In The Know

Have you wondered how an opt-in or opt-out contract works on the Internet when the person consenting is not an adult?

Most contract law requires a person to be of legal age, typically 18, to enter into a legally enforceable agreement. Minors can enter into a contract but it is voidable until they are 18 years of age.

One should consider parental consent a good first step for a child to give away their rights, in this case their internet identity to advertisers to mine, market and advertise.

This will be brought before a judge in a class action lawsuit filed in California against Facebook for the use of the “like” button.

California law requires parental consent in order to obtain a minor’s consent for using their name or likeness for an advertisement.

Facebook doesn’t do that according to the lawsuit, which you can read more about here.

Lawsuits like this one could result in anyone under 18 having to get their parents’ permission to sign up for Facebook for which a system like Integrity is very effective in ensuring that the parent is indeed in control of their child’s digital identity.

Michael Bolcerek
Senior Vice President of Business Development for Integrity

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Keeping Your Website Content Fresh

We all know that the best way to keep traffic coming back to a website is to kee the content fresh and interesting. But the challenge is, how to do that with limited time and resources?

One of our favorite ways to accomplish this goal is by incorporating widgets into our clients’ website content. There are a ton of politically minded widgets available, and many of them don’t cost anything.

A few examples:

WidgetBox has a free app that will let you create your own widget from any blog, RSS feed, flickr account, and a host of other sources. I created one for our blog (posted below).

OpenCongress has a Bill Tracker widget that will post the most recent status of any bill in Congress.

Need some additional ideas about how to keep your web content fresh? Give us a call!

Amy Meli
Director, Grassroots Services

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As with social networking or blogging, the Internet search industry has gone through significant changes since the initial Internet boom of the 90’s.  This can be seen in AOL shifting to providing content or Google looking to change how we interact with the Internet.  Another major change occurred this week with the news of an impending partnership between Yahoo! and Microsoft, further homogenizing the options users have in their search for information over the Internet.

While there may still be other options available to users (Wolfram Alpha for example) this partnership sees Yahoo! abandoning its own search technology in favor of Microsoft’s “Google killer” Bing.  Although users will still be able to access Yahoo! Mail, Flickr, etc…it begs the question whether Yahoo!’s content will be able to keep individuals who were using Yahoo! as an alternative to Google/Microsoft search giants; or if users will even notice the difference?

Many predict that they won’t; and that in the end is a good move for Yahoo! as they have been steadily losing market share when it comes to their search product anyway.  Although it is sad to see an original Internet pioneer lose its teeth to a larger company, it will be interesting to see how Google will respond to Microsoft’s challenge that there can be more ways than one to search the ‘net.

– Will Lubetkin

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More and more, it’s becoming clear that Twitter is a viable tool for grassroots organizing and issue advocacy – Organizing for America (the DNC) has jumped on board this week with a new tool that encourages people to contact their Senators through Twitter to voice their support for health insurance reform.

It’s simple. Enter your zip code, and a tweet is automatically generated and directed to your senator – including hashtags that allow the tweets to be cataloged and tracked. The public nature of Twitter – along with the ability for anyone on the service to track and engage with others using the provided hastags – could make this more effective than more private forms of constituent communication (calls, letters, emails). It’s a way to make your voice heard – not only by your Senator’s office, but by anyone and everyone who can see your Twitter feed.

How effective will this be? Too early to tell. Stay tuned.

- Jenny Towns

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Once in a while, the Aristotle candy blogger takes a break away from sweets and dips her toe into technology news.  For instance, the time Francoise shared her insights into the Amazon Kindle and Grassroots.

Neither Francoise nor I own a Kindle for the same reason: cost.  But there may be hope as eWeek.com reports:

Amazon dropped the price of its Kindle 2 e-reader to $299 from $359 with little fanfare, though it suggests Amazon hopes a $60 price cut will make the device more attractive in an increasingly competitive market.

Is $60 of savings enough?

Money aside, the Kindle urges you to give up more than a chunk of your paycheck (for the relief of never having to lug a hardback around), it urges you stop reading books.

Stop reading, in the traditional sense at least. I like loosing myself as I hurriedly turn the pages slugging into DC each morning. I like walking to work from the metro, nose in a book, scarcely avoiding oncoming traffic and bikers. Would it be the same to scroll through on a screen?  I don’t think so… I contend that I stare at a screen far too much already – with the computer eight hours at work and the TV for a few hours when I get home.

It also brings up a larger question – what will you pay for convenience? Amazon is hoping the answer is $299, and maybe it’s working.  We’ve seen the proof down the street with Trovers Bookstore closing after 51 years — people are buying fewer books.  Is Kindle that start of a revolution or just the next toy for an increasingly technology-obsessed nation?

– Kristi Grant

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Social Media, Web 2.0,  SEO rating … it can make you dizzy sometimes, just trying to keep up. One of the beauties of this new space is all the opportunities to share information. After all, that’s the point right – web 2.0 is the fluid give and take, the interactivity of communication, information and web geeks across traditional boundaries.

I was in my element today – I participated in 352 Media Group’s (free) webinar titled “Making Your Web Site Appeal To Both Customers & Search Engines.” It was great – very informative and the perfect level of “tech talk” and English.

Here’s your crash course. SEO = Search Engine Optimization. Your SEO rating determines how high (or low) you appear in search results. Why is this important? Well, when’s the last time you scrolled through to Google’s 15th results page when you were searching for a new vendor, a nearby restaurant or an interesting blog? Chances are you choose from the results on the first page, maybe even limiting your selection to the first few choices. So how do you get on the first page? How do you get above the fold? Increase your SEO!

Few highlights that help your SEO ratings from the webinar (click here to view the webinar when it’s posted):

1. Reserve some real estate on your home page for flash to draw in the user and use alt tags, with your full company name (if possible), to increase your search engine optimization because search engines can’t “crawl” or read images without the alt tags.
2. Use a Recent News Feed widget to ensure consistent updated content on your home page.
3. Include “live text” with the most popular keywords for your industry, products or services repeated as much as possible while still maintaining realistic verbiage. Live text is any text you can scroll over and select (Note: Images that include words are not considered live text and can not be read by search engines).

Check the webinar for information on establishing keywords through Google’s free adword search, comments on domain name options/importance, tips for embedding searchable YouTube videos and the strategies for link backs. Or read even more tips, from Google!

As the organizers reminded us, page ranking takes a long time to grow, so be patient!

- Kristi

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VoterListsOnline.com is Aristotle’s 24/7 online voter database – simply register (for free!) and you have instant around-the-clock access to purchase and dowload highly customizable voter data. You can select and target through a comprehensive selection of demographics including: political district, political party affiliation, gender, ethnicity, marital status, wealth, educational level and presence of children.

If you’ve visited VoterListsOnline.com before, you’ll notice that we’ve gotten a bit of a facelift this week – but that’s not all. We’ve also made a series of upgrades and additions to our core VoterListsOnline system. We’re pleased to offer you our most comprehensive, innovative voter data product to date.

With the new VoterListsOnline system, you can:

- Easily edit your search as you go – if you’re building a query and need to make a change in one of the steps, you can go back and make the change without having to rebuild your query from step one.
- Generate counts much more quickly.
- Search using geo-spatial selects and hundreds of additional fields.
- Save all query and export templates for easy access next time you login
- Purchase Premium Fields, including:
          Home purchase/mortgage/refinance information
          Presence/ages of children per household
          Magazine subscriptions
          Hunting/fishing licenses
          Charity contributions
- Additional polling options – including Targeted Random Sampling and Normalized Sampling
- Access your “shopping cart” to purchase more than one file at a time.

We hope you like what you see! If you have questions, issues, or feedback we’re here 24/7 at vlosupport@aristotle.com or 800.243.4401. We want to hear from you.

- The Aristotle VLO Team

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I do not own a Kindle. I’m not opposed to them, it’s just not high on my list of purchase priorities. Ahead of it in line are a new a pair of running shoes, and a Wii.

As a result, I hadn’t put much thought into using the Kindle, until I caught this article.

“MT Congressman challenger Tyler Gernant (D) raised the bar jut a bit higher for technologically savvy campaigning this week when he became (his camp says) the first candidate to offer campaign materials on the Amazon Kindle.

“A lot of people have asked me, you know, ‘why are you doing this?’” he said in an interview. “But then again, a lot of people said that about websites, too. Our thought was, if we do this, we have a chance at people engaging.”

Kindles are still not widespread, but I think they will continue to grow in popularity, and this is a tactic worth keeping in mind. Candidates and politicians, interest groups and corporations are always looking for new and more effective ways to engage voters and supporters, and this might prove to be a good one.

It has the added benefit of cutting back on traditional paper literature and being less wasteful. But will people respond to it the same way as traditional political literature? Genant sure thinks so. From his website:

So if you own a Kindle, Kindle 2 or are going to get the new Kindle DX and want to share Tyler’s issue positions with your friends at coffee shops, the airport, the park or even door-to-door to talk to your neighbors, this is an innovative way to do it and you won’t have to lug around a bunch of loose paper.

In the end, Genant will need to transform his Kindle subscribers into votes, and we’ll see if he can. But in the meantime, add Kindles to your ever-growing list of ways to reach out to voters and constituents.

- Francoise

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Sitting here at the Politics Online conference, it strikes me that I’m hearing two streams of thought emerge. One is that technology is now the core reason for success in politics. The second is that technology is another tool in a larger tool box that goes hand in hand with the rest of the things we do to make our campaign, organization, or PAC successful.

After 10 years of being in the political technology business it’s my stance that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Technology certainly makes our political lives easier and we’ve made techological strides in the last few years, but it’s still just one of several tools in our toolbox. We make an effort to use direct mail, phone banking, and canvassing all in the right spots, but it seems some people just want to use technology in order to use it - in other words, they use it without matching to the overall strategy.

One last thought… I would warn all of those who refuse to grab hold of the e-revolution in politics, but I would also equally warn all of those who say it is the only way to go. Choose either path at your own peril. Only campaigns that use all the tools available will be successful moving forward.

- Chuck Harris

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Software companies routinely release upgrades to their applications. Aristotle International performs scheduled releases to our AI360 application to provide our clients with enhanced feature updates and improved system performance. You can locate the latest list of updates by going to Help>New Editions in the AI360 application.

With any release, there are always the possibilities of bugs being introduced regardless of the extensive and rigorous tests performed. The solution is to quickly identify and correct the issues. Let’s say you found a bug and placed a call into our knowledgeable Technical Support Team, who are available 24/7. How are the bugs tracked and exterminated after the initial call? The most efficient way is via a bug tracking software. Aristotle fully utilizes this technology to exterminate bugs.

There are numerous bug tracking software available. A good bug tracking software package will allow you to assign issues, provide status updates, and generate reports and statistics on problem areas. The following site does a good general comparison of some of the applications available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems#Bug_tracking_systems

-Trinh Cao

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