From Iokon's own PollNOLA press blurb:
IOKON Media is proud to present a quick and dirty little project that we’ve been tossing around for quite some time now. The project is called Poll NOLA and it was built in order to digitally track the reputations and press coverage of New Orleans Mayoral hopefulls for the 2010 race. Custom developed from the ground up, we utilized some basic WordPress features with a blend of our own creative programming, for an awesome collection of aggregated data from all over the web.Clearly Iokon nor PollNOLA has any concept of "soon."
We know it’s tough to track so many candidates, their websites, tweets, press releases, blog posts, Facebook announcments and everything else social that these Digital Media newbies have going on, so go ahead and pop on over to Poll NOLA where you can follow the 2010 Race for Mayor of New Orleans.
Currently, PollNOLA has front page headlines for six of the two dozen mayoral candidates who threw their hats into the political arena: Troy Henry, James Perry, John Georges, Nadine Ramsey, Ed Murray and Leslie Jacobs. (There's also a rotating headline that Mitch Landrieu may enter the race and Irvin Mayfield won't!) Two of those candidates, Jacobs and Murray, have already picked up their political toys and gone home. PollNOLA has no mention of their withdrawal from the election. In fact, the only lead stories on the site are about the candidates announcing their candidacies!
PollNOLA does suck the Twitter feeds from Henry, Perry, Georges and Jacobs, (Though Jacobs last Twitter update is her withdrawal back on December 16th!) but if you really care about the election you're following those Twits already.
PollNOLA was thrown together in late August, 2009, and has garnered an impressive four comments. Total. On 119 press releases and articles "selected" from other sources as varied as Hullabaloo Online, NOLA.com, WWL, Gambit and Your Right Hand Thief. You know, real sources with actual content. Of course, there's not much chance of people sticking around to comment at PollNOLA since most of these reposts are teasers that end with a "Read the full story here" link to the original article. It's easier to avoid plagiarism lawsuits that way, I guess.
One thing I find incredible is that a site called PollNOLA only has four actual polls on the site. Three posted on August 21st, 2009 and one from September 14th, 2009. Curious as to how they have helped to inform the citizens of New Orleans, I participated in the latest poll on whether Ed Murray's digitized-hype campaign video was a good thing or not. After choosing the option that I didn't care in the least, a cute little text sentence replaced the poll: "Thank you for your vote, all results will be displayed soon!" That was about thirty minutes ago.
So I wondered, with all the expense of hiring people to slap PollNOLA together, throwing in some content leeching code, buying a domain name through GoDaddy and protecting their identity using GoDaddy's pricey DomainsByProxy service and whipping up those polls that just don't work… is it all worth it?
Results for PollNOLA:
mywebsiteworth.com - $72
websitevaluecalculator.com - $103
sootle.com - $1,315
For comparison, I also checked HumidCity:
mywebsiteworth.com - $53
websitevaluecalculator.com - $119
sootle.com - $291,972
AmericanZombie:
mywebsiteworth.com - $1,082
websitevaluecalculator.com - $119
sootle.com - $230,230
and Nation of Morons:
mywebsiteworth.com - $25
websitevaluecalculator.com - $103
sootle.com - $18,719
And if that doesn't clarify it, Google:
mywebsiteworth.com - $46 Billion
websitevaluecalculator.com - $4 Billion
sootle.com - $3 Billion
So, I think we've proven that website value calculators are about as useful for website valuation as PollNOLA is for content, but if I ever sell the Nation of Morons, I'll be pointing prospective buyers toward my Sootle ranking!
Oh, it's been about an hour now and the PollNOLA results still haven't posted yet. What a surprise. Like anything else associated with John Georges, I suppose we shouldn't hold our breath!
UPDATE! 01-26-10 49 days and counting (a full seven weeks) since new content has been posted to PollNOLA. Clearly there is nothing happening in the 2010 New Orleans mayoral election! The main ad square is still available on their front page! The results from the poll I participated in have still not shown up.
In honor of this post being hung at the New Orleans Ladder I'm adding their worth for comparison to PollNOLA:
New Orleans Ladder:
mywebsiteworth.com - $46
websitevaluecalculator.com - $119
sootle.com - $217,027
5 comments:
Wish we'd spotted this one sooner. Still consider yer'self hung today!
Excellent, as all you work.
Thanks
Why thankee kindly!
Whoops, signed in under my roommate… Thankee kindly 'Tilla!
Hi there! We don't mind one bit when folks write about some of the stuff we've tinkered with.
However, we really need to ask that if you reference our trade name, you should do your best to reproduce the mark as accurately as possible.
IOKON - not Iokon.
It's all in the details right? Thanks so much, and we look forward to your 90 day update!
Oooh! Iokon has updated PollNOLA!! No mention of any of the last two months of political machinations or even the outcome of the election though. It's just a huge banner ad which takes you directly to Iokon's website.
It has one of those cute smiley-face emoticons that are popular with teen texters these days and a big "VOTE!" in capital letters, which Iokon seems to just adore.
Speaking of caps, I was re-reading 'type & typography' (Baines & Haslam, 2002) and I came across a the following:
"A further problem arises today when companies who use lower-case only (or all caps) as part of their identity want them to always appear like that in print. There is no reason for this: their name is different from their signature and should be set in a standard style."
So tough doody, Iokon.
Post a Comment