Breaking News From Iokon's PollNOLA!

Well, not really. In fact, they haven't done anything with the site since early December. It seems the wizards behind John Georges' own campaign website are unable to find any news of note on the heated 2010 New Orleans mayoral election.

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.

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.

Clearly Iokon nor PollNOLA has any concept of "soon."

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

Iconic Britain Has Finished It's Contest!

You may remember the Iconic Britain kafuffle from a few months ago. Well, they finally got around to compiling the top 100 British Icons!! Actually, it's really the top 96 Icons since the Beatles, Lady Diana and Breakfast get listed twice, but hey, what's a little redundancy when you're compiling a list of the best aspects of a culture? Curiously, jug ears and bad teeth and the Beckhams did not make the list.

Visit http://www.iconicbritain.co.uk/ to see the top 100 icons. It a laugh riot! Ten categories and ten pictures each. #10 in Art & Culture: British Summers? Buildings & Architecture contains Beefeaters and Red Phone Boxes, neither buildings nor architecture.

My favorite is the category of Great British Holidays. No mention of Guy Fawkes or boxing day, but mostly places where Brits go when they get a holiday. #6 is 'sandcastles at the beach' but the photo is a flower?? Not only that, but above the photo are the words 'INCORRECT IMAGE.' I mean… they paid someone to type in those words, but were too damn lazy to find a picture of a freaking sandcastle? the acronym LMAO comes to mind but I disdain netspeak.

Brits apparently love their morning meals though as 'English Breakfast' ranked 39th overall and 5th in the 'Institutions & Rituals' category but 'Full English Breakfast' ranked 17th overall and 1st in the 'Arts & Culture' category.

The 'News & Current Affairs' category was very interesting. Christmas was listed twice and other 'current affairs' included D-Day, VE Day, Jubilee celebrations from 1977 and 2002, Band Aid and a Princess Di interview from last century. Talk about living in the past!

The 'People' category was a surprise as it actually contained people! Francis Drake was 7th oa and first in the category beating out Elizabeth II (37th oa/2nd cat) and the Queen Mum (66th oa/9th cat.) The Beatles came in 45th overall and 4th in the category which is puzzling since they ranked 69th overall and 7th in the 'Arts & Culture' category.

Princess Di, whose "famous interview" I mentioned earlier, failed to make the people category, but ranked 2nd in 'Style and Fashion' (behind the original Mini) and 86th overall.

'Views & Vistas' (an thinly veiled Microsoft reference?) was filled with famous places like Stonehenge, London, and the White Cliffs of Dover, but curiously included a field of bluebells (76th overall/6th category.) I can see travelers the world over clamoring for plane tickets right now: "C'mon Marge, we gotta go the that field of bluebells!!"

The final category, 'Wildlife' contained some of the most Britishest of Icons I've ever seen: squirrels, butterflies, robins, lambs, ducklings, daffodils, poppies… my goodness, if only the rest of the world had such wonderful flora and fauna!!

Overall, I'd have to say the copyright infringement problems were a small price to pay for this exquisite collection British Icons! Kudos to Iconic Britain, Microsoft and Thin Martian Design for a job… well, done!