Sneak Peek:  Erick Erickson speaks to a stand-only crowd at the first annual TechRepublican Digital Bootcamp, powered by Google.

5 Buzz Tips

Now that people have been playing with Google Buzz in Gmail for a week and we've rolled out the improvements we announced here over the weekend, we wanted to let you know about some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Buzz. Here are five tips to get you started.

Once Skeptics, Brands Drink the Facebook Koolaid

Just 15 months ago, Procter & Gamble Co.'s top digital-advertising executive had some serious reservations about Facebook as a marketing tool.

Now, the world's biggest marketer wants all of its brands to get a presence on Facebook this year and has recently opened a research-and-development office in Palo Alto, Calif., not far from Facebook's headquarters, in an effort to co-develop capabilities in digital and social media.

An Early Peek at the Politics Online Conference

RootsCamp’s surely gonna rock this weekend, but it’s not the only great online politics event sitting on the horizon: be sure to head over to the all-new Politics Online Conference site (big improvement over the old layout, y’all) and check out the initial agenda. Lots o’ great topics, and a clear departure from some of the stuffier panel titles of past years. Nice work, guys! See you April 19th.

Modern Ettiquette: How to Decline Facebook Friends Without Offence

A colleague I just met at work has invited me to be their friend on Facebook. I don't want to offend them, but nor do I want to share my candid photos and lousy Scrabble scores with someone I hardly know.

Can I ignore their invite?

Measuring Tweets

As a member of the Twitter analytics team, part of my job is to measure and understand growth. The graph above tells a story of how we've grown over the past three years in terms of number of tweets created per day. Please note that tweets from accounts identified as spam have been removed so the counts in this chart do not include spam.

I want your opinion:

What makes a truly modern candidate? Is a candidate born ready for YouTube moments? Can he or she learn to resonate with an online audience?

Last week, Patrick Ruffini started this discussion and offered several attributes that make a candidate pop online.

Candidate 2.0:

*Is Authentic

*Is able to generate an offline narrative that translates well online

*Demonstrates respect for the blogging community and understands the modern user

The conversation continued at this week's Politics Online Conference at a panel on how online video is changing political conversation. Speakers like Jason Barnett of The UpTake, talked up the relationship between the camera and the candidate and the user experience.

Certainly, video is the number one way a candidate can connect with a voter online. I hope to continue to discuss ways that candidates can connect with voters at the Leadership Institute's Internet Activist Schools next week.

Are you connecting?

It's day two of IPDI's Politics Online Conference and I just sat through a great panel titled, "Practical Data Strategies for Mobilization."

The Panelists:
*Dave Leichtman, Technical Project Manager, Blue State Digital
*Clay Johnson - Founding Partner, Blue State Digital
*Ben Self - Founding Partner, Blue State Digital
*Judith Freeman - Co-founder and CEO, New Organizing Institute

The panel talked about practical ways to manage and use large amounts of data.

Ben on integrating data:

Integration is not a family value. Unless there's a good reason to integrate different data, it's an easy to waste a lot of time and money.

Accountability:

The beauty of the Internet is that it's brought a new level of accountability to politics. You no longer have to wonder if an ad is going to work. Upload it to Youtube and see if people watch it.

Four principals for managing data in politics:
1. You need to be able to draw a straight line between what you want to do and if gets your candidates elected.
2. What do we already have that gets us there? As opposed to reinventing the wheel.
3. How do we measure success?
4. Do a small, cheap test. Speed should take priority over almost anything else.

Julie

Organize data in a way that makes testing analytics as easy as possible.

Clay

The first thing an organization needs to do is know, what data do you have? And then, who needs the data?

SQL

SQL is easy to use. Sit down and learn SQL, even if you're just a blogger.

User-Interface Matters

User interfaces really matters, especially on the editorial side. A bad UI makes you want to use the program less. It's the difference between taking five seconds to approve a comment vs. one second. Those four seconds becomes extremely valuable over time.

The panel was one of the most informative I've been to at this conference, and now I'm motivated to learn SQL. Apparently it's easier then learning French.

A personal gripe for conference attendees:
I think it's extremely rude to ask a highly personalized question to a panel/speaker and expect a highly personalized response while the rest of the audience is forced to listen.

My organization wants to build application x - what should we use to build this?

Seriously? Can't you just wait until after the panel to ask your question and not waste everyone's time?

Off to lunch now. Yesterday's meal was gourmet, so I hope today's lunch lives up to past precedence.

For the next two days I'll be at IPDI's Politics Online Conference, in downtown Washington, DC.

I'm looking forward to listening to some excellent speakers and breakout sessions through out the next few days and I'll try and blog about conference highlights as much possible here on techRepublican.

Right now, I'm sitting in the main ballroom listening to a panel discussion on "Pervasive Politics: How Ubiquitous Technology Will Change Politics & Government" moderated by IPDI director Julie Germany.

Adam Greenfield, who describes himself as a "futurist" (what a great job title) gave his pick for the top five technologies (although he only listed four) on the horizon that will shape our everyday lives over the next five years.

1. RFID - Radio-frequency identification
Transforms the way we interact with digital technology, from something we're highly aware of, to something that happens in the background.

2. IPv6
The address space is much longer allowing for almost unlimited internet addresses. Every single object in the world can have it's own web address. This is particularly powerful when combined with RFID because it allows every object in the world to have a location on the internet - from a rivet on a truck to a package at a store.

3. UWB - Ultra wide-band networking

4. WiMAX
Tech standards that replace wi-fi.

On the same panel, Jonathan Taplin while discussing how established entities have tried to put their heads in the sand and ignore the online revolution said,

Mark Penn has tried to ignore power of the internet.

The quip received light applause.

Stay tuned for more.

UPDATE: 4:45PM

I'm sitting in on David's panel on the Long Tail of Politics. David's brought together a killer panel, including: Zack Exley — Co-Founder and President, New Organizing Institute; Matt Salisbury – Republican Candidate for Congress (Idaho-1); Clay Johnson — Founder, Blue State Digital, and Andrew Rasiej - founder of the Personal Democracy Forum. Cyrus Krohn was supposed to be on the panel, but couldn't make it due to a family emergency. But Andrew stepped up and took his place.

Some quips that stood out to me.

Zack:

It's not the cool tools. People are inspired by the message, not by the tools. No one signed up for Barack Obama's email list because his website was cool.

Matt:

For me the Long Tail of politics is that I'm a virus that I'm uploading into the conservative message machine. I can reach Idahoans and conservatives across the country on a limited budget and they can donate a dollar to my campaign.

Andrew:

Our notion of success is getting elected, but it's really a marketplace of ideas.

They may not have won, but they got their ideas out into the marketplace.