MediaShift Idea Lab - DontBreakTheInternet: How The Web Became a Political Force vs. SOPA | PBS
Tumblr took even more dramatic action as far as getting users’ attention, and redirected the roughly 500,000 daily unique visitors to Tumblr.com to a slick “call Congress” tool that dialed users, prompted them with talking points, and connected them to their representatives.
I need to take a minute and let you marinate on Tumblr’s part in all of this. The service combines Twitter and blogging and has grown 900 percent in the last year. With 30 minutes’ notice, Tumblr got hooked up with Mobile Commons, another New York-based start-up, and then they delivered an average of 3.6 calls per second to Congress. Because Tumblr is a blogging platform, its action also produced a sharp uptick in blog posts about SOPA.
The tool the Tumblr team built made me a little happy and a little sad. I was happy because it was perfectly executed. The interface was nice; it was blatantly clear what I was supposed to do; and it got my complete attention until the task was completed. But it also made me sad because I’ve been watching political technology for 10 years and have never seen anything nearly this good from the industry vendors who charge campaigns and non-profits significant sums of money for their clunky click-to-call tools.
It appears that Tumblr built in a day or two what no D.C.-based technology supplier could come up with in the last five years.
