Say it ain’t so, Joe (in several languages)

by | Apr 25, 2006 | Politics, Technology | 2 comments

Just checking out Joe Volpe‘s leadership campaign site and found several new things to update.

But there was one interesting twist: for a while this morning, Volpe’s site offered translations into more than just English and French. You’d also find Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian and Spanish. But unlike every other link on the site, when you moused over the translation links, the destination URL didn’t show up in your status bar. It was masked – and when you did click on a link, the URL was an IP address, not a domain name.

That mystery was solved when I clicked on the French icon (which, incidentally, was a flag of France), and got an error page. It told me little, but it did link to a page of language tools… Google language tools. Apparently, all Volpe’s web team had done was to set the link up to secretly run the page through the Google translator – and then, for reasons unknown, set it up to diguise that fact. A few minutes after I checked the feature out, it had vanished.

Guys, don’t test new features on a live campaign site.

2 Comments

  1. James Hrynyshyn
    James Hrynyshyn on 25 Apr 2006 at 12:01

    I think you’re missing the bigger picture. Rob. Sure some of the candidates are betraying a lack of appreciation for the power of the internet, while others show their naivete about the same, but in both cases, their sites are getting mentioned by people like you. In other words, they’re getting some free publicity. Proving once again, that there’s no such thing as bad PR.

    There’s a related example of this familiar phenomenon on my blog at islandofdoubt.net

  2. Rob
    Rob on 25 Apr 2006 at 14:47

    There’s definitely such a thing as bad PR. Ask the folks at Kryptonite about Bic pens sometime. :)

    Just being talked about, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a good thing. Otherwise political campaigns would never put the time and money they do into negative ads.

    Take the case you mention on your blog, the Harper government’s hamfisted attempt to muzzle one of their own scientists by ordering him to stay away from his own book launch. It was, as you say, spectacular PR for the scientist. But it was godawful PR for the Conservatives.

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