Just over a year ago, I wrote about 76 presidential candidates and how they rank on the web. I gave each one’s campaign site my own “web score”, which was pretty much just their Alexa rank divided by their Google Page Rank. Since then, Alexa has changed their algorithm, but Obama remains the clear web leader. But what about the other candidates? What happened to the campaign sites of those who dropped out long ago? Let’s take a look.
Obviously, I’ll be skipping Obama and McCain, because they’re still in the running. If you want to read about them or their sites, there’s a million people talking about that elsewhere. Instead, I’d like to focus on some of the more notable ex-candidates: Hillary Clinton, Ron Paul, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Joe Biden (yeah… he was running against Obama a year ago), Fred Thompson, and Dennis Kucinich. For each, I’ll show you what their site looks like now, and I’ll add my thoughts where appropriate.
Hillary Clinton
As you probably know by know, Hillary Clinton gave up on her fierce race against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination and is now supporting Obama in his campaign.
Ron Paul
Also still active and up-to-date is Ron Paul’s site.
John Edwards
With some pages missing completely (like Blog / News) and most everything else not updated since January, John’s site is a virtual ghost town where a presidential candidate used to live online. Today there’s just a Thank You message and memories of a failed campaign.
Mitt Romney
Like many, Romney converted his site into a political action committee (PAC) site, dedicated to continuing support for causes he believes in.
Rudy Giuliani
Here’s a guy who has a different way of doing things and continues to prove it. Although his site seems to have been updated to remove the rest of his campaign information, you can still contribute. Well, the form is there, but I’m not sending any money. Feel free to try it yourself and let me know.
Mike Huckabee
Mike transformed his site, like others, to a PAC, “HuckPAC”. While he talks about issues that he feels are important, he jams out on bass guitar and promotes his books.
Joe Biden
Remember when he was running AGAINST Obama? Now Joe is Barack’s running mate and very possibly our next Vice President. I guess if you can’t beat ‘em, run with ‘em.
Fred Thompson
Fred has been running around with John McCain, supporting his campaign, but his site is all about FredPAC.
Dennis Kucinich
Finally, my favorite transformation has been Dennis Kucinich’s site’s move from presidential campaign launch pad to whatever this is.
Image by chucks via FlickrAbout a week ago, I reviewed a blogging tool called Zemanta. I was very excited about it, but my excitement faded as I clumsily tried to test the software with the very review I was writing. It left me scratching my head and promising to revisit the topic after some more hands-on time with Zemanta. As promised, here’s part two of my Zemanta review.
I am going to keep this one short because I’ve already explained what Zemanta does and how it’s used. I will talk a little about what else I’ve learned in the last week and correct some assumptions from my previous review.
Giving photos a chance again
In my previous review, I choked on the photo adding capabilities of Zemanta. It seemed to me that photos would vanish. This still appears to be the case for me with FireFox 3 on Vista. I find that images will still occasionally vanish, but I have a much better handle on things now. If I want an image, I simply click on it on the right side. If I want a different image instead, I just click a different image. While I am much more comfortable with it, I still have a few suggestions for the developers.
1. I need more images to choose from. I seem to get the same geisha girl with a laptop every time I start a post.
2. Allow me to use more than one image per post.
3. An image should always be placed where the my cursor was in my editing text area before I clicked the image. Every time I add an image, it’s always top right aligned and sometimes, I want it down with the paragraph it relates to.
I have figured out how to add more images sources (like my Flickr account), though it still seems a bit limited. Still, even if I could only add my own images from Flickr, Zemanta saves me a step.
Links make a little more sense now, too.
If you don’t understand Zemanta’s link suggestion tool, it can be a little cumbersome. I guess I always just expect something to happen at my cursor position when I use a tool. When you click a link from one of the drop-downs named after the words they will link, it creates a contextual link for you. This is handy mostly for reference links, but will be nice if their link choices some day include other blogs that will give me trackback links. Currently, they mostly go to Wikipedia, which is to be expected while they grow. If you install Zemanta, be sure to add your own blog and Flickr account so your resources will be available to the rest of us and you’ll get lots of link love.
SEO tags and my apology
This is one area where Zemanta shines and I owe them an apology. The SEO tags functionality does a pretty good job of guessing some tags I would think of that I would normally have to type in as well as some that would have slipped my mind. When I’m done with my post, I just click the tags I want and they’re added. Then I manually add any remaining tags that I want. It’s another time-saver and it works just as it should, despite what I said previously.
Filter, My Stuff, and Preferences
Since I’ve continued to play with Zemanta, I’ve found more that needs to be written about. “Filter” and “My Stuff”, for example, are options just above your image choices. They both make sense given their names. Filter gives you a text box to filter images by keyword. If you happened to type about 100 different things but you’re looking for a photo of a puppy, you can filter images for “puppy” and get what you need faster. “My Stuff” just narrows the image pool to your own images.
Preferences is a whole area I had previously missed. It hides at the bottom of the Zemanta panel. When you click the link, a new window pops up with your preferences page. Included are “Image Position”, which lets you choose the horizontal alignment of your image, “HTML Code Style”, which allows you to choose between standard HTML and xHTML, and “Signature Image”, which is where you choose what style of “re-blog” image you want at the foot of your post (or none). The preferences page includes two additional sections called “Personal” and “My Stuff”. The Personal section allows you to add a bit of personal information, as well as an Amazon.com associates ID. I added mine, but if I happen to mention my favorite movie, Dream a Little Dream, Zemanta offers links to IMDB, Wikipedia and Rotten Tomatoes, but not to Amazon. I am excited about seeing that work, though. The My Stuff section is where you ad your stuff, of course. Here, you can identify your Flickr account, add your social networks, and add blogs and other sources.
My new verdict : Install it
As I said before, I’ve installed the FireFox plugin, so if I ever dislike it, I can remove it. The posts will still have the “Re-Blog” or “Zemified” footer links, but I think it may be a keeper.
CONS:
- Only one image
- Images always at the top
- Amazon links not an option yet?
- Seemingly limited sources
PROS:
- Add images in a snap
- Add tags easily
- Suggests tags I might forget
- Provides resource links
- Provides a means for others to find and use my media and posts
The minor cons can be fixed pretty easily, I think, and the limited resources will improve as more people use it, I feel. My excitement for Zemanta is renewed, and I can’t wait to watch it grow. If you install it, drop a link below to your first Zemanta post and let us know what you think.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=5edb5d98-f704-494f-b267-a2f03f3192cd)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=d218a986-9fda-49a7-a6bb-8cb90a82b871)
