Pop-up Politician dishes dirt on US congress members

July 25th, 2006 at 12:23 pm

This is a very good widget. Almost like the widget showing charts and so on as MarketWatch.com is doing. Very innovative.

July 25th, 2006 at 1:32 pm

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

July 25th, 2006 at 2:00 pm

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.

July 26th, 2006 at 6:24 am

Very cool!

July 26th, 2006 at 10:00 am

Boggers covering matters of US politics…

July 26th, 2006 at 10:09 am

very cool

July 26th, 2006 at 12:29 pm

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.

July 26th, 2006 at 5:31 pm

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.

July 27th, 2006 at 6:16 am

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.

July 27th, 2006 at 10:08 am

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.