Political Web Strategy (PDF download). Our white paper provides an introduction to thinking about your website as a platform for building a community of support:

"Web 2.0 sites are not collections of pages so much as collections of programs that can do things. For example: forms, forums, blogs, shopping carts, news feeds, info graphics, calendars, maps and fundraising thermometers... Web 2.0 has enabled the extension of web presence beyond the home site. It’s an important part of a political web strategy to take advantage of this kind of extension. For example: YouTube."

Good Job, or Good Work? A blog post at O'Reilly Digital Media: "Under the terms defined by Harvard researcher Howard Gardner, a friend and collaborator of Goleman's, Good Work is 'a calling that combines excellent performance, expresses one's ethics and offers a pleasing sense of engagement.' This post describes what organizations can learn from Obama for America on the subject of Good Work.

Why Are TV Commercials So Loud? A Reader's Digest article that quotes Spencer:

"Spots are noisy because they can be. The FCC doesn't make any regulatory distinctions between the sound levels of commercials and the sound levels of programs. 'The peak levels of commercials don't exceed the peak levels of programming,' admits Spencer Critchley, a communications consultant in California.

'But the experience is similar to having a flashbulb go off every now and then versus a spotlight shining in your eyes all the time.' In other words, an entire commercial can be broadcast at the same level as an extra-loud (but fleeting) explosion on 24."

All You Need to Know About Creativity, in 48 Pages. "When I worked in Silicon Valley, I realized after a short while that a big part of my job as a manager amounted to finding ways to help people be creative. After all, if you have a collection of very smart employees, it's wasteful to just tell them what to do - they probably know more than you do about the challenge at hand. So I started collecting my own thoughts on the subject... But only recently did I come across a slim, decidedly non-academic volume that, it turns out, pretty much said it all back in the 1940's: A Technique for Producing Ideas, by James Webb Young."

10 Journalism Tips For Bloggers, Podcasters & Other E-Writers. "1. Respect the value of people's time. Anyone who publishes is making a deal with their audience: This will be more rewarding than real life would have been. Know your point, get to it quickly, and make your content dense with value. We live in a narcissistic age, and free access to world-wide distribution is not helping. We all need to remember: It's not fascinating just because I said it."

The News Business Is Broken in the Digital Age - If You're an "ee", Not If You're an "er". "All businesses are essentially risk models: Managers devise ways to package risk in a way that they can sell for a profit. If I'm running a news business, my risk model used to be that I was taking a lot of upfront risk in paying reporters, editors and others to find and prepare the news, which I could resell to advertisers, subscribers and news stand customers. But if I can now get citizen journalists to contribute content for free, I'm transferring my upfront risk to them... I think there's a potential cost to all of us, regardless of whether our jobs are affected. That's because the risk traditionally taken on by news organizations includes the potentially huge liability involved in performing an essential service to democracy: investigative reporting. By "investigative" I don't mean gossip & gotchas or clip jobs, I mean developing sources, interviewing experts and poring through references, files and databases."