I am beginning to think that it will take B. Hussein Obama personally flying a jet into a tall building before Americans truly understand how dangerous this terrorist sympathizing socialist really is.

The rampant racism on the site just might be enough of a problem to force Townhall administrators to be a little bit selective with their post choices, which explains the frequently out-dated featured posts and unwillingness to consider paid and public contributors on the same level of visibility.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be making lots of small changes to the site to make it simpler and easier to use. You might see some of these changes; others you might not even notice, like removing the word “Updated” from News Feed stories that have new information added to them.

(via Facebook Blog)

With any luck, this will make things like Facebook Pages more visible; because they are a Facebook – engineered element, they should take priority over the little (often ridiculous) applications. And with more visibility come more supporters; we’ve found that our Facebook Page at Campus Progress has been attracting predominantly new people rather than recycled supporters from our traditional profile and group.

Sign a Petition - users are able to sign petitions on Townhall’s own activism page. Currently, the only petition is a generic call to lower taxes. Hey, it’s better than nothing.

Call Talk Radio – Townhall has a repository of information about contacting local and national (conservative) talk radio. A step in the right direction, but I think that hardly qualifies as activism – preaching to the choir is no way to start a revolution.

Contact Elected Officials - users are able to access a database of current elected officials from the state level on up. This is the most useful advocacy tool on the site – it actually allows users to take matters in to their own hands.

Write Letters to the Editor - there is a lot of left-wing infrastructure for this, and I would guess that conservative Townhall members love being able to write to the liberal media that they despise so much. But despite my sarcasm, it is a good way to engage – and I’d rather see some legitimate engagement than aimless racism.

I wonder if this will have any feature for instantly pinging groups of people – at Campus Progress, this could be effectively used to communicate events or even press releases: “Campus Progress’ David Halperin is on CNN right now!” would probably get us a good amount of exposure.

That said, I’m sure any such feature would be abused to the point where it would have to be limited in some capacity.

via Webware

Now you have the option to fill this in with whatever you like. Personally, I prefer Progressive. Hopefully, this will encourage more people to be open about their political views, however obscure or nuanced they may be.

I spent the better part of yesterday covering my tropical oasis at my home in Florida as the result of a record low of 16 being predicted. In fact, another freeze is called for tonight with a forecast for snow flurries around Daytona Beach. Wow, this sounds an awful lot like global warming to me. Seriously, if it is freezing all the way down here, there is absolutely no way ice is melting in the Arctic!

Despite being posted over a month ago, this is one of the site’s featured posts – which indicates to me a) that there is relatively little activity on the site to merit frequent featured post updates, and b) that this is hardly on the road to being a forum for discourse or ideas. The fundamental idea of Global Warming is that it refers to gradual temperature increases over time – not temporary cold snaps in Florida. Whether you agree with the theory or not, this post (and many others) lack fact-checking, and the site’s editors seem to be out for hits based on shock value rather than substance.

Green Owl Records is trying to do business in anhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif environmentally conscious way – even if it means driving halfway across the country in a bus fueled by vegetable oil.

 

In effect, it is much like the “50 Ways to Love Your Country” for organizers. New candidates, staffers, and organizations will learn a great deal from the ground-level ideas that form the foundation of a strong digital strategy, and experienced online organizers can use it as a reality check – large, complicated strategies can look terrific on paper, but do people want to engage?

It cites YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook as prime examples of stellar online strategy. While not political in the least (at least not inherently), they all share common features that led to their popularity – ease of use being the primary element. Certainly nobody can be forced to support a candidate, organization, or issue, but if they do, there should be as few barriers to entry as possible. Confusing supporters won’t necessarily turn them off from the issue, but it will prevent you from engaging with them directly.

It also promotes the idea of social networks everywhere. An increasing number of political strategies are adopting this tactic, with varying success. From Obama to Campus Progress, people are encouraged to converse within the site. If effective, P2P2P says, this will keep people on your site – and keep them more engaged. The challenge, of course, is pulling these people away from time normally spent on other networking sites.

The section on cross-promoting concentrates primarily on promoting your website at events and vice versa, as well as cross-platform promotions on radio, in the public, and on other sites. But what it doesn’t go in to detail about is the necessary step of engaging the people you work with online while they are offline – and encouraging them to take their passion in to the real world.

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This year, SXSW went green… or tried to, anyway.

Festival organizers partnered with Green Mountain Energy and Ecology Action of Austin to cut down on carbon emissions where it could.  All waste generated from outdoor events at the festival was to be recycled. Generators and production trucks all ran on biodiesel. Of course, not all emissions could be cut out. So for the remaining parts, SXSW purchased carbon offset credits to make up the difference. 

And all of that is well and good for a festival hosting over one thousand bands (and the 1000 vans, cars, and tour busses that those bands bring, not to mention countless others driven by the fans attending the festival). But they’re not doing all they can, according to Carbon Crusaders.

"They are purchasing renewable energy credits to offset the conference’s emissions – now standard for any conference wanting to brand itself as “sustainable”. They are also however, consuming the equivalent of acres and acres of trees in useless promotional materials – the life blood of sponsorship commerce that drives these events."

 So while the festival may have paid close attention to their own waste, they clearly didn’t extend the favor on to the hundreds (if not thousands) of sponsors. The convention center down here is littered with piles of promotional material, some piles literally three feet high. A quick scan of the flyers, magazines, stickers, and postcards yielded very few that identified the use of post-consumer waste.

If SXSW is so serious about making their festival sustainable, they should encourage -if not force – their sponsors to do the same. Companies are vying for access to the music fans who perenially descend into Austin for these ten fateful days in March, and a little bit of prodding in the name of the environment wouldn’t hurt anybody.