Illinois Governor's Race Money Widget From ProPublica

Early this morning, the folks at ProPublica Illinois released a widget that documents the fundraising and spending of the gubernatorial candidates in Illinois.  Well...it shows most of the candidates - the ones who are *in* the race with a shot at winning their respective primary.  I'm embedding their widget below.  (Also...one cute thing to mention here:  the url of the story is at: their domain/nerds/story.  Nice touch, right??)

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There's obviously some interesting things going on here in the race (like JB Pritzker's burn rate?!?) that smarter and more tuned in political people can provide context on, but the reason I'm posting this is that it reminds me of the old days.

The old days?  Yeah...like back in the mid-aughts when there were plenty of local bloggers - and specifically local political bloggers - that had their own little homesteads on the Web.  That's when I fell in love with the Web and met so many people who shaped both my life and my career. 

Back in the aughts, there was a lot of this kind of thing going on:  embed-able widgets and what-have-yous that publishers or political organizations could publish and rely on a network of bloggers to pick up and publish said widgets - which would maximize the reach.  At the JoinCrossBlog and the ILHRO, *we* had things like this.  Check out this image I just grabbed from the WayBack Machine.  If you look closely, you'll see that on the old homepage, we had an events widget, an election day countdown and I think at one point, we even had a newsfeed one.

Today, I guess the closest thing we have is a re-tweet or 'share' on Facebook these days, right?  Post something useful/valuable/unique and then goose it with promotion.

But, I'm still here.


Yep.  And I'm a blogger.  So, ProPublica...I'm standing with you guys today in the spirit of publishing on the web.  I'll gladly share your widget and link to your story.  That's how we find interesting things online and how I can do my *very little part* to help keep the independent Web alive.

(Get off my lawn!)

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