The Onion has a great infographic today accompanying a story about a Secret Service agent "taking a question" for President Bush. The graphic diagrams the scene and actions. I'm using a detail here because I hate getting sued. View the full image here or read the story.
Creator Leonardo Bonanni explains:i put up a bus schedule-looking framed piece of paper with my latest results on untimely deaths at mit. it was sparked by the obvious cover-ups and lies that make mit appear like it has normal suicide rates. then chris asked us to place a container in public, one that wouldn’t get taken down. after studying street signage, i settled on the discrete bus schedule format and built a frame for my spreadsheet. it seems to have worked! it’s still up, one week later. i guess if you carefully camouflage something controversial it can become public information without being torn down.More info and photos at the link.
Embracing new technology in political campaigns can be tricky business. Howard Dean pulled it off seamlessly with MoveOn.org in the 2004 primary season. John McCain in 2008? Not so much.
John McCain has a MySpace page. Great idea, right? All the politicians are doing it. But McCain is in the spotlight, and it's not because of anything he has done. It's because his web publishing crew sucks.
First, they ignored a basic rule of web etiquette (I refuuuuuuuse to say the "n" word today). Techcrunch explains:
Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.
The result (image composite by Techcrunch):
The next day it was fixed - but a spelling error was introduced, along with an atrocious design:
The error was gleefully highlighted on Newsvine this morning. If the error is still up, you can see it here.The first time around this could be laughed off as a simple mistake, although it highlighted McCain’s flip-flopping positions on gay marriage. But now some people are going to question whether the guy can hire competent people to surround him. The original story will hit mainstream press this morning. Lots of people will be going to McCain’s MySpace page. And they’ll see a sloppy site.Behold the power of incompetent spellers (and mishandlers of apostrophes).
