LTO Links #37

Relaunching WhiteHouse.gov

Your weekly must reads

LTO Links

Issue #37 |

Advertising

Former Politico Heads Are Shaking Up Native Advertising With New Site

"Schwartz explained that these native ads, which could include a short video clip or simply a short article with an image attached to it, can be produced and introduced into the stream within the same day and at a fraction of the cost. This is something some of their brand partners are excited by, because it allows them to run and test ads all at the same time.

"Axios' ads also have the ability to follow storylines while reaching different people; by measuring how long readers dwell on certain ads, Axios can then show them more of what they're interested in."

This Brand Sent Its Bedding to Trump So He'll Sleep Better and Stop Tweeting

"The company has sent its 37.5 Technology Sleep System to Donald Trump, and is tweeting him along the lines that it hopes he will get a better night's sleep and get off Twitter at 3AM."

Advocacy

The Day The Internet Stood Still

"Looking back from five years in the future, the defeat of SOPA/PIPA by an unlikely coalition of Internet activists, online communities, and huge business interests is even more amazing. The call to action didn’t fall along party lines. It brought together libertarians, progressives, conservatives, and Tea Party activists. It didn’t matter if you were a major corporation or an individual citizen. For one day, the line was drawn, and the fight for a Free Internet changed everything."

Data

Trump’s Data Firm Snags RNC Tech Guru Darren Bolding

"Bolding, who in November, 2015, became the RNC’s third CTO in as many years after building his career as an engineer in Silicon Valley, will assume the title of CTO at Cambridge, where he will build products for commercial and political clients. 'We want to be able to scale up what we’re already doing, since there’s been quite a lot of interest from the commercial and political space,' he says."

The Real Story Of 2016

"Another myth is that Trump’s victory represented some sort of catastrophic failure for the polls. Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state.3 Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968."

Design

Trump needs time to make whitehouse.gov great again

"Trump transition aides told POLITICO they’re keeping — for now — the basic shell and design built under the leadership of President Barack Obama, including the fonts, format and blue colors that have come to be associated with many aspects of the outgoing Democratic administration....

“'Any major redesign done well takes months,' Rinat said. 'We wanted to make sure this was done right and with the people who are going to be running the website involved.'"

13 Bold Web Design Predictions You Should Explore in 2017 [SlideShare]

"1. Longer Pages...7. Silent Videos...8. Cinemagraphs...11. Original Photography and Illustrations...12. Full-Screen Forms...13. Breaking the Grid"

Social

RT Gets Banned From Facebook Until After Trump's Inauguration [Update: Facebook Lifted The Ban]

"Facebook just lifted the ban, which lasted about 20 hours, but the company still hasn’t gotten back to us about why RT was specifically banned in the first place. The State Department has also not responded to a request for comment."

Technology

You’ll Never Be The Same Again

Mikey Dickerson, Administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, says farewell and reflects on the importance of building a tradition of public service in the tech industry.

"The U.S. Digital Service started as a half a dozen people in an unheated basement in the White House complex, tasked to work on three projects: HealthCare.gov, modernizing immigration, and Veterans’ benefits. We knew we’d need a lot more people to meet our goals, still I wasn’t convinced we could recruit even ten who’d trade the comfort of the tech industry for the complexity of government technology. Fortunately, I was wrong.

"Two years later, the team has grown from six people in a basement to 200 folks spread out across a dozen agencies, including Homeland Security, Defense, and Veterans Affairs. Three projects became five, five became ten, and ten quickly turned into dozens. Recently, we published a rundown of our most important work to date, linked below. It’s humbling to see all of this in one spot."