Indeed, Barr says that he does twitter on his own. Barr joins the growing ranks of Twittering elected officials like John Culbertson and Tim Ryan. But unlike fellow Presidential candidate Barack Obama, Barr twitters himself. No staff, no help. (And that may explain why his tweets are a bit…off, at times.

So, congratulations, Congressman Barr, on taking the dive and Twittering for yourself. Have a great flight and and keep the tweets coming.

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Wow, I thought. A local restaurant might understand the Internet. I expected to see a review from any of the numerous DC food blogs, or maybe even a comment from Yelp.

No, instead, it’s a screenshot of a random, unnamed bulletin board.

The first person quotes a previous poster who asks,

“Has anyone here had Duccinis Pizza, I got a menu from them the other day. looks great.”

The man with the fro responds,

“I put one of the children of the Duccini’s owners through college. A friend put a different child of the owners through college. Another friend bought their books.”

“Neptune,” represented by a ghost sticking out its tongue, offered encouragement.

“duccinis is quite good … and they always manage to deliver mighty quick. best stromboli EVER. the best part about duccinis, they deliver ben and jerry’s ice cream! yay for chocolate chip cookie dough!”

No URL, no name of the bulletin board. Nothing. Just a screenshot.

Man, those Blogs sure love Duccini’s!!!

P.S. One of my secret passions is online marketing for local businesses. With a little bit of work, local businesses could build their online reputations and drive customers from effective web marketing.

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At 7:09pm EST - I twittered that Obama had 998,901 fans, and he’d reach one million “by the end of the week.”  Then I refreshed the page.  Now, it’s 7:29, and there are 999,036 supporters.  That’s 135 new supporters in 20 minutes.  At that rate - according to my very rough math - Obama will have 1,000,000 Facebook supporters by 10pm EST or so.

The original social networking craze in this election - the One Million Strong for Barack Obama Facebook group - only has 565,214 members.  The first million-strong group to actually reach its goal was the anti-Hillary Facebook group One Million Against Hillary Clinton, which crossed one million two months ago.

John McCain has 146,439 supporters, and he saw a similar, though not as sharp, spike in supporters around when Hillary Clinton dropped out of the race.

And finally, as of this posting, Obama has 999,141 supporters. Right on track for one million tonight.

[UPDATE FROM MICHAEL] Here’s a screenshot of when they hit 1 million. (Micah posted another screenshot earlier, with the time included.)

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Patrick Ruffini noted last week that McCain’s emails read like “Tolstoy in my inbox.” Rick Davis continues the proud literary trend. Look at this mammoth message:

Forget the content, even forget the length. One link? In the last sentence? What is McCain’s campaign thinking?

My guess: it seems like there’s too many cooks in McCain’s email kitchen. McCain’s online team needs to assert itself within the campaign and put the brakes on the email insanity. There’s a reason their email messages aren’t bringing in more money. To start, try shrinking the ratio of words to links in the next email, and then make a relevant ask.

Emails don’t have to be short to be effective - but at least try to engage your readers. A link in the first 500 words would do just fine.

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Gold Stars for Grownups

You can rate your friends in three categories (social, mental, and physical), each with a number of different attributes with which you can “+1” your friends. Social attributes include leadership, romantic, and punctual; mental +1s feature honesty, innovation, and adventurous; make them blush with physical plusses like strength, beauty, and cuteness.

The list is growing, too. If your idea for an attribute is accepted, you get +1 creativity.

You can register on the site to collect +1s, but you can also send them anonymously to your friends via email – even if they aren’t registered on the site.

So go ahead, +1 me – I already gave myself one point for humility.

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Using the third-party application Tweetscan, you can search for specific phrases and see only the tweets that include your search. In the half hour between 3 and 3:30 EST, there were more than 300 tweets that mentioned Spitzer.

It’s not just the news of the scandal that spread across Twitter; looking at the stream shows folks’ reactions to the news and inquiries about how the story will play out. Some folks are plain disappointed, others lament that he was caught in such a typical trap.

You can also get analyses of how the scandal plays out in the 2008 election. This tweet mentions that both Spitzer and his lieutenant governor are super-delegates supporting Hillary Clinton. Another criticizes the Times’ protrayal of the scandal that implies Spitzer was involved with running the ring, not just being a john.

As David All tweeted early after the scandal broke, the coverage of the Spitzer scandal shows that Twitter is indeed a utility, not just a play-thing. While it’s still a bit inaccessible to read specific topics from within Twitter itself, its open API allows for applications like TweetScan to fill in the gaps.

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From its inception Facebook offered a healthy handful of political views from which users can choose: very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, very conservative, as well as libertarian and apathetic. Most everyone with political views would feel comfortable selecting one of those seven segments. Though for some left-leaning people “liberal” was inadequate, and instead preferred “progressive.” In summer 2007 MoveOn.org staff Justin Hamilton (corrected) created a Facebook group asking the site to add “progressive” as a political views option, which to date has about 500 members.

What Facebook opened up today is far beyond what any users were asking for.

In its blog announcement, Facebook’s internationalization manager said the new changes allow people to express their political identities “just as you can with Religious Views.” This is not entirely true - Facebook organizes religions into two hierarchical categories. For instance, if you’re Catholic, the default selection as you type is “Christian - Catholic.” If you’re a Buddhist, you can select Buddhist, or you can specify you’re “Buddhist - Theravada.” If you want to say you’re a Democrat, you have to write out “Democratic P” to find our country’s party - otherwise you’ll end up in Venezuela’s Democratic Action Party. When you write out “Progressive” in political views, the field defaults to “Progressive Canadian Party” unless you click out of the box.

What Facebook should do is *actually* structure political views like religious views, into subcategories, rather than a giant list of international political parties. First, out of the site’s 65 million active users, only about one-third up to 60% (thx, Fred - Facebook needs to update its press page.) live outside the US. What incentive does Facebook have in defaulting to a list of political parties relevant to small clusters of users?

Political parties should be options as subcategories of political views, so users can still identify first by their positions and second by party affiliation, if any. For instance, just as you can say you’re “Buddhist - Theravada,” Facebook should make it easy to identify as “Progressive - Democratic Party,” “Conversative,” or “Moderate - Republican.”

Introducing two levels of political views is in Facebook’s financial interest; by effectively hiding US parties and encouraging free-form writing in “Political Views,” Facebook misses the opportunity to identify people across broad spectrums of political views. With yesterday’s changes, advertisers can target people who self-identify as members of the Republican or Democratic parties, but lose the ability to find neatly organized groups of people based on commonly accepted ideological identifiers. You can already see it starting to happen. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington writes in his glowing review of yesterdays’s changes:

I chose to support the “Alliance For Congo’s Renewal” party for now. Just because I really don’t need to see any more political ads.

Free-form political affiliation is all well and good, and that should be kept as-is; it just doesn’t make sense for Facebook to disperse this important information and include largely irrelevant options.

It’s good that Facebook is opening up its profile options for users, but they need to seriously rethink what they just did to their “Political Views.”

Screenshot of writing “Progressive” in “Political Views”

Screenshot of writing “Democrat” in “Political Views”

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Carter and Sonka describe the BlueGrassWiki as a:

…community-based, collaborative effort to compile and organize information [that] will empower Kentucky Democrats to engage their local Democratic Party organizations…

The immediate goal of BlueGrassWiki is to provide all the information Kentucky Democrats need to be involved in the party’s reorganization process this April.  Essential to that goal is providing as much contact information we can for the individual counties.

After the party reorganization, we hope to use BlueGrassWiki to help the county parties and activists hoping to get involved find each other.

Why the infiltration?  Kentucky progressives’ favored Senate candidate Andrew Horne was, as Sonka says, “forced out” of the race by higher-ups in the state party and the DSCC in favor of an establishmentarian.  Incensed, Sonka penned a piece in which he called for progressives to build their own infrastructure to take back the Kentucky Democratic Party.

Bluegrass bloggers aren’t strangers to the limelight.  The Nation profiled the rise of a homegrown anti-war movement with its sights on Sen. Mitch McConnell this summer.  To progressive Kentuckians, Horne’s exit signaled their party’s capitulation of the Senate race; now, BlueGrassWiki looks beyond November 2008’s races to building a friendly and sustainable infrastructure to prevent similar incidents in the future.

To show what they envision for the Wiki, Fayette County’s wiki was pre-populated with a plethora of information about the local party structure.  Besides the obvious inclusions of the website and name of the top leaders, the party’s pages also feature details of precinct chairs, elected officials, and organizations that work in the county- including their email addresses.  Here’s a small sampling:

Contact:
Website: http://www.fayettedemocrats.org/
Phone: (859) 268-4448
Email: FayetteDemocrats [at] qx [dot] net

Meeting Time:
Day: 1st Thursday of every month
Time: 7:00 pm
Where: 431 South Broadway, Lexington (map)

The Executive Committee is comprised of 31 voting members including:
The Chairman of the Executive Committee - David O’Neill
The President of the Fayette County Young Democrats - Colmon Elridge
The President of the Greater Lexington Democratic Women’s Club - Joanie Taylor

BlueGrassWiki marks a significant step in grassroots online organizing.  As the bloggers note, “building a wiki is not a two person effort.”  As Kentuckians fill in the gaps of the wiki and start to connect, we’ll begin to see an actual uprising - all through the power of online collaboration.

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I took data from the Mine Safety website of mining deaths in the US from 1900 to 2007, and uploaded a .csv file to Swivel. It automatically takes the fields and lets you create a play with graphs, clouds, and tables in all sorts of forms.

You can see my whole data set, but Swivel also lets you take what you play with and bring it to other websites with handy embed code.

Here’s a graph of miners vs. mining deaths for the last century.

It’s pretty cool stuff – if you have data and/or graphing needs, I recommend you check out Swivel.

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In September 07 – about four months ago – I wrote a post lamenting the lack of a good way to access Google documents from my desktop environment. I use Google Docs daily, and want to access the files as easily as I can browse my harddrive.

I proposed the Google Docs Sidebar – a Firefox Extension that uses the native browser sidebar to load in a user’s Google documents.

Well, ask and you shall receive. Introducing gDocsBar, a firefox extension that loads your Google documents into your sidebar.

It’s pretty much all I need, but it is a tad bloated and buggy. I notice a slight slowdown in my already out-of-control Firefox activity and memory. There’s also a weird bug for me that when you log in, you have to collapse and then re-expand the sidebar in order to see all the documents, otherwise it just keeps loading nothing.

For me, I can put up with those annoyances for the way-easy access to my Google Docs. I give this extension a 7/10.

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