Hi folks--
Over at Loaded Orygun, we got pretty excited about the early start on defining John McCain. We took to heart Chris Bowers' analysis, research and call to action at Open Left, and are helping to push negative stories about McCain up the search engines as we speak.
But we wanted to do more. Specifically, my new web ace/editor petrichor did. We think it's a great idea, but even for a lot of bloggers the whole notion of pasting links by hand probably takes some of the steam out of the initiative for a lot of folks. What if there were some really, REALLY easy ways to do the job?
Announcing the latest weapon to educate people on the REAL John McCain: optimization widgets!
{read more, below, or click the links above to get your widget code}
As we said, 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 JohnMcCain 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 customized to link to any of the nine articles (although for best optimization only use two or three links at a time, apparently).
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. (Another note: as far as we can tell, search engines don't pick up Javascripted links, so don't use only this widget if you want to help optimize. But it is a nice looking, smaller-bore object if you don't have enough room for the html one.)
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?