Entries tagged 'Facebook'

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

McCain’s Campaign Gets Creative With Video Game

John McCain’s campaign got quite creative today with the release of this year’s first official presidential video game. Pork Invaders, shown above, is a remake of the classic Space Invaders, where a user shoots vetoes at legions of scary pigs.

The graphics, sound and gameplay are all pretty mediocre, but mildly addicting nonetheless.

For a campaign that has yet to show a whole lot of Internet savvy, this is a huge step in the right direction — showing some out of the box thinking and even a bit of humor. The fact that the game is both embeddable (as above) and Facebook-compatible scores extra points for the Arizona senator.

While I applaud the effort and creativity, I hope Barack Obama’s campaign comes back with a game that blows this one out of the water — it wouldn’t be that difficult.

Maybe a “Wolfenstein 3-D” remake in Guantanamo?

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Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

A Political Milestone for Facebook

Today, the Barack Obama campaign announced that the candidate has amassed a following of more than 1 million supporters on Facebook.

One million, four-hundred fifty-eight, to be exact.

To all of the political prognosticators who doubted the youth vote, let this just serve as one more piece of evidence that when given a voice, young people do care about politics.

We want to change our country for the better and we’re willing to put in the time and effort to make that change happen.

Look out Washington, D.C. A generational tidal wave is coming.

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Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

McCain’s Social Media Problem

So we have two nominees. And both have become Internet superstars over the course of the primary season.

Unfortunately for Republican nominee John McCain, his stardom comes at his peril, highlighting questionable incidents and statements (100 years? Sexism? Bombing Iran?). The readily available footage just adds fuel to the creative fire of McCain’s opponents, leading to parodies that are sometimes even more popular than the original gaffe (No You Can’t. Blame it on McCain. McCain 2013.)

Sure, Democratic nominee Barack Obama gets his share of dings on social media sites, often from his former church (Rev. Wright. Father Pfleger.)

The key difference is that Obama and his campaign have embraced social media — posting nearly 1,110 videos on his YouTube Channel, twittering regularly, sharing more than 18,000 photos on Flickr and blogging (hyper)actively. He’s approaching a million Facebook fans and has large followings on everything from MySpace to MiGente. Not to mention the whole my.BarackObama.com sub-site, which brings embracing social media to a whole other level.

His campaign is fast and consistently on-message throughout the social web. When the Jeremiah Wright controversy really gathered steam on YouTube, his staff was there to flood social media sites with embedded copies of his “A More Perfect Union” speech, which has been watched more than a million times.

McCain, meanwhile, adds a post to his blog every 2-3 days and maintains just token presences on social web sites. His campaign’s participation seems forced, and he clearly doesn’t see substantial value in social media. By not embracing the technology, the technology has come to be a growing headache for the senator.

There are numerous user-compiled reports of McCain flip-flopping, hiring lobbyists for his campaign staff, and the like. If you’re Obama, why hire an opposition research staff? He’s effectively crowd-sourced many of these efforts and doesn’t have to buy advertising time to distribute that material.

If the Republicans really want to have a chance in this election, they must embrace the good and the bad of social media, create their own content and highlight the best of user-generated media supporting their candidate.

Without that, we’ll all be singing along to a mash-up of “YouTube killed the political star” in November.

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Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

The Beauty of Photos

So I’ve been (back) at this blogging thing for nearly a week and I’ve started exploring some new plug-ins for WordPress. I like to take a lot of photos, but always struggle with where to post them.

Some end up on Flickr. Others go on Facebook. Still more end up living in iPhoto, never to be seen again.

When I ran across the NextGEN Gallery plug-in, I was impressed. It allowed me to easily upload multiple photos and display them nicely in a blog post. Take a look at these disgustingly cute pics from my recent engagement:

 

There’s lots of options about how to display the shots–full size, thumbnails or in a simple slideshow. And the plug-in integrates just enough Flash to add to its functionality and not distract from its usability.

The only hiccup was when I tried to upload some full-resolution images. The software didn’t automatically downsize them, resulting in huge page load times and when I manually clicked on the button to resample them, I only got through two of ten photos before running across a server memory error. Luckily, iPhoto will happily export them in 800×600 @ 72 dpi.

In any case, hopefully I can start to post select galleries to TresVacas thanks to NextGEN. Cheers!

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