One more day.

Ameritocracy has launched a new Questions feature that is being used to create an interactive debate-watching experience for its users.

The debate questions posed by the moderator will be posted as they are asked. The candidates’ answers are then posted, and Ameritocracy users will be able to see these statements in isolation just seconds after they are given, giving them the opportunity to fact-check in real time or immediately after the debate.

To participate, all you need to do is sign-up for an Ameritocracy account, and when one of the debates starts go to http://ameritocracy.com/currentdebate.

Ameritocracy is a non-partisan fact-checking site that puts the user first. Combining innovations put forth by websites as diverse as FactCheck.org and eBay.com, Ameritocracy allows users to collaborate in calling into question the accuracy of statements made by politicians, the media, and other public figures.

Twitter has caught on to the mainstream and a number of Republicans are using it to attack young voters. Here is a small selection that has popped up through a search of the words “youth vote.”

gnj46 - If Youth of the nation vote for Obama, that shows your they have small minds

Seriously, check your spelling/grammar before accusing a demographic of having small minds.

aataxi - Youth Vote = uninformed

If you want to check out the back and forth over Twitter during the debate, check out the election 2008 Twitter page for a zeitgeist.

P.S. Stop making the assumption that every voter under the age of 30 is out getting blasted on every Friday night. Seriously.

This post is a simple tutorial that should give you a good grasp on the basics of creating a Sprout widget using Sproutbuilder.

First thing, of course, is creating an account with Sproutbuilder. It’s free and a great addition to your arsenal of online tools.

Once you have an account, you can launch the builder and create a new widget.

You can choose from a number of starting templates or begin with a blank slate. There are many different templates and you can create widgets of a wide variety of sizes and shapes. For the purpose of this tutorial I am starting with a blank slate in the default size of 360 x 280.

Above is a screen shot of your workspace. On the left is your toolbar, at the bottom is your page controls, and on the right you can control the properties of selected elements.

Although you have tools to create a basic background design within the builder, I prefer to use graphics software to create the image elements of my widgets (in my case Adobe Photoshop).

Using Photoshop I created a new image with the dimensions 360 x 280 and designed the master background. Once you are happy with your background, save it for the web and return to the builder.

At the top right of your workspace you will see a tab that says Assets. This is where you can upload and deploy images and other resources into your widget. Upload your background image and then drag the thumbnail onto your workspace. Since the background image is already the correct size for your widget you can set it to its original size on the element properties bar. You can tell it is properly positioned if the x, y, and r values are 0 and w and h are 360 and 280 respectively.

If you are going to be using the same background image for every page of your widget, you will want to do the previous step on the master page background. To work with your master pages, click the master pages tab on the pages toolbar at the bottom of your workspace. You will see two blank pages, a foreground and a background. The background controls the background image for every page, and the foreground allows you to include elements that you want on every page. The advantage to the master pages is that you avoid the repetition of adding a background or elements to every page, as well as ensuring that those elements are always aligned properly.

The first page I am creating will serve as the index page. It is the page that the widget begins on and allows the user to navigate to their desired page. For this widget I am going to make the interface look like a computer terminal, and I am choosing to use that interface for all of my pages. Here is the screen PNG image I created in Photoshop to use as a master foreground element for my pages:

I switch to the pages tab from the master pages and start working on the index. In this case, I am going to create a very simple index using text, though you could use images, buttons, etc. to link to the other pages. To create text you select the text tool on the left-hand bar and you will see a tool set with text box above your page. From here you can select your font, size, and color and enter your desired text. It is important that each link be a separate text element so you can independently link each one to its corresponding page. Once you have created your index you can begin creating your individual pages.

Sproutbuilder offers a ton of options for components to include in your widget. Above your will see the three different categories expanded: Media, General, and Services. With media you can include images, sound, video, or a jukebox that plays a list of uploaded song files. General includes some cool options such as a countdown, which I will use in this widget, a thumbnail menu of your pages for navigation, a timer that can change pages after a certain amount of time has elapsed, buttons, a slideshow, and more. Services allows you to integrate features of outside services into your widget, such as an RSS feed from a site, which I will use, microblogging services, google forms and charts, etc.

I am going to create two pages for this widget: one that displays the last few posts from Future Majority, and one that counts down to election day. On the pages bar I click new to create a new page. It will automatically be populated with the background and foreground elements from the master. For the countdown I will use the text tool to create the headers and the countdown component set to November 4th. You can set the setting for selected components on the right-hand properties bar. For the Future Majority page I use the news feed component and enter the RSS feed address in the properties bar. To add a component all you have to do is click on it in the components bar.

Once all of your components are in place you can begin configuring some stylistic options with the properties tools. To link an element to another page or an external URL, select the element by clicking on it, expand the Links & Tracking portion, and choose which page or enter the appropriate URL. You will use this with the navigation elements on the index page as well as with any back to index elements.

I have also included some actions for some of my elements to add to the widget’s style. I want my text buttons to glow on mouse-over and to delay on load. To do this you expand Effects & Animations. You can choose which state you want to add an effect to: default, mouse-over, mouse-down, page-show, or page-hide. You can add effects and animations to any or all of these states. To create the mouse-over glow I select mouse-over and add two effects: brighten and glow. I set the brighten factor to 25 and for the glow I choose a green color slightly lighter than the font and change the blur to 8. You have a lot of flexibility with your effects, so play with them until you get it just right. To get the text to fade-in one line after another I choose page-show and the fade-in effect. With each subsequent line I increase how long the wait after load is to appear.

The final thing I do when creating a widget is setting the page transitions. You do this from the pages bar at the bottom of the screen. On the right you will see options next to effect. You can choose from none, fade, wipe left, or wipe right. Next to that you can select the transition speed: fast, medium, or slow. For this widget I am just going to use a medium fade.

And that’s it, a basic widget has been created. Let’s see how it looks.

Now this is a very basic widget and a very quick overview. Sprout widgets can be very powerful since they allow you to use Flash, though the Flash design is much more time-consuming and requires some additional skills. I may do a tutorial on creating a Flash-based widget later on, but for now you can create some pretty nice widgets without Flash.

The best way to learn more about the features of Sproutbuilder and widget building is to get your hands dirty and start experimenting yourself. It’s how I learned how to do it, and I’m sure once you start you will come up with a bunch of cool ways to build and deploy Sprout widgets.

Sometimes you need to be able to manipulate images but can’t afford to drop a few hundred bucks on Photoshop. It’s important to resize your photos for a couple of reasons.

First, when you HTML resize on a website the quality of the image at the lower size is diminished and it increases load times since the large image has to be downloaded.

Second, in creating PowerPoint presentations using large images and then shrinking them within the presentation will create a huge file and have the same image degradation.

Yesterday I asked the Friendfeed community about their favorite free image manipulation tools and here is what we came up with.

Web Based Tools

Snipshot - Snipshot has both a free and a pro version that costs $9 a month. The free version is suitable for most of your basic image manipulation needs.

PicResize - A very versatile online photo-editing tool.

PikNik - Online photo manipulation software with a lot of features. A pro version is available for $24.95 a year.

Photoshop Express - An online version of some basic Photoshop features. I actually like using this when I am away from my computer.

Desktop Applications

Shrink-o-matic - This is an Adobe AIR application that enables you to batch resize a large number of images.

Paint.net - A powerful open-source desktop application that is based on the .NET framework.

FastStone - A very fast and easy image browser, converter, and editor.

IrfanView - Application with a lot of features and available plugins.

Windows Live Photo Gallery - Free photo management software from the Windows Live software set. It’s also great for working with photos from digital cameras.

Picasa - Google’s free photo management tool.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) - The most popular free open-source image manipulation software with features that are as close to Photoshop as a free application can get. There is also GIMPShop, which is a GIMP version that emulates the user interface of Photoshop, making the transition easier for existing PS users.

What free image manipulation tools do you use? Share in the comments.

It’s that time when local campaigns are starting to get active, organizations are recruiting and carrying out campaign plans, and people are coming up with ways to improve their campaigns. This is a list of 34 resource/tutorial/tips on campaigns I have written in the last year, all in one place.

1. Creating Pre-Populated Twitter Links

The Let Our Congress Tweet site uses an interesting method to get their supporters to use Twitter to spread their message.

By clicking a link anyone that has a Twitter account is taken to their update page with the pre-populated text “Congress, change the rules. Talk to us on our social networks. http://LetOurCongressTweet.org Let our Congress Tweet! #LOCT08.”

2. Promoting Your Campaign Online

Last week I wrote a post about horizontal segmentation in political communication on my blog, and this post will look at ways you can harness the concept online in promoting your own campaigns.

3. Horizontal Segmentation: Harness the Power of Multiple Media

In his TED lecture, Malcolm Gladwell talks about horizontal segmentation as applied to the food industry. Instead of trying to find the one thing that the majority of people like, you should discover the different varieties of something that people like in order to reach everybody. The concept of horizontal segmentation is also applicable to political communication.

4. Facebook’s Phonebook Feature

Facebook has a new feature that was added to the new and improved Facebook Mobile called Phonebook. Phonebook is exactly what it sounds like: an alphabetically organized list of the phone numbers of all of your Facebook friends that list them.

5. Confirm RSVPs For Facebook Events

I spent this last weekend doing trainings for Arizona high school students who are interested in starting Young Democrats chapters at their schools. In a little experiment, we confirmed that by calling the people that RSVPed as attending or maybe attending to our Facebook event we dramatically increased turnout.

6. Collecting Vote Pledges on the Internet

This last Saturday in Nashville I held trainings on how to use the internet to collect vote pledges. As I promised, I will put some additional resources on here to supplement the training.

7. Build Your Exposure and Spread Your Message With Blog Comments

The more people here your message, the more likely it is to stick with them. This is why it is important to spread your organization’s message as frequently as possible throughout multiple avenues. One of these avenues is the comment sections of blogs.

8. Don’t Hate, Appreciate: Thanking Your Members

One of the easiest ways to lose active members is to take them for granted and not openly appreciating their contributions to your organization. If someone does not feel like they are valued for their work, they might just put their efforts someplace else where they are appreciated. Here are some ways to let your members know that you appreciate their work.

9. Facebook Group Membership Building

A Facebook group is now a staple for youth-oriented organizations and chapters, but building membership isn’t like Field of Dreams: just because you built it doesn’t mean that they will come. You need a strategy in order to build membership in your Facebook group, so here are some tips to help you reach your goals.

10. Your Website as a Fundraising Tool

In terms of online fundraising, there is no resource more valuable than your organization’s website. It is important that your website successfully makes your case to potential donors as to why they should give you their money. Here are some tips to make your website an effective fundraising tool.

11. Using Google Spreadsheet’s Form Tool for Free Online Surveys

As mentioned in my earlier post, I created an online survey using the new form tool in Google Documents asking the questions “where should I move” and “where do you think I will move?”

12. Using Twitter for Your Organization

This post is an attempt to unravel the mystery that is Twitter for the youth organizing community. While Twitter is pervasive amongst the early adopter crowd, it is just now beginning to gain traction with regular internet users.

13. The Bring Back Bondelli’s Blog Strategy

Following the success of the “Bring Back Bondelli’s Blog” strategy (if it wasn’t a success I couldn’t be posting this right now) I thought it might be helpful to explain my methodology and show how you can apply the same techniques for your own causes and campaigns.

14. More Tips on Blogging and Websites

I have come up with some additional tips on blogging and websites since I published my Blogging for Young Democrats Chapters and The Importance of a Quality Website posts. Here are those tips.

15. The Importance of a Quality Website

We have reached the point in the internet revolution where organizational websites are not only common but expected. If you don’t have a website, you don’t appear to exist. With more people using search engines to find information than ever before it is critical that your organization have a strong web presence. This post will cover the importance of chapter websites and ways to improve or start one.

16. Getting the Most Out of Your Members

Chances are that the members of your organization have a wide range of experience, skills, and knowledge that you may not even know about. This post is designed to help you learn what you members bring to the table and how to effectively utilize their skills through goal-setting.

17. Developing a Traditional Media Strategy Part 1: Media Lists and Press Releases

So I have written about reaching out to new media, but it is always important to develop a traditional media strategy to get your message out to print, radio, and television news. This post will help you create a media contact list and learn some best practices about writing and sending press releases.

18. Developing a Traditional Media Strategy Part 2: Working With Reporters

In Part 1 of the Developing a Traditional Media Strategy series I discussed how to create a media contact list and best practices for writing and sending press releases. Today’s post will give you some advice on working with reporters once you have their attention.

19. Developing a Traditional Media Strategy Part 3: Media Monitoring

It is important for you to know what is being said about your organization in both new and traditional media outlets. You may also want to keep track of posts and stories about candidates, issues, and legislation that your organization is interesting in. This post will give you two tips to efficiently monitor the media. These are the methods I use in compiling all the stories in my link posts.

20. Developing a Traditional Media Strategy Part 4: Rapid Response and LTE

This is the fourth and final part of my Developing a Traditional Media Strategy series. Part 1 covered media lists and press releases, Part 2 covered working with reporters, Part 3 covered media monitoring, and this post will cover rapid response and letters-to-the-editor.

21. Making Your Website’s Posts Social Bookmark-Friendly in Textpattern

A lot of state and local chapters use Textpattern for their websites. Sometimes the page templates don’t have adequate textpattern code for the titles of your posts. This means that no matter what page, article, or post is being viewed the same title will appear. While this may not seem like a big deal, it makes a difference on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. I use del.icio.us for my links posts, as do a lot of bloggers. With some chapter sites when I go to add a post it will just show a generic title, for example if it were YDAZ every post would show up as YDAz.org :: The Young Democrats of Arizona. I have to write in every post title that I share. While I am willing to do this, some bloggers won’t, and it can limit your exposure.

22. Blogger Outreach 101

One of the best ways to get your message out to an audience that is likely to be receptive to your message is by working with established bloggers to cover your organization. Good blogger outreach is a subtle art, and this post is a crash course in implementing a strong outreach program.

23. Why You Should Get Involved in Your Local and State Parties

We all know the stereotype of the composition of local and state Democratic Parties: a plethora of old activists that consider anyone under 50 a young Democrat. While this keeps many younger voters from becoming involved in those entities, it would be to your advantage to bite the bullet and take the plunge.

24. Blogging for Young Democrat Chapters

Blogging has grown from being a novelty in political communication to a vital tool for candidates, campaigns, and organizations. This post is designed to guide Young Democrats chapters in developing their blogging strategy.

25. Tips for College Chapters Starting a New Year

It’s that time of the year again when college chapters are looking to recruit new members from the influx of wide-eyed freshmen joining their campuses. Here are are a few ideas for new member recruitment that have been used effectively by chapters in the past.

26. A Perfect Email

Luigi Montanez wrote a great post on TechPresident about the perfect campaign email. He used the recent Hillary Clinton campaign’s Kentucky/Oregon appeal to show exactly what an email should look like.

27. Building Link Posts with Del.icio.us

A couple of people have asked me how I do the link posts on here. I know I have mentioned before that it is through del.icio.us, but I’m going to get more specific in how to do it.

28. Keyboard Shortcut Resources

Most people will never realize the amount of time they will save using keyboard shorcuts unless they actually take them time to make their use a habit. Here is a list of resources for keyboard shortcuts from a number of popular programs.

29. Vote Pledges and Why They Work

Over the weekend Michael wrote about the vote pledge and peer-to-peer program kick-off at the Young Democrats of America conference in Nashville. During the conference there was a lot of excitement about the program and I had great attendance at my trainings on using the internet to collect vote pledges. However, as Michael stated earlier, not everyone is sold on the idea of vote pledges, but I am going to show why they should be.

30. Vote Pledges are Valuable, Even in Heavily Democratic Areas

I just posted an article over on Future Majority about why vote pledges work. There is some debate currently over whether or not it is a valuable use of time to collect vote pledges in areas the tend to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Here is why vote pledges are valuable to the youth movement and the Democratic Party no matter how Democratic the area.

31. Moving Beyond the Low-Hanging Fruit in Youth Organizing

In youth organizing there is also low-hanging fruit: college students. Most organizations and campaigns have primarily focused their efforts on college students because they are the easiest to reach. However, if we are going to evolve as a movement we need to reach beyond just organizing college students and start working on those young voters that are harder to reach.

32. Using Flickr for Your Organization

While many people are aware of Flickr as a photo sharing site, there are a number of features and uses that are underutilized by organizations.

33. Your Organization as a Brand

In the wake of articles discussing the destruction of the Republican brand, it is important to look at our own organizations and chapters as brands.

34. Branching Out Beyond Traditional Party Politics

Traditionally partisan youth political organizations have been based solely on promoting the party and its candidates. Membership has been dominated by hyper-political and super-active aspiring politicians, staffers, activists, and party leaders. With the rise and coming of age of the new Millennial generation, we must branch out and expand membership to those that are not necessarily die-hard party politicos.

+1: Another great resource for online campaigns is Colin Delany’s Online Politics 101, a free pdf ebook. Check out Colin’s site at epolitics.com for additional resources.

A couple of people have asked me how I do the link posts on here. I know I have mentioned before that it is through del.icio.us, but I’m going to get more specific in how to do it.

Go to del.icio.us and set up an account.

Once you have an account, go to settings, and then daily blog posting. From there you will be able to set up your blog with your account, set the time that you want the posts to go up, etc.

I strongly advocate the use of Firefox 3 as a web browser, and if you use Firefox adding links is ridiculously easy. Del.icio.us has an extension for Firefox 3 that lets you add a link just by clicking a button on your toolbar. The picture at the top of the post shows the toolbar button.

And that’s it. I go through my Google Reader and Google Alerts and click the button on the toolbar for anything I want in my link post, and I don’t have to worry about anything else.

If I had a dollar for every time I heard an organization talk about wanting to create their own social network I could buy a couple shares of Google. While you may be looking at my.barackobama.com and thinking “hmm, we could build our own social network like that,” guess what? You can’t.

At Netroots Nation, Matt Browner Hamlin put it this way: if the best-funded Presidential campaign in the history of the world has a hard time creating its own social network and making it work properly, you probably can’t do it. Honestly, you shouldn’t even want to.

Here is Tony Cani’s metaphor: if you found out that young people like to hang out in coffee shops, you aren’t going to build your own coffee shop. You are going to go to the ones that people already hang out in.

Your time, energy, and money are much better spent actually reaching out to people on the social networks they already use instead of trying to create your own, encourage people to use it, and then be responsible for not only outreach but running a social network itself. But let’s be honest here, the people aren’t going to go to your social network anyway.

At the Arizona Democratic Party, we had the BlueStateDigital social networking component that both the DNC and the Obama campaign use. Tony Cani was the first person to try to get it to take off, I was the second. No matter how much I tried to get our supporters on to our social network to use those tools, it just wouldn’t happen. I would have to go to Facebook and MySpace instead.

Here is one of the big problems. People are getting to the point where they have account overload. People only have a finite amount of attention to give their social networking profiles. If you spent the time required to be active on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Windows Live, Yahoo360, Livejournal, MyBO, DNC Partybuilder, as well as networks for other things it would be more than a full-time job. That is why campaigns pay people to run these profiles for them. Users are going to remain on the social networks that give them the most value, which normally means the social network most of their contacts are active on. A social network without users has no value, and that is exactly what you are thinking about building.

So instead of trying to start your own social network, think about the demographic of people you are trying to reach out to and establish yourself on the networks they frequent, whether it’s college students on Facebook, young latino(a)s on MySpace, etc.

Still think it is worthwhile to create your own social network? Tell me why I’m wrong in the comments.

The Let Our Congress Tweet site uses an interesting method to get their supporters to use Twitter to spread their message.

By clicking a link anyone that has a Twitter account is taken to their update page with the pre-populated text “Congress, change the rules. Talk to us on our social networks. http://LetOurCongressTweet.org Let our Congress Tweet! #LOCT08.”

#LOCT08 is a Twitter hashtag that allows them to track the people that are sending tweets about their site, as well as allows them to create the tweet timeline using the Twitter API.

Hashtags and the Twitter API are a whole other deal that I will cover in later posts, but I wanted to make sure everyone knew why that was there.

To create your own pre-populated tweet link just format a link as follows:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Insert your message

If you want to add a hashtag or link just include them in the message:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Just learned about Twitter pre-populated links at http://www.kevinbondelli.com Check it out! #KB708

And here is the link in action, feel free to send the tweet:

Just learned about Twitter pre-populated links at http://www.kevinbondelli.com Check it out! #KB708

Flowgram - Flowgram is a screen-casting tool that lets you walk people through the use of a website, comment on items online, or a number of other applications with audio and text commentary.

SlideRocket - SlideRocket is an online presentation application that allows you to create rich presentations with a lot of features, effects and transitions. You can see one I made here.

Summize - Summize lets you search the Twitterverse for keywords to see what people are tweeting about your organization or cause.