notes from across the pond

I was browsing Bobby Jindal’s website this afternoon and thought I’d check out his blog. I’m always intrigued by how political candidates use campaign blogs. They can be the most banal things, but when done right can also be very informative.

The latest entry is this:

Anyone who’s signed up for Jindal’s email updates knows that he’s on, what he calls, his Fresh Start Tour. Although a little odd for a blog entry, I assumed this was an interactive map and therefore excusable as a blog entry. At least I could follow Jindal on the campaign trail. How wrong I was!

I clicked on the map and it took me to the jpeg, no explanation of where Jindal had been and why, no photos, no videos, no nothing. If you don’t believe me you can check out Jindal’s blog yourself. This is surprising considering the rest of the site is awash with news and video of Jindal’s Fresh Start Tour. The campaign has even gone so far as to post an extensive array of photos from the tour on Flickr.

What was even more shocking was that Jindal’s campaign team have posted one of these map images each day for, wait for it, the last 10 days since the tour started! There are no written posts in between despite a number of posts, supposedly from Jindal himself, in July and June.

The maps, the photos and the videos are well and good, but with some simple adjustments Jindal’s campaign team could have made them much more meaningful by combining them as a whole in an interactive map. Regular readers will know I am a huge fan of interactive maps as visual means of telling a political story. Instead, they are left with a disparate array of potentially useful tools failing to achieve their maximum impact.

In light of Google’s announcement yesterday of Really, No Seriously, Easy Google Maps, this is a pretty heinous error. Especially as a quick search reveals there are already various free tools out there for embedding Google My Maps into blogs and websites, such as that provided by Daniel Rubin and Ongopongo. Jindal’s campaign team is not exactly short of money either.

For someone like myself, a political consultant who specializes in utilizing the Internet for political campaigning, this is all very disheartening. No doubt, some wise guy will use Jindal’s substandard online operation as evidence that blogs, photos via Flickr and videos are ineffective political campaign tools. I hope this post goes some small way to explaining why that wise guy is wrong.