It’s been a few weeks since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign unveiled its much-discussed Fight the Smears microsite. It’s certainly a daring move, and probably the right one. Although a cardinal rule of politics has long been “don’t repeat the charges against you,” there does reach a point where that no longer holds. John Kerry learned this the hard way, and Obama should get credit for adjusting accordingly.
One aspect I haven’t seen discussed in any great detail is the second page of the website, “Behind the Smears”. It’s not easily found — although it occupies the somewhat prominent last spot in the list of links at left, it’s also buried at the bottom of the page, below the main content and just above the site disclaimers.
The main content of said page is a chart showing the relationships between the accusers, and it looks like this:
It’s pretty neat, but it’s also under-designed. After all, it seems to claim that the 1992 Clinton campaign itself is is smearing him, when all it means is that… actually, I’m not sure what it’s saying. What’s more, the lines are too light and don’t convey any specific information about how they are connected. There are a few small revisions which would make it more intuitive: a dotted line for lesser connections, or bigger names for those with more influence.
Relationship mapping is becoming a bigger deal in the blogosphere as more rigorous and even scholarly studies are done about the connections between blogs and attempts are made to quantify the influence one has upon another. This is driven in part by curiosity and in part by my own industry, where marketers are desperate to accurately quantify their impact. One example comes from Linkfluence, as demoed at Personal Democracy Forum this year:
But how useful is this information? It’s nice to see a representation of the political ’sphere at the macro level. Some insights can certainly be derived therefrom, but it leaves a lot unsaid. For example, it doesn’t necessarily help me to know that one site has linked to another. I need to know why. I need to be able to drill down, and find out how they are arranged by a common link or keyword.
Don’t get me wrong, though: I’m all for pretty pictures.
And while the Obama campaign chart isn’t all that pretty and ultimately not that informative, it’s nevertheless a step in the right direction. The more and better tools a campaign can give to its online supporters, the more investment (in time as well as money) they are likely to make in turn.
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