There’s a number of little tools emerging that pop up information from off-site when users hover over a link, but here’s the coolest one I’ve seen yet: Pop-up Politicians. This ajax widget from the Sunlight Foundation lets anyone link US Congressmembers’ names on their blogs to a popup window about that politician. Here’s an example of the tool in action. Bloggers covering matters of US politics can easily layer Sunlight’s widget into their posts - to add value to blog coverage and help a cool organization spread its work.
The window includes links to the politician’s page on Congresspedia, a wiki covering US Congress members, the page at OpenSecrets.org that tracks said politician’s campaign contributions and the Washington Post’s congressional voting database.
Chalk this one up as a simple, but truly useful, way that ajax, wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies are being leveraged.
This is a very good widget. Almost like the widget showing charts and so on as MarketWatch.com is doing. Very innovative.
it will be nice to see how this shapes elections in the future, having more transparency on politicians platforms and laws they passed will be valuable dynamic information for the voter.
Wish list:
Past or current criminal investigations, trials, and convictions.
Past or current civil litigation (they sue or get sued) and outcomes.
Additions to the Congressional Record of speeches they never actually gave.
Ability to select key issues or legislation in one section, then see in the popups how that legislator voted on my selected issue (like net neutrality).
http://www.telecommer.com
Telecom, that would be great. This is obviously a pretty simple system, but much of that info is held by the databases linked to here. Some way to bubble up key info automatically would be cool for sure.
This is amazing, exactly what web2.0 should be about.
One flaw though: the specification for rel-tag at microformats (http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag) indicates that the linked page should exist. The linked page in the sunlightlabs example,
(http://sunlightlabs.com/tag/Sen.+Edward+M.+Kennedy) doesn’t work so this will not degrade gracefully for browsers that don’t have javascript. It should be pretty easy to fix though.
I hope more people pick up on this script, and kudos on them for using an Apache license to encourage uptake. Hopefully someone will make plug-ins easy to write.
Daniel,
That flaw should be fixed tonight…
Very cool!
awesome
Boggers covering matters of US politics…
Thanks Bogger.
very cool
I hate pop-ups. They create a bloody mine field where I have to hold my breath so my mouse doesn’t move and pop something up that covers the content I am trying reading. Blah. It’s Sin #3 on my list of annoying things that webmasters are adding without limits and consideration for usability.
I agree with bytech. I like the idea, but it’s really poorly implemented.
The most obvious violation of interaction design principles here is that the popup is triggered by a mouseover (therefore not requiring an explicit user action such as clicking), but requires a click (explicit user action) to be hidden.
This is really the root of the problem. Personally, I think the popup causes enough change to the page (disorienting users) that it should be launched by explicitly clicking on the associated sunlight icon. However, if it absolutely needs to be launched by a rollover, rolling off the icon or popup should hide the popup. This is the expected user behavior for any kind of rollover event.
If the change were to be made to an explicitly-launched popup, there is still one thing missing - when the popup is launched by clicking on the icon, an event handler should be added to the entire document so that if the user clicks anywhere outside the popup, it is hidden. Again, this is standard behavior across both web-apps and desktop applications. Click on a pulldown menu in windows then click anywhere else on the desktop: the pulldown menu disappears. Having a small “x” to close the popup just doesn’t cut it.
David, I agree completely. Thanks for spelling all that out. Fortunately the designers are reading this thread, so hopefully they’ll take note.
I have a tendency to overstate things, it seems. There are some interaction design problems with the widget, sure, but “really poorly implemented” is a bit insulting, on review. It’s a great idea, it’s the first release, and I’m sure it has a promising future.
popups blow almost as much as political bloggers
Seems like a Firefox extension that did this would be nice. Instead of just requiring page designers to instrument web pages that shove popups down people’s throats, voters could use the extension to bring up popups like this whenever they come across a politician’s name.
A design like “Right-click reads name of politician (or other official) under cursor and puts up a Sunlight Pop-Up” would work for me. There are many analogous extensions that you could just copy the code from, and there’s already an API.
To extend 17’s suggestion, allow the user to add canned interfaces (macros) that the fireFox extension would execute using the marked text. Right-clicking on marked text would present the standard context menu listing the macros the user had added. That would open the idea up to anyone who had a category to expand on. Not just about politicians. The user is no longer at the mercy of the page author to have provided links.
In fact the more I think about it, the more grandiose the possibilities become. Examples might be: mark a food and select to see its recipe from the menu. mark a stock, get its history/price. Whatever third parties can come up with to offer. The sky is the limit. It’s not a new idea either. An associate of mine here says that he worked for a dot-com that tried to sell exactly that idea a few years ago, but was unable to, and eventually folded. I don’t think a firefox extension is enough to build a company on, but it would certainly be good enough for someone to write and give away. It has to be open for users adding macros, and it has to be easy to incorporate into the user’s browser to fly, though.