Cool Tools: Fonolo gets you to a human being

This looks like a very interesting tool for those caught in the web of automated phone lines. It is web service that maps out the call trees for "popular" customer service lines, and gives you a chance to jump directly to a live person. I could see this saving me hours of touch-tone foolishness!

White House's "Online Town Meeting"

I don't agree with President Obama on many things, but I am continually impressed by the innovation his administration is bringing to the online experience. George W. Bush's White House could not even back up their e-mails properly, but Barack Obama's White House is hosting an online town hall meeting where users both submit questions to the president and then vote on which ones he should address.

It may well be that we'll learn the questions actually get picked by Obama's handlers. But if this is real, it is really a great thing to try out.

Adventures in political marketing

A week or two ago I posed the question "Why are Republicans uncool?".  Almost on cue the GOP launches a website that could make them more cool.  The GOP is looking for input on policy proposals.  This could be a really great people to discuss issues - even if it does end up being only Republicans on the site. As we have seen, even here on Mod-Blog where most of us are Republicans we have a fairly wide diversity of beliefs and focuses when it comes to politics.  As the article says:

The site itself has a stodgy charm to it. But at least the GOP is creating an online forum for citizens to engage with policy makers before they make policy. This could just be an empty effort whose real purposes is to collect e-mail addresses from party members to hit them up for donations. And if that’s the case, the site will soon die. But if the GOP can create an active community of people truly interested and informed about different policy options, and feed that into their platform, it could give them a real competitive advantage over the Democrats.

Here's hoping that this one works out in the positive for the GOP.

On the other side of the aisle, the Obama campaign marketers are either geniuses or nuts, I tend to favor the former rather than the latter.  The campaign is sponsoring a NASCAR car in an upcoming race.  Since it's widely known that NASCAR is most popular among red necks state voters, this could be a good way of garnering a positive look from that voting block. Again, Obama is trying to bring states and blocks into contention that have traditionally be foregone conclusions.  As much as I don't like that a Democrat is doing this, it is good that people are now being forced to think about their vote rather than simply voting for a party.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Netscape to be discontinued

The web browser that gave many of us our first taste of the web will be shutdown come Feb. 1. Most people stopped using the browser years ago, in favor of IE or Firefox, but in its heyday it was the best of the best. We won't miss Netscape, but we do owe the developers a debt of gratitude for showing us how beautiful the web could be by creating what we now know of as javascript and contributing to the development of CSS.

Geek Question: Ruby on Rails pros & cons

This post is more for the software/web developers in our community. I recently started looking into Ruby on Rails as a development framework for some of my web development. I was wondering what you all have or haven't heard about it. I'm mostly looking for any negatives - since there are tons of positives out on the web - but I'll take any positive comments you have as well. Thanks for your help.