohen
  A light discourse on how videogames can inform and impact people's perceptions on issues along with a list of previously attempted campaign-type games
• Political Organizing Through Social Networking Sites by Zack Rosen, Civicspace Foundation
  A nice discussion on engagement with a story about Fred Gooltz and his low-cost use of MySpace to build a race.

Why am I so excited? Simply because this is another app from google that just works. Not only do I get to avoid spending another $800 on a tomtom 910 (which I loved, nonetheless), but all of the things you expect in the google Maps are easily available - with traffic and identification of locations in clear, simple view.

In January of 2006, Jed Alpert and his consultants were doing work on using mobile technology for the entertainment industry. Jed had been one of the founders of sonicnet (which had been acquired by MTV) and had built up a large base of contacts in the music industry. In a project he was doing for Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears, he and his staff developed a simple platform for engaging enthusiastic fans via the budding SMS text interface. Quite serendipitously, he happened to be taking with a friend in the American Way about his efforts, and was asked if he could do the same for the American Way. After a few tweaks and some process modifications, Jed found out that his response rates were 10 to 20 times what he was getting on the entertainment space. Thus was borne the Rights Group and their platform, PoliTxt.

Daniel Lopez, founder of vivaDemocracy, came up with the idea of leveraging workflow applications to a distrubted volunteer management problem. Instead of relying on the management to choose who does what jobs, why not let the supporters choose what jobs they could do and report back on what they accomplished - similar to the Action Centers we see on the Senate sites like Senator Clinton or the GOP site. Armed with this idea and some engineering talent, Daniel and his team created vivaDemocracy, an intriguing offering for less-monied campaigns looking for an easy way to manage their volunteers.

Too many questions!
There are a number of solutions for podcasting - both video and audio - and, depending upon your needs, you can do it yourself, if you are willing to invest the time (I promise, not that much time is needed). To help in this, I am leveraging some of my experiences from my corporate business, Contagious Conversations, where I will interspirse posts on the basics of podcasting in the coming weeks. To make it easier to understand (and less expensive), I will focus on audio podcasting, since most campaigns will not be spending an inordinate amount of time doing video production (okay, there is always an exception). So, to begin with, let's start with a very simple question: what is a podcast?

MP3 files alone do not make a podcast, and no iPod needed
One of the funniest lessons I had discussing social media with other people was the overuse of the word "podcast". If you look at ABCNews' "This Week" page, scroll down to the This Week Podcasts - and note the name of the MP3 link, "Listen to the 'This Week' Podcast". While ABCNews has learned from their prior misnomers, the MP3 file is still called a podcast - and a number of sites that allow for people to download audio or video files are not "podcasting".

Podcasting, to quote directly from the ABCNews' site is:

Podcasting is the latest in on-the-go, on-demand technology. With podcasting, you can listen to radio programs or events whenever and wherever you choose. Podcasts are MP3 audio files that are automatically downloaded to your personal computer, and then transferred to an iPod or other MP3 player using a podcasting application. (my emphasis)

You might wonder why I am making such an issue out of this - many of you know what a podcast is, you listen to them via iTunes on your iPod. But, the number of political campaigns that think a podcast is putting an audio file on a website for download misses the fundamental benefit of podcasting: the file becomes viral campaign collateral if it is properly marketed and disseminated through the networks already formed for podcasts. Rather than thinking that the website is the end-all of the campaign's online presence, consider the viral nature of the Jib-Jab flash animation in 2004, or the "kiss" video on YouTube that impacted Lieberman's primary campaign. Podcasting is the ability to make your media content transportable and delivering it to where other people can find it - without coming back to the website.

This is not any different than thinking about having campaign offices in different geographic areas - everyone does not have to come back to the main office to get their lawn signs or bumper stickers. If you know where the podcasts can be found (e.g. Odeo, Blubrry, PodShow, Podcast Alley, Podcast Pickle to name a few), you can submit your podcast feed (now here is where it gets tricky...) and then supporters can find your podcast!

Now that this is clear, let's get to the next question: why are you doing a podcast?

You might ask, after so many years, hasn't anyone come up with a better group communications package that surpasses eGroups (I still use the eGroups name, since I was Director of Marketing back in 1999)? goggle Groups was relaunched a little over a year ago, and there are a number of free mailing list and community tool companies out in the market.

But in the years since, Yahoo! has kept the balance of functionality and service in play for eGroups that it is often sited as the better tool for group management out of them all. And, while I may be biased due to my allegence, you would be hard pressed to find a better community management tool for the price. In coming posts, I will discuss strengths and weaknesses between the different tools (a special post on google Groups, definitely), to ensure we do learn about more solutions that can offer tools that meet different organizations needs.

Today, campaigns are offered a better solution with actBlue, one of the best systems I have seen in operation today. Instead of being a feature on an all-in-one system, the team at actBlue have focused on making a robust, scalable and easy to use system with a low cost charging mechanism for candidates. Candidates do not have to get a merchant account (a pain for small campaigns that are not incorporated or do not have a banking history), rather actBlue takes care of the transactions and sends a check to the campaign on a weekly basis. On the admin site, the campaign can also download an NGP or FECfile formatted list of contributors for compliance issues. Tracking performance of syndication (read: grassroots supporters) is a breeze with simple referral codes - which makes tracking the performance of fundraising campaigns somewhat easier.

Become a Pioneer or Minuteman
One feature actBlue offers that is only found on all-in-one systems is the ability for grassroots supporters to create their own personal fundraising pages - for any candidate or candidates you wish. Now you too, can be a Pioneer or a Minuteman or a Ranger - all you have to do is Netroots Candidates supported by DailyKos and myDD. Or see the efforts of BlueAmerica, another group of bloggers. Or, to see a successful Senate campaign efforts - take a look at Maria Cantwell who, instead of building their own contribution system, are leveraging the actBlue platform in conjunction with the website.

When on the Kerry Campaign, the biggest flap we would often have is to use the Microsoft Exchange server so that each team could synchronize their calendars for scheduling. Not only was it a painful process at times, but the cost of maintaining so many Exchange accounts became prohibitive. Now, consider being a smaller campaign with less than 10 people - and no real IT person. What would you do?

google Calendar
In three of my recent campaigns, I have introduced the google Calendar with great success. As you can see from the screenshot, all groups of the campaign have their own calendar (which they can set permissions on who can see, who can modify, who can add, etcera) and they can be viewed in a single page with color differentiating the areas of the campaign. For this campaign, we needed to know where the candidate would be and where the rest of the staff would be. One person somewhat played the scheduler (though her job was more on communications) and she made sure everyone was aware of the calendar.

As a scheduler for one campaign, I watched this young lady spend hours painfully mapping out the event, using MapQuest to get directions and having to print out everything to enable the driver(s) to know where to go. With google Calendar, I found that you can have your calendar all written out on a PDF (click here for a shot) and even have your cell phone receive a text message some period of time before the event happens to alert you to your next event.

Granular to the individual event
And while security is paramount on the team, you can still invite other people outside your campaign sphere via the individual event management - which include eVite/RSVP-like functionality so that you can determine if all receive or respond to the event scheduled.

Do I recommend google Calendar? Absolutely! In each campaign, I found it heads and shoulders about the Microsoft Exchange solution - and it allowed for the schedule to be consistant across the campaign and understandable by all. And with google being so ubiquious, why not use the tools available. It's free, it's easy and it is fun to use. And it saved me a ton of money not having to buy Exchange licenses.

Tags: Calendaring, Scheduling, Campaign Scheduling, google Calendar