Marc Ross, Christine Stineman, and Chris Lisi of 2ndSix, Tribe Effect and Chris Lisi Communications have just published a very interesting report looking at how 102 big Washington-based trade associations and advocacy groups are--or aren't--making use of an array of 14 core social media tools and platforms. The results shouldn't surprise anyone; it's still pretty obvious that a year after Barack Obama's electoral victory, most inside-the-Beltway still have a very cautious and traditional attitude towards social media.

But the individual breakdown by organization and the thoroughness of the research (which covers a ten week span ending October 2, 2009) ought to serve as a wake-up call for many groups. Because the results are pathetic: "75 of the organizations reviewed [are using] four or fewer online new media tools. The average score of the organizations reviewed was 24%, meaning 76% of the most commonly used social media tools are not being utilized to communicate with members, voters and other constituencies."

Change.gov the website is so yesterday. Today, it's Change.gov the widget, iPhone app, and mobile tool.

We noted a few days ago that online home of the Obama-Biden Transition Project had swapped out traditional copyright for a far looser Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license -- one that invites users to have their way with the site's contents, as long as they give credit back to Obama. Now a new service called Cerado Ventana has packaged Change.gov in a way that makes it easier to interact with the site through other portals.

Our Voice 2008 is a new, nonpartisan youth politics site that is snap-polling its users on topical issues and providing its users with the means to break down that data by state for display on websites and social networking profiles. But to become useful to campaigns, media outlets, or nonprofits it needs a critical mass.

Want to dress up your website with political data? Just add a widget or badge to your site. Here are a couple of fun options you can play with.

Hi, I'd like to ask all of our Republican colleagues to go to the bathroom or go watch tv or something.

Um, yeah, just kidding, but here's why: I'm going to be talking about a damned interesting application that electoral and advocacy campaigns can use to keep their branding and messaging in front of supporters, and I'd rather that my Democratic friends get on top of it first. I've been impressed with the potential of widgets as an outreach and communications tool for months now, and a product has come along that looks to fill just about every role I've talked about an ideal campaign widget doing.

Inspired by the May 16th e.politics/techPresident article on the conspicuous lack of presidential campaign widgets, a group of software developers has started to build their own — if the campaigns won't help their supporters spread the word, these guys are happy to do it for them.

The major presidential campaigns have put tons of effort into creating websites, building their own social networks, creating online videos and reaching out to voters through Facebook and MySpace, but they're so far mostly ignoring a simple and effective tool to help their supporters find volunteers, raise money and spread messages: web widgets.