Unity08

Unity08 launched this morning – as promised. It’s actually not a bad offering. The action center looks frighteningly similar to the GOP.com action center and the BC04 action center – so those of us involved in either should feel flattered.

Judging by Nicco Mele’s place on the Founder’s Council, I suspect he had a hand in putting this together. I find that odd given his prominent role in the Dean campaign in 04, but I hear he’s now advising McCain, so I suspect his support for the liberal Dean was based more on his outsider status than his ideology.

The site isn’t bad. It has a couple of technical problems and makes a couple of strategic mistakes.

First, the contact page is a mess. The comment field is 19 characters wide by 2 high. That’s atrocious. Leaving a comment is a horrible experience. It’s made worse by the fact that you are limited to 250 characters.

On the strategic side, they have limited your options for showing support to giving them money, or e-mailing friends. It would be very easy to create a graphic bug that supporters could place on their site and help advance the agenda.

I have a lot of friends in the political internet realm and none of them had heard of this effort. That’s evidence that their blog outreach strategy is failing before it got started. They should have amassed a database of moderate bloggers and had them pumping up the launch. As it is, Technorati lists 15 posts that mention Unity 08 and two of those are me. I’m 15% of their effort thus far.

Oh well, I guess I’ll create my own bug. Look for it later today. If you want it, feel free to grab it.

UPDATE: I got the bug together and it’s in the top right corner. If you’d like to grab it, right click here and save for a gif, or right click here and save for a png file.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mad props (wow! I feel so gangsta) to Anne “Her Magnificence” Champlin for pointing the Unity08 effort out to me. She is truly one in a million. A diamond in a see of rhinestones. You are the cat’s PJs, Mrs. C. Rock on!

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