Presidential Candidate Websites.

Shock and horror came over me as I scanned their websites.  There was stuff all over the place, explosive gradients and backgrounds that simply don’t jive.  Youtube videos are injected in every nook and cranny.  Since both websites are full of crap I don’t fell like reading or watching, I thought that I’d go a step further and do a good ol’ W3C Markup Validation on them.  The results were astounding to say the least.

John McCain: 171 Errors, 46 Warnings (217 problems)
Source: W3C

Barack Obama: 220 Errors, 37 Warnings (257 problems)
Source: W3C

You would think that with the Democratic party doing anything and everything to get Barack all over the media, news, magazines, to the point where I check under my bed at night to make sure he’s not there, they would have made sure his website was W3C compliant.  If he wins, what does that say about their concern for web standards.  It makes his “net neutrality” talks sound like complete crap.  McCain’s site is not much better than Obama’s but the fact is that McCain’s site is better.  Winning is winning.

You’d think that my selection process would be over, but you would be wrong.

VP Candidates.

I went to JoeBiden.com and SarahPalin.com and both were serious let downs.  Biden freeloads off of Obama’s website.  Palin’s website says “This space intentionally left blank.”  Serious disappointment.  Not even a picture of Palin for me to hang up on the wall of my gun locker.  Biden too… dude what’s up with that?  You gotta have Obama carry you through the whole damn election?  Complete rubbish from both the elephant and the ass.

For giggles, I ran ‘em through anyway…

Sarah Palin: 5 Errors, 0 Warnings

Joe Biden: 72 Errors, 29 Warnings

…and let me tell you, I did giggle quite a bit.

Because of how atrocious both VP candidates’ sites are, I won’t be including them in my decision.  Their awfulness cancels each other out.  If you wanted to play a numbers game though, Biden’s piggybacking on Obama’s site does more hurt than good.

The Tie Breaker.

Don’t listen to my drivel.  This blog post is balderdash.  You shouldn’t judge your presidential candidate based on how compliant their website is with W3C standards, even if I am.  When you don’t like either candidate, you need to pick one small issue that you can judge the candidates on go from there.  That’s the tie breaker.  Could be something as lofty as religious beliefs or something as trivial as who has a better choice of neck ties.

Fact of the matter is, you need to go out and vote, no matter how irrational and illogical your selection process might be.

Update

Just tested Change.gov and I’m slightly more impressed.  Seems like since Obama is now president-elect he is able to rocket past anything McCain could ever compose with a WYSIWYG with a cup of coffee.  He has created quite a website that is pretty damn compliant.

Change.gov: 20 Errors, 3 Warning

This makes me feel much better, because the one thing that keeps me up at night is web standards.  Seems like we’re getting much closer to changing.

Over the past ten years, the way that people identify themselves on the internet has changed drastically.  It’s not quite obvious because the change was very gradual and it has not totally affected every area of the internet.  Despite this, it definitely happened.  It’s almost like when your girlfriend asks you if you think she’s lost weight.  It happened so gradually you didn’t notice but when asked – you notice.  There was a time when someone could jump onto IRC and chat with their friends using a username that had varying value.  The username could be thrown away if its reputation faltered and it could be retained if it had meaning and significance to those that interacted with it.

And Then It Happened.

Social networks erupted onto the internet with a force more powerful than any of the trends we’ve seen in the past, on and off the internet.  MySpace.  Facebook.  LinkedIn.  Some forum and IRC elitests refuted the fact that these sites for people by people were extremely valuable and a great way to associate an online identity with yourself.  They claimed that these networks were for teenagers and emo kids.  They made fun of the pictures that people posted all the while, clinging onto their text based chat and personal blogs linked to a screen name.  In the end, the naysayers were defeated and social networks have become a very real force on the internet.  Now, a lot of those that were once against social networks probably have an account or two of their own.

Why Did It Happen?

It’s hard to pinpoint the cause, but one thing is for sure – people by nature are social.  A place to go and share you lives with your friends is immensely attractive to everyone, even if they deny it.  What’s more is, anyone could signup to a social network and begin building their online identity to mirror that of their real world identity.  The need to know HTML and have a geocities or angelfire account became nullified.  Some people still retained their text based identities on IRC channels and forums, but many people (especially those of the internet brats) had decided to get their own account on a social network.

There Was An Incentive Though, Right?

Absolutely.  The problem with screen names and text based communication is that it is nearly impossible to take credit for what has been accomplished.  With the widespread adoption of social networks came the opportunity to take advantage of your reputation to gain love, money, bragging rights, and just generally enhance your social circles.  Those who understand the concepts of branding themselves have been able to utilize social networks for gains across the board.

Hey But Like Anything, There Is A Risk.

This is true of social networking in a big way.  If one is not careful with what it is they associate themselves with on social networks, they can tarnish their reputation at “internet speed.”  A high ranking person in a Fortune 500 company who posts pictures of their half naked and drunk self will surely have repercussions in the work place.  Aside from maintaining some restraint in the content you post, it is also important to keep on top of where your identity is being used and insure that you are in control of it.  It is a real risk that someone might sign up on a social network as you in order to do and say things that ruin your brand or even exploit others using your good name.

Sort Of Like Social Network Identity Theft.

True but it is much easier to do and get away with.  One thing anyone should do, if you value their online reputation, is to run some searches for your name and make sure no one is using it badly.  You should also consider signing up on social networks that you think you might have an interest in at a later date to prevent someone from beating you to it and stealing your name.  These sorts of things don’t happen that frequently but they can happen and might also be a huge hassal to fix.  Your credit record is a bunch of numbers but your reputation is a complex web of people and stories.  Someone introducing poison to that web can be very difficult to repair.

The identity landscape is changing and we’re all participating in its evolution.  Gone are the days of your disposable screen names – now our online identities can be more valuable (and more difficult to repair) than our credit records.  Our next generation of hiring managers are going to be former internet brats and you can be certain that they will weigh your online reputation heavily when you’re looking for a job.  Protecting and enhancing that reputation should be much higher on everyone’s priority list than ever before.

If you Digg this then you Dugg this.

The typical workflow at Digg is that you go, submit an article, people digg or bury it and if it’s popular and makes it through their algorithm it makes it to the front page.  If you aren’t up for submitting something you can just read the articles, make comments, and digg or bury them.  The comment stream at Digg is really great.  Sure there is a lot of stupid stuff, but the user participation is fantastic.  It’s not uncommon to see a few hundred comments on an article.  Furthermore – you can actually digg or bury the comments.  If people are saying stupid stuff then they can be burried so no one has to look at them.  If you leave a good comment then it can be dugg up so you and everyone else can see what the community is thinking about things today.

More after the jump…

From a general media standpoint, this sort of behavior is extremely valuable.  Not only do you get to see what people care about but you can also see what the majority of people think about a given article.  Since there are so many people on Digg, you can see a huge demographic of people.  The blend of news one gets when they visit the front page ranges from humorous YouTube videos to very serious world news.  This variety means that if you stop by an hour from now there will be more stuff for you to consume, fueling this new found addiction to current “stuff.”  Digg is the drugg dealer and they do it well.

Ok.  Now Let’s Mixx it Up.

Mixx’s approach to the news is very similar to Digg’s.  You submit something, people can vote it up or down, and if it reaches a popularity point then it makes the front page and also appears in the popular section.  This is what people have come to expect from sites like reddit, Digg, and now Mixx.  That’s where the similarities stop though.

When submitting an article you can also fire it off to your followers to alert them that this is something you think they should read.  This is a great way to get tons of up front votes from people you think share your opinion.  To further add to this, there are Mixx communities too.  These communities are often aimed around specific topics, but there are also those like the Mixxing Bowl that provide a fairly even blend of news.  You can also fire off your new submissions to a group and while these people might not be your followers and may even hate your face, they did just get a notification that there is something that they might want to look at.

Mixx’s partnerships with other news outlets enable them to submit stuff to the site fairly rapidly.  This gives those news sites an eye into what people on Mixx care about that they are reporting on.  This sort of thing is pretty valuable but may not be as valuable as something like Digg’s comments… uh oh.  What did I just do?

Round One.  FIGHT!

Mixx and Digg are both plagued by one huge issue – blind voting.  Blind voting is when someone reads your little summary or maybe even just the headline and then votes.  They didn’t read the article – they just voted for some reason.  Maybe because they are dumb heads.  The difference between the communities is that on Digg, people actually write something in the comments about an article.  On Mixx, it’s not uncommon to see an article become popular that no one has even commented on.  Does that mean it just got lucky and received a lot of blind votes?  This sort of trend makes Mixx less valuable to everyone, including the blind voters and especially big media outlets that are trying to get a feel for the public response to their content.  Digg certainly has its fairshare of dumb comments but at least people say something.  This is one of those cases where it’s far better to say something stupid than to keep your mouth shut.  Despite the total lack of comments and gross blind voting, Mixx tends to sway towards a more community oriented site…

Digg Wins.

Round Two.  FIGHT!

In terms of the community aspect of things, Mixx gets it right.  Their communities can greatly enhance the coverage and attention articles get.  Digg has nothing like this short of their new (beta) suggestion system.  Mixx’s groups do a much better job of “suggesting” articles though because the suggestions are coming from the community instead of a random algorithm or a panel of edittors in the Digg offices (wherever they are coming from).  These communities add an extraoridinary amount of value to one’s overall user exerperience on the site though.  If you’re a Mixx user and you’re not in a community then you really should consider joining one.  Communities might be Mixx’s slingshot.  I’m obviously being somewhat extreme here as I don’t think a single feature is going to overthrow Digg.

Mixx Wins.

Round Three…

So people use Digg and Mixx for different reasons and that’s fine.  Mixx has so much potential that is being punched in the balls by the uncaring community that Mixx aims to please.  It’s a shame to see so much in terms of features wasted.  Maybe if Mixx implemented a voting system for comments it would be more attractive to leave a comment rather than simply blind voting.  It’s hard to say.  Digg on the other hand has been rather stale in developments lately and it will be very interesting to see how their new suggestion system plays out in the longer term.  Both sites seem to be aiming down different routes but they could definitely benefit from looking at each other in terms of the user base and features.

Looking Forward.

I do not think that Mixx is going to drag away all of Digg’s users in a single day, but if Digg continues to have problems with their content and begins having rebellions like they did earlier this year then there is a good chance people might stumble over to Mixx and find that they like the features better and just choose to stay there.

Hopefully we have a change in the overall mentality over at Mixx so that there is more participation around articles than simply blind voting.  Whether or not the staff can push through this change or the user base needs to just do it is up to debate.  Something like requiring a higher number of comments for an article to go popular might be a good idea.  Time will tell what direction these sites take though.

Recap

Digg’s user base needs to start using the features it has, comment the hell out of articles, and embrace the community-geared futures so that everyone can benefit.

Digg needs to keep doing what it’s doing and not screw up and piss off the mob.  They could also benefit from some more community-geared features of which they lack today.

Ok So Who Cares?

Well the concern amongst the community right now is that this acquisition went down and it instantly broke any old Summize API requests due to the new URL redirect.  No warning was given and it just kinda happened.  With things starting off in this way, it’s no wonder that the community was feeling a little burned, spewing comments such as “RIP Summize” and other similar statements.  Feeling the heat, Alex Payne asked those following him to @reply with any concerns about the API changes as a consequence of this acquisition (http://twitter.com/al3x/statuses/859262626).  The community eagerly awaits that blog post.

Any Real Reason for Concern?

Looking at things right now?  No.  Twitter has been improving and Summize functions just as it used to (except for the broken API requests and new theme).  There is a great potential for the two services to feed off one another since Summize improved upon Twitter and without Twitter there is no Summize.  There is the obvious concern that having Summize under Twitter control will somehow destroy the great up-time, speed, and reliability of the searching service, but at the same time it might be possible for Twitter to take in the technology used in Summize and adapt it to make the mother service even better.

As a developer that uses Twitter for a number of different things, I hope we see the API for Summize largely untouched and also see the API for twitter enhanced to utilize a lot of the Summize functionality.   This will make developing applications that use Twitter much simpler.  There is an inherent risk though – if this integration does not go smoothly it has the potentional to ruin Summize and also provide Twitter no gain for their $15 million.  Let’s all hope that it works out with a great deal of improvement for everyone.

Alex Payne’s Twitter: here
Search.Twitter Query for Summize: here
Twitter Blog Post on the Aquisition: here

There are the other people that dwell on the internet and use it for socializing or a means of communication with people in the outside world. Social networking and building communities and websites with a “screen name” can draw away from what you have actually accomplished and steal away some of the recognition you deserve.

About 10 or 11 years ago I was sitting there at my computer sending emails back and forth between a friend when they suggested I get an AOL Instant Messenger name to chat with instead. I didn’t understand because I thought AOL was a service one had to pay for. Well I decided to check it out, signed up for a screen name, and got to chatting. It was good.

Over the months following that I registered several screen names in an effort to establish what would later become my first online identity. I used yahoo to search for “something you do” and came up with the word “jive”. Since I claimed myself to be the master of everything I do, JiveMasterT was born (where T is the initial of my last name). This name rode with me for probably 9-10 years. I used it to describe myself in an online world in communities, forums, chatrooms, etc. It was me, and I was JiveMasterT. It was a symbiosis. Hard to believe that’s how it happened.

I’ve recently begun operating in larger social environments and developing connections with people in the real world that I’ve met through the internet. It really began to hit home when I was doing the administrator work for WRXModders.com under the name of JiveMasterT and participating on other Subaru forums with that name as well. Local people would get together for a meet up and everyone would refer to me as JiveMaster or Jive and while this was fun at first I just wanted to be know as Patrick. Shortly after that, it dawned on me that if I wanted to put anything from one of the sites I’ve constructed as JiveMasterT on “Patrick Tulskie’s Resume” that it would lose a lot of the impact due to such an unprofessional name. JiveMasterT was taking credit for my work. JMT was no longer in symbiosis… it had become a parasite.

Throughout the past few months I’ve begun killing off JiveMasterT but it hasn’t been easy. So many people know JiveMasterT and they do not know who Patrick Tulskie is. Fair enough, but that’s something I’ll have to overcome with time. JiveMasterT marked a period of growth from my very young days to about March of this year.

In these days of internet anonymity, many people like to have this blanket over their identity. Myself, I’d rather not. It forces me to be more careful about what I say and what I credit to my name, but it also gives someone instant access to find out about my accomplishments and things that I’ve done, built, constructed said, suggested, etc just by searching through google.

As of today I’ve converted what accounts I can salvage and will attempt to be converting more accounts as time goes on. Sure JiveMasterT might live on in some form or another, but his public presence needs to die so Patrick Tulskie can be free.

RIP JiveMasterT 1999-2008