Web Traffic Project: TrustTheVote.org

Experiment time! Over the next 60 days, I’m going to focus my efforts on building traffic to one of the sites I run, TrustTheVote.org. This site is dedicated to reaching out to citizens and election officials to share the work of the Open Source Election Technology Institute (OSET), a non-profit organization developing open source voting software and related technologies for secure and reliable elections.

Although OSET’s work is targeted at democracies all over the world, right now there’s a lot of interest in the upcoming US midterm elections taking place this Tuesday, November 6th (I hope you’re registered to vote!).

I’m going to focus on this site this month (October) as we approach these midterm elections, and then in November as we learn more about how the election went in the US.

We are interested in more than just the results. How did election polling go across the country? Were the results reported quickly, accurately, and reliably? Are there questions about election security, especially related to cyber-security?

It’s an exciting time and there’s a lot of interest in election security and voting software. Now’s the time to build our audience.

I’m going to be checking in regularly with updates on what’s working (and what’s not working) to increase traffic to the TrustTheVote.org site. I’m going to be doing a lot of writing for this project, with the goal of developing an email list of interested citizens.

I’m going to be implementing the traffic strategy I described in this post on Cadent.com, Publish every day to send a flood of traffic to your site. Essentially, by writing and posting regularly, I’ll increase the visibility of the site to search engines and then drive more organic traffic to the site.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.

Our New President

Change is coming, whether we want it or not (but that’s always true). I’m incredibly happy to see a president who is not: the son or wife of a previous president, or a general, or admiral, or coming from a long line of politicians, or … a white male.

It’s great to see that this country can still pick a leader based on what we perceive as his qualifications, not the color of his skin or the last name of his father. Enough dynasties! We need some new ideas and perspectives. It’s the old ways of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

Even if you don’t agree with Obama’s policies, you have to admit that he’s going to shake things up.

The Boston Globe has published a series of excellent photos of Obama from the campaign and election.

Unchecked and Unbalanced

I just finished Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, by Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Z. Huq. It’s a chilling review of the current administration’s coordinated abuse of our Constitution. I have to wonder if I’m on some kind of watch list because I checked this out from the library and then posted this to my blog. These are scary times for anyone who believes in the importance of open government for the people.