Blog P.I.

The new website for Rudy Giuliani went live last week, and what was an attractive if perfunctory placeholder has now become an attractive and functional website. This shouldn’t be too surprising — when Bush-Cheney ‘04 blogmeister Patrick Ruffini announced in January that he was joining the Giuliani ‘08 team, that was a good sign the campaign would have a pretty decent website. And it is more than that — but it’s also not without flaws. So let’s take a look:

Is The Buzz is just a round-up of favorable coverage? Sure, but unlike the news feed from every other top-tier candidate, here the MSM and blogs coexist as equals. Romney’s page does link to favorable blog posts, but segregates them from the proper journalists; the others don’t link to bloggers at all. The Buzz also includes a quasi-Digg counter keeping track of how many times a story has been clicked. I assume this is imported from Ruffini’s 2008 Wire. Neither feature prevents a single user from clicking on a story multiple times to artificially inflate its relative significance. That’s a flaw on Ruffini’s own site, but not so much here.

A fundraising widget? Now we’re talking. Other candidates will let you sign up to become a fundraiser, but only the Giuliani campaign makes it as easy as cut-and-paste. In contrast, the Romney campaign makes you join TEAM MITT before they’ll let you at their fundraising tool, the cumbersomely-titled QuickComMITT. Hillary wants you to sign up before you can send your friends e-mail pitches, and while I haven’t completed the Obama sign-up page, I get the impression it’s an updating thermometer akin to the old Howard Dean “fundraising bat.” All of these campaigns want to keep tabs on their individual fundraisers, but the Giuliani team can do that through this Flash-based widget, too. But most importantly, if you can put a YouTube video on your page, you can raise money for Rudy Giuliani.

Ruffini is no great fan of the social bookmarking buttons that litter the bottom of many a blog post, but if the Giuliani campaign is using these ones, he must have decided these are the ones that work. That, or he was overruled. Regardless, Giuliani’s is the only campaign to make these tools standard across the website.

Considering how important talk radio is to the Republican base — and to the Giuliani campaign — this is a good idea. And nobody else has one. Yet the execution and experience leaves something to be desired — the boxes are small, the “Select City” box is unused, and the final readout doesn’t tell you what time the radio programs are on or on what station. Perhaps a prospective caller should already know this, but if so, why bother with this feature? Bottom line: If you want people to volunteer on your behalf, it helps to connect the dots for them.

And now, onto the less-good:

So it’s not perfect. I keep getting this dotted outline whenever I click on links from this panel. Not a big deal, but it does disrupt the browsing experience.

Now, this is a bigger deal. I got this message at home last night and again at work today. Both connections qualify as “broadband,” I’m on a MacBook Pro and using the latest version of Firefox. What’s a guy gotta do to watch some video around here? Actually, once I finally got the error message to go away (I was starting to wonder if Amazon’s one-click patent was written into McCain-Feingold…) the video worked just fine. On the other hand, it took too long to load. On the other other hand, the now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t controls worked like a charm.

And the best-laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley, but this is still kind of embarrassing:

Republican presidential front-runner Rudy Giuliani’s campaign hurriedly fixed its official Web site late Monday to remove a dangerous design flaw that could have allowed hackers to expose personal information submitted by volunteers. The vulnerability affecting Giuliani’s site, http://www.JoinRudy2008.com, could have exposed confidential information stored in the campaign’s databases. The Web site failed to block commands that can instruct it to improperly display sensitive information, a popular hacking technique known as “structured query language injection.” … “Anybody who knows anything about security could have found these problems in two seconds,” said Marc Maiffret of eEye Digital Security Inc., a researcher who examined Giuliani’s Web site at AP’s request.

Aren’t you glad they didn’t make you sign up to fundraise now? I kid, I kid. So again, it’s a work in progress.

It’s also worth noting what isn’t included. Notably absent are any of the front-page social networking icons that most of the other candidates include. Before My.BarackObama.com and McCainSpace I wouldn’t have thought to mention that there is no social network, but there isn’t one. And there is no blog. A Facebook button wouldn’t kill them, but the one place they really need one is in their social bookmark toolbar — and it is. Meanwhile, a campaign probably doesn’t need to bother with their own blog unless they have a compelling reason to do so. And while I do think a Giuliani-based social network could succeed (call me crazy) it certainly is no requirement.

All in all, not bad. And I bet as the campaign goes forward, it’ll get even better.