Last night was a busy night on the technology front. After years of planning and public outreach the nation’s television airwaves went all digital. Hundreds of analog transmitters were turned off across the nation and thousands of TV sets went dark. As a result of this transition stations are able to save thousands of dollars in energy costs since the new transmitters use substantially less power. It also marks the beginning of a new model in mobile communication but more on that in a bit. Last night also was when Facebook allowed users to pick their own identity on the popular social media platform. I went with my social media ID of RBearSAT while others who were up at the magical moment got more recognizable names like their real name. Read more…
Sunday in an article in the New York Times it seems that many people who start blogging either walk away from the experience or have reduced the number of blog postings published. “According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled,” states the article. Sometimes I wonder myself why I keep posting to this blog. Then I see something happening in the world around me and find I have to say something about it and the blog continues. But why should one blog and what makes a good blog? Read more…
During the 2009 San Antonio mayoral campaign I was chatting with Julian Castro before our first virtual town hall about some of the things that might come up during the session. Of course we talked about the normal stuff like using Twitter to help connect with the people, Facebook and having more of the virtual town halls if he were elected. During the conversation he brought up a really cool idea I hadn’t thought about regarding the development of virtual neighborhoods. Just like using neighborhood association meetings as ways to connect and share information in the ‘hood why couldn’t we use social media to create a virtual neighborhood experience, not to replace the NA meetings but to supplement them. It’s actually a pretty cool idea if you think about it. Read more…
Today Pres. Obama will be hosting a virtual town hall today at 10:30 a.m. CST, taking questions from people who sign in and submit them through an online forum. People can also vote up or down on the questions. As of the time of this posting almost 70,000 people had submitted or voted on over 75,000 questions, far more than he could ever hope to answer. A moderator will select from questions submitted on topics ranging from home ownership to retirement security. It demonstrates that Pres. Obama is carrying forward his promise of a more accessible White House through social media technology. So the real question is if this something we can see more of in government? Read more…
I decided that this year I should attend SXSW Interactive to gain a better perspective on social media and Web 2.0. Part of it is for my job and part is personal. SXSW Interactive seems the place to be to dig into the technology. Since its addition two or three years ago it has really started becoming the place to be to gain the best insight on the technology and creative uses of it. While Twitter wasn’t born at the festival it really got its boost during the event about 2 years ago. This year it will really hit stride as many of the attendees will most likely be either following or be followed by someone at the festival. Call it the world’s largest Tweet Up.
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Last night two of the major mayoral campaigns in San Antonio had social media events. Julian Castro hosted a Blogger Summit engaging several of San Antonio’s bloggers as well as main stream media writers. The event was webcast and had a chat room running for listeners to comment and ask questions. Trish DeBerry-Mejia hosted a Tweetup gathering that was also webcasted and had a chat room. Both were experiments in engaging voters in a new way. Based on reports coming in it appears both were a success but it seems some people saw it as more of a competition than an experiment. Maybe that’s not a bad thing after all. Read more…
Sunday Randall Stross wrote in the New York Times about the changing view of privacy in the age of Facebook. In the article Stross talks about how comfortable the younger generation is with sharing details about their life with others. “It’s the older members — those who could join only after it opened membership in 2006 to workplace networks, then to anyone — who are adjusting to a new value system that prizes self-expression over reticence,” writes Stross. As I’ve watched more and more of my over-40 friends joining Facebook I’m seeing a general shift in that attitude. The question becomes how far that shift in transparency will extend into society. Read more…
After completing a review of the city council candidate websites over the past week I thought it might be good to provide a recap and summarization of the results. As noted in the initial posting the world of campaigns has changed significantly because of the Internet. In the past campaigns reached out to voters through mailings, phone calls and campaign events. Now with the Internet in a majority of American homes campaigns must add this channel as a means to reach out an inform voters of the issues and why they should be elected. The Obama campaign took this outreach to new levels during the 2008 presidential election. Read more…
Districts 9 and 10 were easy to rate since there are only two sites found for District 9 and none found for District 10 as of this entry. Since these districts are similar to District 8 I feel this is a big deficit for the candidates and a great opportunity for web developers to help the candidates. I will be posting a summary of the analysis of the candidate sites with some best practices I have seen from these sites and some sites across the nation. Hopefully that information will help future candidates. The purpose of this exercise was not to criticize the candidate but to provide some suggestions to help improve their Internet presence. Read more…
District 7 stands to be the one of the most competitive council races this year pitting current council member Justin Rodriguez against the council member he defeated two years ago, Elena Guajardo. Aside from the mayoral race this one will have plenty of intensity and debate. That should result in the websites for the race being at or above the level of the mayoral candidates. If only that were true. Rodriguez’s site is nothing more than a graphic and Guajardo’s has several things that use improvement. This race also has a MySpace website in Robert Garibay’s which provides a decent framework to launch a campaign website. Read more…
Looking at the District 5 and 6 candidate websites I only found 1 in District 5 for Elginio Rodriguez. As I stated in my original posting on this topic it find it surprising that sitting council members that are running for re-election would not stand a website up for their campaign. Lourdes Galvan currently does not have an electin website at the time of this posting. There is time to get one stood up but that window is closing to be effective. Regarding District 5 with the absence of some websites and the low rating of the one that exists voters are going to have to go elsewhere to get information on the candidates. District 6 has one candidate with a MySpace page who has done a great job laying it out. He probably could give the other candidates assistance on their sites. Read more…
In reviewing the various websites of the city council candidates I’ve decided to break the analysis up by district since there’s a lot of information in the analysis. This first analysis will be for Districts 1 and 2 and will break the sites down in respective categories. I must say that the District 1 candidates have the best websites of all. After reviewing them the bar was set for the other sites which never really scored higher than around 15-17. Read more…
Recently I discussed how effectively the mayoral candidates were leveraging the Internet and Web 2.0 in conjunction with a radio story on Texas Public Radio. Based on that review DeBerry-Mejia definitely had the advantage but Castro has been making inroads to improve his site to better leverage Web 2.0 concepts. Now that the city council races are starting to solidify I figured it would be a good time to review those sites to see how they fare in the post-Obama election period. From an initial scan it appears that these sites are all over the map in terms of how sophisticated they are. Unfortunately I will not have the results of that review ready for a couple of days because I really want to dig into this effort. Read more…
Tomorrow Texas Public Radio will run a story about how the candidates running for mayor of San Antonio are using the Internet and social media. It should be an interesting story in an election following one of the most successful campaigns to leverage these tools, the Obama campaign. Lessons to be learned from that campaign are that if a candidate can successfully use the tools offered they can stand to benefit from getting the message out and raising incredible amounts of money. The question is how much these campaigns understand that aspect and are willing to take the time to leverage it. Read more…
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