My favorite line is this one:

Obscurity may be a plus. 4 of the 9 candidates with positive numbers are still unknown to 40% or more of the voters in their states. For the most part this year the better known a candidate has become the less well liked they’ve been.

Basically, I think it works like this:

1. Bush screwed our country so badly that everyone is tired of politics.
2. After the super hopeful election of 2008, things haven’t gotten better fast enough in any of the ways we all care about (ahem, jobs?).
3. The voters say, a pox on all their houses.

I’m not sure what the solution to this is, to be honest.  In Florida’s Democratic Primary (and in several other states) candidates have been spending millions of dollars on TV ads, only to see their favorability go down.

I think pretty much everyone is tired enough of politicians and politics at this point, that the only way you’re going to garner any support is by being totally different, and totally worthwhile.

Those are, coincidentally, the only types of candidates that DD works for.  Unfortunately, in 2010, they seem to be in short supply.

What I would’t give to bring back Paul Wellstone.

Google Voice is both Voicemail, and something entirely different.  gVoice is

• A dedicated customizable phone number (one campaign we worked with was “2-4-6-VOTE”)
• A number that can be called from within the internet browser, straight from your homepage.
• The number can ring multiple phones — the office phone, then a cell….
• Callers can get different messages depending on who they are, or when they call.  After business hours instead of ringing, you can set it to go straight to Voicemail.
• Voicemails are transcribed, and can be emailed to multiple people.

During the last weeks of a campaign there can be literally 100 phone calls per hour, and staffing all the different phones is an insurmountable feat.  Similarly, a busy not for profit or business can easily have ten different people who might be answering the “main phone” based on different hours they’re working.  Google Voice lets all of that incoming data be streamlined– no more crucial messages slipping through the cracks.

Plus, an unlimited searchable endless backup of all your voicemails!

In the past we’ve had to search the internet high and low to find invites to the hard-to-get-into service.  But starting this week, that’s over. Google Voice is free for open sign-ups.

That also means it’ll be easier for us to integrate gVoice into your backend right there along with your emails and shared documents and calendar.

Yay!

For Design Different’s clients, the favorite new feature will almost certainly be the streamlined user interface back-end.  Basically, the entire way the menu’s work has been dramatically improved.

For nearly 4 years now D2 has been providing a 3rd party plugin (actually two different plugins) to fix the problem of the complicated & clumsy WordPress back-end.  The backend is the part of WordPress you access when you want to post a new page, or change a plugin.  It’s the part of WP being used right now to write this post!

Using those plugins wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was the best way to keep our customers happy and make WordPress as user friendly as they needed it to be.

But it caused problems and confusions occasionally.

For example, we had a former client email us last year and say,

“I learned how to use WordPress when you built our website, but then I tried to help someone else manage their WordPress website and it was way too complicated!  Why were their plugins and stuff hidden and hard to fix?”

With WP 3.0 there’s no need to use those extra plugins!  So we won’t ever get one of those emails again!

(PS- we helped that client install the same useful plugins on her friend’s website for free… )

In the short run this change means we’re going to have to develop new training materials for new clients– but in the long run it’s going to help everyone that there be only one system (the normal one).

We’ve already updated this site, and others we manage, and the official D2 opinion is

awesome.

Our favorite technical spec change has got to be the merger of WordPress Mu (“multi-user”) and regular WordPress.  This means BuddyPress will run on a regular WordPress install.

D2 is officially predicting the world of specialized social networks to finally take off sometime in late 2011, and be ubiquitous by 2013… mostly thanks to BuddyPress (although some major corporation will likely step in, and we’re not ruling out a takeover of Elgg or a revival of Ning).

Marshall wins, as predicted, but not by too much.  The big story is that Ken Lewis almost made it into the run off.  I admit that if he had, he might have earned my vote.  For a lot of reasons, I predict that Elaine will handily win the run-off, but I’m still not certain about the general election.   There’s absolutely no reason she shouldn’t win the general election, Richard Burr is a sitting duck.  But she should have walked away with this primary, and instead she nearly lost it.  If not for Cunningham in the race, Lewis might have won this thing.

I just checked the geographic breakdowns on the Marshall/Lewis/Cunningham primary, and it looks likeDurham is a place that Elaine really does have the least support statewide.  She’s got about 5% less support here than everywhere else, and Ken has not surprisingly a ton more here than elsewhere.

And if it’s not a danger to her, then why not use it as an opportunity?  As someone who’s worked my share of campaigns, I would have killed to have an extra primary to soak up earned media and test my field staff.

Plus, it looks super anti-democratic for Marshall (the freak’n Secretary of State in charge of elections!) to tell Cal to step aside.  Which meant that on election night, she got bad coverage on WUNC.

Marshall can beat Burr, I know it.  But will she?  The answer is sadly no, not if her campaign doesn’t get better fast.

Just when Joomla! was running out of steam, in steps Microsoft.

Granted, Microsoft isn’t exactly a powerhouse (perception wise) these days.  But they’re sitting on an aweful lot of cash and development money, and Windows 7 if changing things.

We’ll see.

Last fall, the Obama administration said it was rebuilding WhiteHouse.gov on the Drupal platform. Shortly thereafter, White House technology directors met with Drupal developers to show off new features for the site and to discuss how they can work with developers to enhance Drupal as well.

Basically, the Whitehouse improved the Drupal source-code, and then re-released that improved code back into the public domain to improve Drupal itself.

There is a really great WhiteHouse inspired WordPress theme I’ve been meaning to use, but now it seems wrong. The next time we work on a statewide campaign, I think Drupal will be the way to go.

But the question is, will Facebook or Google ever be able to outdo the other?

Google added Buzz, but Buzz is a) more of a competitor to Twitter, and b) not being used by anyone.

And Facebook has for a long time allowed people to use regular emails in Facebook Messages, but yet everyone keeps their gMail.

In at least one key metric Facebook (sort of, not really, kind of) was beating Google last week.

For the week ending March 13, the social networking site got more traffic than its competitor in the United States, according to a blog post by industry tracker Hitwise

…

for the first full week, more Americans typed “Facebook.com” into their browser than “Google.com.” But these figures account for only a portion of Google’s web properties. They don’t measure Gmail or YouTube at all. Looked at in isolation, YouTube alone was the fifth most visited website during  the week ending March 6, according to Hitwise

So Google is still king, as it should be.  But Facebook is ascending to the dominant challenger (like, up there with Microsoft and Apple) just like I predicted four years ago.

And this recent news, even if it’s not really “news” has got to be putting some smiles on those Facebook faces.

If it did, you’re not alone.  About 10 million blogs hosted by WordPress.com were down yesterday.  That’s ten million AKA 10,000,000 !

But not a single WordPress blog hosted by Design Different was down.

That’s because there’s a difference between hosting your own version of WordPress, which comes from the WordPress project, AKA WordPress.ORG, and allowing your WordPress to be hosted online for free by WordPress.COM.

Don’t get me wrong, the Dot Com version is a wonderful and free system.  Like Blogger was (and is) for the last eight years, WordPress is today.  It’s an easy, free, low-barrier of entry way into blogging.  And it must be working out OK, considering there’s at least 10 million people who have tried it.

But after trying out WordPress via WordPress.com, users often end up realizing they want more control over their website.  By letting someone like Design Different design and host your site, you’re able to have great customization and control over every feature.

And, yesterday at least, it hosting with us would have meant your website was still online.