Archive | January, 2011
sputnik-tshirt

Win The Future with Obama SOTU T-shirts

I sometimes work on little side projects, and this is the latest: Win The Future. President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address used the comical phrase “Win The Future” – and also “Our Generation’s Sputnik Moment”. Help Obama – Win The Future Get your t-shirt and wear your sputnik moment loud and proud. “This [...]

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Introduction_to_Email_Campaigning_For_Unions_cover

Free E-book: Introduction to Email Campaigning for Unions

I am releasing my second free e-book for unions, this time focusing on using email for union campaigning. Introduction to Email Campainging for Unions This e-book looks at a widely used – and often misused – online campaigning tool: email. While some online campaigners have written the obituary for emails in this age of social [...]

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1295525046_Phone

Politics is mobile

More from Pew Internet, as much as 26 percent of the adult American population may have engaged with the midterm elections using their mobile phone. The report found: 82% of adults have cell phones. Of those cell owners, 71% use their phone for texting and 39% use the phone for accessing the internet. With that [...]

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klout

Looking back at my Tweeting and Blogging in 2010

I thought I’d share with my readers some of thoughts about my tweeting and blogging from 2010 – a year that saw considerable growth in readership and followers for me. Blog 2010 was the year of elections, and marked my attempt to blog at least once a week. While I’ve been blogging on and off [...]

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twitter-use

Twitter – who is using it and how

Pew Internet released another interesting report last year about Twitter usage. It only focuses on the USA, but I imagine that usage demographics and other statistics are fairly consistent across the West, including Australia. This is the first Pew report that has focused on Twitter alone, rather than lumping it in with other “similar services”. [...]

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delete-key

Six reasons why no one read your latest union e-bulletin

So, you’ve signed up for MailChimp, got yourself a new email template design, and started to track emails… and found out that none of your members read it. Why? Here are six reasons why your latest email was rubbish. Perhaps the open-rate was below average, or no one clicked through to the links, or perhaps [...]

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princeton-readers-2011-01-17

Princeton study shows that easy fonts make things harder to remember

A Princeton study entitled “Fortune favors the bold (and the Italicized)” (their emphasis) has shown that readers retain information more reliably when they are challenged with so-called “disfluent” fonts. The research suggests that introducing ‘disfluency’ – by making information superficially harder to understand – deepens the process of learning and encourages better retention. The psychologists said [...]

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Pew Internet Generational Report

Online usage demographics are changing

Pew Internet has some interesting new data on Internet usage by age demographic, and the take-away is that more “older” people are using Facebook. According to the report, Internet users over the age of 74 joined social networking sites at a faster rate than any other age group this year. Since 2008, in fact, social [...]

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Hardball by Chris Matthews

Quick Book Review: Hardball – How Politics Is Played Told By One Who Knows The Game by Chris Matthews

Hardball – How Politics Is Played Told By One Who Knows The Game Chris Matthews – a former Democratic staffer for House Majority Leader “Tip” O’Neill and speechwriter for President Carter – has written a contemporary version of The Prince. It is a handbook for staffers, aspiring candidates and ambitious “pols” which aims to give [...]

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This is Iceland on Twitter

Amazing social media campaign: “Iceland Wants to Be Your Friend”

I must confess that I know next to nothing about Iceland – I certainly never thought of it as an example of best practice social media campaigning – but after stumbling across this amazing campaign, I’m almost convinced that I should buy a plane ticket and visit its “forbidding interior” for myself. The “Iceland Wants [...]

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Lake Eppalock, Victoria

Good news for Tony Abbott: “Build more dams” thought bubble fails basic logic test

Tony Abbott, Liberals Party leader, has proposed a “vision” for Australia that involves building more dams. This will solve our water problems and stop flooding. “I just think it’s a bit odd in a country with as many water issues that we’ve got that there have been virtually no dams built in the last two [...]

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Is Clicktivism Ruining Left Activism

Is “Clicktivism” ruining left activism?

Micah White (no relation) in The Guardian has a provocative article that makes the case that online activism (“clicktivism” or “slacktivism”) is ruining left-wing activism because of an obsession with “opens, clicks, actions, sign-ups, unsubscribes, bounces and referrals”. Gone is faith in the power of ideas, or the poetry of deeds, to enact social change. [...]

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