People who know Salsa Labs co-founders April Pedersen and Chris Lundgren: Have they been inexplicably cheerful since, say, February?

If so, it's probably because they just landed a veritable white whale of a client: The AFL-CIO, which signed a contract with Salsa last month, according to Christine Kenngott, AFL-CIO's online mobilization and Working Families Network manager. The AFL-CIO is in the process of migrating to Salsa from GetActive, she said.

Source: HuffPo

Larry Ward, the president of Political Media, says the joke's on anyone who tried to exploit his company's unintentionally hilarious GOP.am URL shortener when it launched last December.

When the site launched, people on the political left had entirely too much fun using the shortener, which adds a hat to the linked site in the style of ow.ly, to put the official Republican Party seal over the website of their choosing. (The website of Communist Party USA, to pick a safe-for-work example, if the link still works. It did when I checked earlier today.) The GOP apparently protested having its official stamp in use, and it was replaced with an unofficial logo shortly after the service launched.

"[There were] a couple thousand links out there that were all porn and stuff," Ward told me. "I was sitting there thinking, 'why am I just turning these off? I should point them somewhere' ... So we did, we pointed them to all these different sites based on which action of the day was going on. Now I think it's pointed to a health care petition on the GOP page."

PdF Conference Call

When Scott Brown's campaign was winding down, his web/political strategist Rob Willington — a former executive director of the Massachusetts Republican Party — bought massrecount.com. Just in case.

Obviously Brown didn't need that particular URL this year. But it was one of the strategies Willington explained to PdF Network members on a conference call yesterday, to wit: Be an early adopter of social media memes, like relevant hashtags (for Brown, it was #MASen); on social media, build personal connections with people, rather than just blasting on-message comments and repeating press releases; use developing technologies like the ability to geotarget Google search ads; and when you meet a voter, always get their data.

• The State of the Internet in 2009.

PdF Conference Call

Kate Albright-Hanna just wrapped up an hour-long talk with PdF Network members about how Barack Obama's campaign used Internet video. Albright-Hanna, now at the online news and entertainment organization VBS.TV, was responsible for the campaign's online video operation.

Rollin' rollin' rollin', keep them data rollin': A herd of federal agency data was taken in from the pasture on Jan. 22. // Photo: Bureau of Land Management

Not to knock the plight of the wild North American horse, but it isn't clear to me how population counts of wild burros and mustangs are the most important data the Department of the Interior has to offer for its eager public.

Along with every other federal agency, Interior had until Jan. 22 to respond to a Dec. 8 directive from Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag by posting, on the Obama administration's Data.gov open government data repository, three "high-value data sets." Their response was a list of volunteer opportunities from serve.gov; a list of government recreation facilities; three data sets concerning wildland fires; and an elaboration on the United States' dwindling stock of wild mustangs.

So I asked Interior: What makes the wild American donkey so important?

CORRECTED

350.org // via Flickr

For an hour or so this afternoon, Michael Silberman of EchoDitto and Phil Aroneanu of the climate change advocacy network 350.org talked with Micah Sifry and members of the PdF Network about how to engage large groups of people with, in financial terms, practically zilch.

It's been a whirlwind couple of days for Ari Melber since we released his report on Organizing for America's first year of action. As folks start to really get into the meat of Melber's research, here's a list of places where we've seen him — or his report:

Google put together this before-and-after shot using newly available imagery of Haiti, post-earthquake.

Google announced last night that it has released a map layer with up-to-date imagery of Haiti.

The imagery, which Google wrote on its blog was captured yesterday morning by the firm satellite and aerial imaging firm GeoEye, shows the devastation wrought upon the heavily populated area around Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake.

"The imagery is remarkably sharp,"Google Earth Blog, which is not affiliated with Google, observed. "[it] shows some amazing scenes such a a soccer field turned into a make-shift camp (shown above), and smoke continuing to billow out of some buildings."