| For those of you who are not already aware, the blogosphere is engaged in a massive crowdsourced search engine optimization project called Searching for John McCain spearheaded, by Chris Bowers over at Open Left. TJ wrote about it here last week, but the basic gist is that: 1. Nine articles were researched and selected for being reputable source, having McCain's name in the title, and the title and article containing honest reporting about the highly conservative nature of McCain's ideology. 2. Active participants are changing their signatures and linking to these articles in blog posts and comments wherever and whenever applicable. Since Soapblox disallows any scripting elements in blog posts, I've created a custom page to share several tools and widgets we've created to assist in the search engine optimization of McCain, and increasing the awareness of the project to get more participants. Additional instructions are detailed over there. The linking part is where we come in--creating links manually is time consuming and can require some technical skill. So we've created a bookmarklet button that you can add to your Bookmarks Bar and click on to convert all references to John McCain and McCain into links to these articles no matter what page you are on. Whether you're writing your own blog post, or a comment at some other site (Blue Oregon, Kos, OpenLeft--doesn't matter!), once you've got the button in your toolbar, all you do is click it after you've written something in a text box with the name McCain as one or more of the words. (Note: The button below is for display only; the one you can drag to your toolbar is at the custom page.) The bookmarklet is the 'killer app' that will allow us to virally spread these links (so go install it right now), but there is also: 1. an html widget to create an ad banner that can be customize link to any of the nine articles. 2. a flashy scrolling banner that contains all nine links, and 3. a javascript widget that shows a randomly selected link within the banner each time the page is refreshed. So please visit the widget page and share these tools with all your friends! While these tools were created for Searching for John McCain , if it works out well, they can easily be converted to do the same thing for, say... Gordon Smith? |