Links that didn’t make the newsletter but should still be on your radar. WhatsApp is causing a serious fake news problem in Brazil Vice.com And because WhatsApp is a private, closed messaging service, fake news researchers don’t have much hard data to go on. Ortellado says they’re primarily able to get information by lurking in […]
The Resistance: A Student Movement
The makers of Resistbot, a chatbot that enables Americans “to contact their elected officials via messaging apps and SMS texting” and has added 4.1 million users since it launched in March of 2017, share this map showing where the “Resistance” is most heavily concentrated: And the top ten counties are broken out in this chart: […]
Remains of the Day: LTO Links 81
New for 2018, I’m going to take a look at the stories that didn’t make it into each week’s newsletter, but still caught my eye. This blog post describes the motivation behind partial.press, a news aggregation website that highlights a given sources bias. How to Combat News Bias mckn.co “Enter my new project, partial.press. Partial […]
Eye-opening chart: Digital Advertising’s Duopoly
Fred Wilson highlights this startling chart about the duopoly of Facebook and Google in the digital advertising space: And there’s no sign that this will change any time soon, because Facebook just created more advertising opportunities within Instagram: “The move was likely made in an effort meet advertising demand for Facebook, according to a source […]
Improving your campaign website’s usability
In my earlier post analyzing the navigation menus of 50 US Senate campaign websites, we learned about the importance of a user’s expectations and meeting those expectations: “Usability suffers when a site fails to meet users’ expectations.” Now here are five practical steps for improving a campaign website’s usability by meeting expectations: Make the link […]
Campaign Website Navigation & Voters’ Expectations
Check out my follow up post here highlighting ways you can improve your campaign website’s navigation. In last week’s edition of my email newsletter, Learn Test Optimize, (sign up here) I shared a link to this post from the Nielsen Norman Group about the negative impact a centered logo has on website navigation. Towards the […]
How to get your campaign’s hashtag trending without paying for it
Last week during the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump’s campaign paid a reported high six figure sum to promote its hashtags to a national audience. And there’s some question as to whether this was an effective use of the campaign’s resources: Trump paid six figures for a hashtag that clicks through to this. pic.twitter.com/n0cG6Dwk5w — […]
Pokémon Go and the future of political technology
I was in Australia when Pokémon fever struck. I had been following the phenomenon on Twitter, reading about pleas to stop playing the game at Arlington National Cemetery and Auschwitz. But I knew it was really a thing while having dinner on the water in Port Macquarie, New South Wales, as we watched dozens of […]
16 Slides from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report Political Strategists Need to See
Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report is a must-read for Silicon Valley insiders and others interested in the future of technology, marketing, software, hardware, and their impacts on society. The slide deck is 213 pages long and Meeker, a partner at a top venture capital firm, gave a quick, 24 minute overview you can watch […]