Your Input Wanted on Feature Roadmap for CivicCal

Over the winter holidays, I’ve been making some updates to a website where I list upcoming political and non-profit events in the Seattle metro area.  The site is CivicCal (for Civic Calendar.)  In addition to a listing of events, it also includes a list of organizations and a list of venues.  I’ve been thinking about directions to take the site and I would very much welcome your input.  A few ideas:

• Personalization – Make it easier to set the organizations you’re interested in and to subscribe to their events
• Social Network integration – Make it easier to share events with your friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, etc.
• Mobile integration – Develop a more mobile-friendly site or apps for the top mobile platforms
• Organizations – The site is heavily focused on civic-oriented organizations and events; it could expand to include a broader set of non-profit groups
• Geography – Should the site expand to another metro area?
• Other – Do you have another suggestion?

Please leave a comment, post on CivicCal’s wall on Facebook, tweet at @RobDolin or @CivicCal, send an email, or otherwise get in-touch.  Thanks very much–

–Rob

Filed under: News and Politics, Online Communities, Social Networking, Technology

Email Blast Open, Bounce, and Click-Through Rates (via Constant Contact)

Many organizations (both commercial and non-profit) send email blasts and most measure these; but it’s hard to have a sense of what success looks like except by comparing from blast to blast. 

I was pleasantly surprised to find Constant Contact has a compiled list of average Open, Bounce, and Click-Through rates for their customers segmented by around two-dozen businesses.  You can find this at: http://constantcontact.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3194/p/450%2C453/r_id/111930.  Enjoy–
–Rob

Filed under: Technology

How to find friends from a specific city on Facebook and LinkedIn

On Friday, I found-out about an awesome opportunity for friends in the DC area to see an exhibition basketball game played by current and former NBA all-starts.  (http://bit.ly/ObamaClassic.)  I wanted to share this info with friends in the DC area, so I started doing some investigation of the “People Search” functionality on various Social Networks.

Facebook

Searching for just the words “Washington, DC” on Facebook yields a bunch of junk results, but by filtering to People and picking the Washington, DC location, I got a bunch of quick results of my friends in the DC-area.  Here’s a link to the specific query: http://www.facebook.com/search/results.php?lo=2427178&wk=&ed=&ny=&q=Washington%2C+DC&type=users

And here are the settings I used:

LinkedIn

For LinkedIn, you need to click the “Advanced” link:

And then set your options:

Here’s a canonical URL: http://www.linkedin.com/search/fpsearch?searchLocationType=I&countryCode=us&postalCode=20005

Next: Contact Import

Given these useful discoveries, I’m importing contacts from systems that have less robust people search (or out-of-date user profiles) like AOL/AIM.

Happy connecting–
–Rob

Filed under: Online Communities, Social Networking

Windows Phone App Recommendations

A while ago, I was having a conversation with a friend who suggested that Windows Phone didn’t have very many apps.  I think he might be living in the past.    With the latest apps including Amazon and Netflix and the latest games including Plants vs. Zombies, Fruit Ninja, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Tetris; I continue to keep my SIM card in my Windows Phone (Samsung Focus) and my iPhone stays in a drawer at home.

Apps

• 4th & Mayor – A second foursquare app
• Adobe Reader – When someone
• American Airlines – For booking travel and checking on rewards
• Evernote – Syncs my notes between my phones and PC’s.
• Facebook – When I want to search for Events on Facebook
• Foursquare – My favorite local social app
• Gowalla – Great local app for some cities including their hometown of Austin, TX
• Microsoft Tag Reader
• Seesmic – Posting to multiple social media accounts
• Twitter – When I want to view Twitters lists
• Yelp – Checking local reviews
• YouTube – watching the occasional video that a friend shares

 

Games

• ChickenImplosion – Great game premise and entertaining graphics
• Flow – A geometry puzzle app written by a friend
• Kill the Duck – Like “Duck Hunt” from your old 8-bit Nintendo
• Impossible Shoota – Space Invaders with really nice graphics
• The Oregon Trail HD – Yeah, like you played on the old Apple ][e
• Swipy man – Cute physics-based game
• Unite – It’s like the old “Marble Madness” arcade game

 

Seattle/WA specific

• OneBusAway – Our local public transit app; tells when the next bus is coming
• Seattle Traffic – For seeing the WSDOT map of how congested the highways are

If you’re thinking about getting a new SmartPhone, here are my recommendations on the USA-based carriers based on which devices are available as of mid-August 2011:

	Larger screen	Keyboard
AT&T	HTC HD7S or Samsung Focus	Dell Venue Pro or LG Quantum
Verizon	HTC Trophy
T-Mobile	HTC HD7	Dell Venue Pro
Sprint	HTC Arrive	HTC Arrive

Thanks for visiting–
–Rob

P.S. For more apps and games, check-out the Featured, Top Free, and Top Paid lists of Windows Phone apps. 

Filed under: Technology

Social Network profile pictures for political campaigns

I volunteer with the 43rd District Democrats in Seattle.  One of our board members is running for Seattle City Council.  Many of the board members are supporting him and have changed their profile pictures on Facebook to the “I’m with Mo!” logo that you can see below. 

It will be hard to measure, but I’ll be curious to see if this has some impact on peripheral awareness of the campaign and people choosing to vote for Mr. Classen.

Filed under: News and Politics, Social Networking

Screenshots of upgrading to Facebook Messaging

Earlier today, I was offered the chance on Facebook to upgrade to their new Messaging platform.  I’m excited to see how this works so I went ahead and upgraded.  I’ve heard that this is a slow roll-out so I also took screenshots so blog readers who didn’t have this feature (yet) could see it:

Step 0: Activate

It looks like Facebook is offering me a chance to upgrade to their messaging platform. 

Here’s the screens of what I went through if folks are interested:

Step 1: Choosing an email alias

Step 2: Enabling text messaging

(I’ll be turning this off if Facebook doesn’t have a good relevance system for limiting who can send me a Facebook message as a text.)

If you’re also using Facebook’s new messaging, please leave a comment with any tips and/or let me know what you think.  Thanks very much–

–Rob

Filed under: Social Networking, Technology

Past King County Democrats Officers and Staff (via the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine")

I’ve been volunteering on the King County Democrats Finance Committee and we’ve been having a conversation about the organization’s staffing history.  I was deeply involved with the organization from 2004 through 2008 but I only knew a few people from the prior years.

Thanks to the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” I was able to find the officers from every year going back to 1999.  This was something that I was really pleasantly surprised to be able to find!

This also gave me a new appreciation for the importance of making pages accessible to web crawlers. (Thanks Andrew V. of the Northwest Progressive Institute for peaking my curiosity on this with some comments about rendering a calendar server-side.) 

In 2009, the left navigation was changed from a server-rendered menu to a client-rendered menu that leveraged JavaScript.  I don’t remember noticing a significant user experience change, but the Internet Archive’s crawler did not pick-up the JavaScript nav (and the various pages that were thus linked.)

Overall, this was a great discovery.  Check-out the evolution of the King County Democrats web presence over the last 10 years: http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.kcdems.org/ or the evolution of almost any site: http://wayback.archive.org/web/. 

Filed under: News and Politics, Technology

BIG NEWS: New Home in Montlake

This past month, Hillary and I closed on a three-bedroom home in the Montlake neighborhood of Seattle (South of the University District and north of Capitol Hill.)  We’ll be slowly moving-in over the month of July and look forward to welcoming you soon.

Contact Us

Our new address will be:

2511 W. Montlake Pl. E
Seattle, WA 98112

Get directions with Bing

Come Visit in Seattle

We’re looking to set-up one of the bedrooms as a guest room and welcome our friends and family to Seattle.  My sister will be visiting from Chicago, IL for a weekend in July and cousin Matthew from Salt Lake City, UT will be spending a weekend in August.  Especially for friends from rougher climates, Seattle’s summers are beautiful and Seattle’s winters are very mild. 

First Meal

Two of our best friends, Michaela and Kevin, were in town from DC and joined us for our first meal in the new home yesterday.  (Pagliacci Pizza and L’Ecole No 41 wine.)  The sellers did not leave furniture so our current dining room is populated with a CostCo table and four CostCo folding chairs.

Filed under: Personal

Is Fake Mark Zuckerberg the first fake profile on #GooglePlus?

“Hey, cmon guys, facebook still has farmville.”

Filed under: Social Networking

Search Engine Optimization and Presidential Politics

Try doing a search for the word “santorum” in your favorite search engine.  It’s interesting that the first hit is not the Presidential campaign of Rick Santorum but http://www.spreadingsantorum.com/.

Through the wonders many, many people linking the words “santorum” or “rick santorum” to the aforementioned site, it’s the top hit on Bing (and some other search engine.)

It’s amazing the impact a large number of small websites and blogs can have if they work together. 

Filed under: Social Networking, Technology