The Sunlight Foundation went into the weekend with a hit piece on the much-maligned re-designed GOP.com. Over at TechRepublican, James Richardson started the week with a well-researched rebuttal, noting that Sunlight missed a couple of items in the shadows in decrying the projects price tag.
But for the site’s well-documented technical faults, on the internet content is king, so there’s at least reason to laud the Republican new media operation: The Facebook Friendship Fairness Czar application. The application tallies the number of your friends and assesses a “tax” reflecting how many you have over the average Facebook user’s 120-friend total. It’s a pretty neat way to needle the Obama Administration’s tendency to entrust policy decisions to executives with no Congressional oversight. The postcard alerting you of your tax is actually kind of funny, too:
Facebook is a necessity for any new media operation – even MySpace knows that now. That means finding creative ways to connect and keep people coming back. Even if GOP.com has its problems, at least the Republican party is thinking strategically.
Jim Eltringham 