Plugins

A bright young developer has come up with a way for us to easily see who the top contributors to political candidates are using a simple browser plugin. The plugin is called “Greenhouse” and it is available for Chrome, Safari and Mozilla. Once you have the plugin installed it will attempt to determine on each and every web page that you load if there is a politician and display information about their top contributors (and greatest benefactors?). The data comes from opensecrets.org. The information provides a quick and simple to read list of top contributors to the candidates election. This provides a very valuable context to the article that would be lacking without extensive knowledge of that candidate. I frankly cannot see myself being without this plugin now that I’ve had it installed for a couple of days, and you may feel the same way after trying it out.

Sample of plugin in action.

The application of this is obvious and you are probably either very interested or be indifferent depending on your personal interests. I hope you find it helpful! You can download the plugin here.

Good Bye Headup makers of a Wikipedia info popup information utility are calling it quits on 2/28/2011. Citing lack of success in an Email sent to users of Headup (including moi) early this morning:

Hi there,

Following our previous email, we wanted to let you know that by the end of February we’re going to discontinue the Headup Widget for websites service.
We appreciate the time and effort that you took to use it. It’s been a great experience for us, and we hope you enjoyed the product as well.
There are many reasons for this, but the bottom line is that it just wasn’t successful enough to warrant future development.
The Headup widget will stop functioning on February 28th, 2011.

If you are a WordPress or Joomla user, we highly recommend that you uninstall it from the plugins page before the end of the month.
Other users should simply remove the script from their HTML files.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Thanks for the feedback and support along the way, you’ve all been great.

All the best,
The Headup team.

I use the Headup widget here on my blog to allow people to get popup information on keywords such as Email, Facebook, Notifications, Life, NBC, Community (picked randomly from recent posts). According to the WordPress Codex site Headup has as of this publishing 10,754 downloads. So there are at least that many people like me seeking alternatives. I am going to start looking at alternatives but Wikipop is looking the most promising right now.

“Lack of success” = Lack of Profit

With the pressures to provide everything for free these days, many people are raising the question about free content and free applications. In fact if you follow @GiniDietrich’s blog she did a piece recently about charging for content. In that article she cited a recent Harvard Business Review podcast “Finding Profit in a World of Free” which is a very interesting piece that discusses the topic in depth.

Good bye Headup, it was indeed nice knowing you. Thanks for the free software and good luck to everyone. I only wish that your monetization strategy had worked because I thought you had a pretty awesome tool.

Photo Credit Peter Kaminski

See Who Owns Your Local Politician

Bye Headup it was nice knowing you

“Lack of success” = Lack of Profit