Why I was so impressed with “The Story of Us: Five Years Ago Today” video from @BarackObama

Regardless of how you feel about President Obama, take a minute or two to watch this video that his digital team launched about a month ago:

What impressed me so much about this video was how the Obama campaign’s digital team used Outlook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, and the Facebook timeline as background / context for photos and video from the past five years. 

Filed under: News and Politics, Social Networking, Technology

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

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

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

YDWA Conventions and Presidents

Below is the list of the Young Democrats of Washington Convention locations and the person elected President at those convention locations.  I’m posting this here so that it gets picked-up and indexed by search engines in case someone is looking for this information in the future.

• 2002: Olympia, WA – Simon Farretta (SU/KCYD)
• 2003: Bellevue, WA – Gayatri Eassey (SU/KCYD)
• 2004: Spokane, WA – Gayatri Eassey (SU/KCYD)
• 2005: Vancouver, WA – Aaron Belenky (KCYD)
• 2006: Tacoma, WA – Krystal Wood (SU/PCYD/KCYD)
• 2007: Wenatchee, WA – Amanda Nelson (CCYD/KCYD)
• 2008: Vancouver, WA – Amanda Nelson (CCYD/KCYD)
• 2009: Spokane, WA – Megan Gustafson (KCYD)
• 2010: Seattle, WA – Chiho Lai (WWU/KCYD)
  (Andrew Peabody (KCYD/UW) completed term)
• 2011: Yakima, WA – Ashley Parcells (UW/KCDY)

Other past YDWA Presidents include Selina Davis and Jaxon Ravens.

Filed under: News and Politics, Online Communities

Mobile-friendly version of YDWA 2011 Convention Schedule

Below is a copy of the schedule for the Young Democrats of Washington (YDWA) convention in Yakima April 1-3, 2011:

Filed under: News and Politics, Online Communities, Technology

King County Young Democrats Officers 2002-2006

I’m archiving an old website and I came across some old lists of contacts from the King County Young Democrats.  I figured this would be an interesting place to post this list.

2002 Officers

• Chair: Angela Henry
• Vice-Chair: Chris Cramer
• Communications Director: Angie Cvetkovich
• Treasurer: Rob Dolin
• KCDCC Representative: Marie Yamamoto

2003 Officers

• Chair: Rob Dolin
• Vice-Chair: Jamie Corning
• Communications Director: Tillie Gallagher
• Treasurer: Jason Bennett
• KCDCC Representative: Justin Simmons
• Political Director: Paul Scoville
• Federal Legislative Director: Nicole Kovite
• State Legislative Director:Steve Smith
• Local Legislative Affairs Director: Jennifer Wegmann
• At-Large:Tania Maria Rosario
• Immediate Past President:Angela Henry

2004 Officers

• Chair: Rob Dolin
• Vice-Chair: Aaron Belenky
• Communications Director: Robert Beiser
• Treasurer: Steve Smith
• KCDCC Representative: Tillie Gallagher
• Political Affairs Director (South King County): Paliosc Benjon
• Political Affairs Director (North King County): Sabrina Weiner
• Federal Legislative Director: Rachel Leigh
• State Legislative Director: Arija Flowers
• Local Legislative Affairs Director: Sarah Reyneveld
• At-Large: Jon Zimmerman
• Immediate Past President: Angela Henry

2005 Officers

• Chair: Steve Smith
• Vice-Chair: Allison Smith
• Treasurer: Tillie Gallagher
• Communications Director: Robert Beiser
• KCDCC Representative: Alexander West
• Political Affairs Director: Kelly Chafin
• Federal Legislative Affairs Director: Amy Ockerlander
• State Legislative Affairs Director: Sarah Reyneveld
• Local Legislative Affairs Director: Jack Ross
• At-Large: Jon Zimmerman
• Past Chair: Rob Dolin

2006 Officers

• Chair: Sean Baratt
• Vice-Chair: Kelly Chafin
• Communications Director: Rachel Zommick
• Treasurer: Tillie Gallagher
• Finance/Fundraising Director: Megan Gustafson
• State and Federal Political Affairs Director: Amy Ockerlander
• Local Political Affairs Director: Amy Ockerlander
• Legislative Affairs Director: Sam Ross
• KCDCC Female Rep.: Elizabeth Pew
• KCDCC Male Rep.: Aaron Belenky
• Membership Director: Erik Nielson
• Outreach Director: Sarah Schacht
• Technology Director: Corey Ann Khan
• Social Director: Sara Needleman-Carlton
• Past Chair: Steve Smith

Updated 4/29/2012 with the below additions:

2010 Officers

• Chair: Andrew Peabody
• Treasurer: Chiho Lai
• Communications: Amanda Nelson
• Political / Legislative: Rob Dolin
• Vice-Chair East: Brandon Adams
• Communications East: Ian Jacobson
• Membership East: Cyrus Habib
• Vice-Chair Seattle: Robin Ldebetter
• Communications Seattle: Greg Haffner

2011 Officers

• Chair: Michael Althauser
• Vice-Chair, Events Director: Ashley Parcells
• Finance Director: Chiho Lai
• Communications Director: Greg Haffner
• Political Affairs Director: Rob Dolin
• East Membership Director: Elizabeth Bateman
• West Membership Director: Vamsi Velagapudi
• IT Director: Andrew Villeneuve

Filed under: News and Politics

Favorite Past Posts (2009 and 2010)

Below are some of my favorite posts from 2009 and 2010:

• Upgrading our family PC’s
• Messenger Social Everywhere
• Introduction to Activity Streams
• Update Facebook, Messenger, MySpace, and Twitter all from your iPhone
• 5 Reasons to Connect “Web Activities” in Messenger and Hotmail
• What the #@/cc! are all of those symbols in your status updates
• Does politics belong in online reviews
• Windows Live Embraces the Activity Streams Open Standard
• Local (Seattle) Political and Advocacy Groups on Twitter
• Beginner’s Introduction to Twitter
• What’s the difference between Twitter and Facebook
• Online memories extending beyond people and time
• Hope (and humor) – In 140 Characters

Filed under: Blogging, Microsoft, News and Politics, Online Communities, Social Networking, Step-by-step, Technology, Windows Live

Archived Posts from Rob Dolin’s space

If you’re interested reading some of my blog posts from 2006-2010, you can find them on http://RobDolinsSpace.wordpress.com/.  Specific categories that might be of interest include:

• Buzz
• Career
• Food and drink
• How to
• Humor
• Life @ Microsoft
• News and politics
• Organizations
• Personal
• Search
• Social Networking
• Spaces Customization
• Technology
• Travel

Filed under: Blogging, Food and Drink, Humor, Microsoft, News and Politics, Online Communities, Personal, Social Networking, Step-by-step, Technology, Travel, Windows Live