Fundraising is arguably the most important part of campaigning in America. Obama crushed the competition in both camps last election with his fundraising ability. Interestingly, 93 per cent of his donations were for $100 or less.

Perhaps that’s why he’s so eager to sell sell sell this election campaign with an expanded online store. It’s more like a shopping mall, since you can get everything from calendars to “beverage totes.”

Here’s some choice favourites:

Glassware set: $80
“Perfect for display or everyday use”

Spatula: $40
“When you’re fired up and ready to grill.”

Joe Biden Can Holder: $10
“Need to keep your soda cold? The Vice President’s got you covered. Literally.”

Rhodium Ball Ornament: $40
“A great companion to our glass ornament set.” 

For the second year in a row, I’ve made a donation to Wikipedia’s annual fundraiser. It’s worth donating if you have some extra cash. A very important website with no ads, made possible through donations and a whole lot of contributors and moderators.

Yay, freedom.

NOVEMBER 18, 1977 — Bobby, 7, and Jimmy, 5, join their father, Bob Loptson, in playing a video game on the TV set in their Toronto home using the Atari game console. This Christmas television video games are back again, but manufacturers have devised a plan they hope will keep the gifts from gathering dust in a corner. The new games are programmable, meaning you can buy cassette-like cartridges that let you change the action whenever you get bored. Instead of just electronic ping- pong, you now can play at anything from road racing and space wars to math quizzes and artistic doodling.

Atari Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., the major manufacturer of programmable games, now has a library of nine cartridges offering a total of 187 games. And it pledges to bring out one or two new cartridges a month until 1983. The new games are not cheap. The Atari Video Computer System sells for $280 at most stores, with one cartridge included. (However, the department stores are discounting it heavily: Simpsons has it at $250 with one cartridge, Eaton’s at $270 with two cartridges and Sears at $300 with three cartridges.) Additional cartridges sell for $30 each.

“My indications are that consumers are ready to spend the money,” said R.W. Loptson, a sporting goods buyer for Sears whose department gave Atari one of the largest single orders for a home entertainment product in Canada.

I’m usually a big fan of Marcus Gee’s columns. The Toronto columnist for The Globe and Mail writes mostly about Rob Ford, but also about municipal politics and “fixie” bicycles. But in a rare look at the other goings-on at City Hall was today’s column on shark-fin soup.

Toronto councillors voted to ban the controversial soup at meeting last week because, by and large, the harvesting of shark fins is inhumane and cruel (as a wide variety of Chinese animal farming is).

His arguments do so little to persuade me I scarcely understand their internal logic. Let’s examine.

Argument 1: The matter rests with more senior levels of government
My Rebuttal: “Look, everyone, Toronto’s doing something!”
Surely it’s within a municipality’s power, especially for Canada’s largest municipality, to set the agenda for provincial and federal politics. It’s a lovely thought that provincial and federal politicians will turn their attention on banning shark-fin soup without nary an indication that people would support it. But Toronto’s ban will help the movement’s cause immensely.

Case in point: The harvesting of gall bladders from bears has been a long-standing industry in China. But slowly, activists from the international NGO Animals Asia started closing down the farms. Soon, some provinces started signing bans. It’s hard to affect change in China, certainly, but now the vast majority of China’s provinces have banned bear farming and federal policy will inevitably change as well. Sometimes, oftentimes, change must come from the bottom-up, not top-down.

The point is, while a more effective policy change is possible on the federal level, municipalities and smaller communities can rightly and justly assemble and affect legislative change to better persuade politicians at higher levels to notice, adopt the agenda and work towards change.

Argument 2: Monitoring this will be hard and expensive for a system already tired of enforcing so many bylaws
My rebuttal: “Life’s tough, but someone’s gotta do it”
Of all arguments against public policy, the “it’s too hard” argument must be the most offensive. What a sad and sorrowful day we’ll have when legislation is formed not because it is the right thing to do or because it makes the world or our lives better, but because it is easy.

Enforcing a bylaw surrounding shark-fin soup will be difficult. There will be many black market products sold and bought and consumed. The same can be said for virtually every law on the books. The war on drugs is perhaps the most salient example. Despite billions of dollars and a litany of laws on the books, drugs are still sold and consumed while lives are scarred or ruined altogether. But we do not, as a society, say the difficulty in enforcing a law is a deciding factor in whether to implement it in the first place.

Argument 3: Unlike smoking or pesticide bans, the shark-fin ban doesn’t help people
My rebuttal: “Unlike many parts of the world, Canada is enlightened to broader rights and larger wrongs”
Gee’s argument is the same against a vegetarian’s philosophy: that humankind should solely be focused on its own ills and benefits. And of course, the vast majority of the planet supports this philosophy. Most countries make no earthly consideration for animals other than themselves and in some cases it’s warranted: poverty and famine can be so pervasive that the wellbeing of animals or the humanity of their death is justifiably low on the priority list.

But Canada should be better. We can be a more enlightened population. Because we’re enlightened in so many ways and in so many laws: women’s rights, minority rights and gay rights being most obvious. Our legislation has evolved beyond the selfish desires of the wealthy and powerful to include the sundry fundamental truths of a fair society. Among that, I think, is humane animal farming.

Like many rights and laws resulting from our enlightened state, humane farming is not without its difficulties. Indeed, the right thing to do and the hardest thing to do are often the same thing. Shark-fin harvesting is (for the vast majority of animals) not humane, and an enlightened culture wouldn’t support it. They would take legislative measures to block it. And that’s what Toronto’s done.

The click-through rate on Internet ads is far less than 0.01 per cent. But sometimes an ad is interesting enough to warrant a coveted click. Here’s one of them.

When you land, The Globe’s usual homepage is blacked out. It’s immersive and startling enough to get your attention. The box ad on the right gives the tease: “turn off the light and see.”

Ads are moving in a good direction if they provide these in-site experiences rather than a standalone link.

When clicked, the site goes black and a series of images of some weird night vision.

Once the animation ends, the main site comes back and the box and site-topping ads are replaced with more information about whatever you just saw.

It’s pretty cool and effective. The only strange thing is it seems like it’s not going to warn you about a deer, but it’ll tell you if you’re about to run over a human…

Social media is so 2009. Now it’s all about community: relationships with readers inside and outside of traditional “social media” tools like Twitter and Facebook.

No one is better at than pushing community tools than The Guardian (but props to The Globe), whose ascent to online community supremacy began years before everyone else in the industry.

1. Participating should be simple

 BBC’s 9/11 Memories interactive

Nothing’s more off-putting than a complicated process to participate. So avoid sign-ups, registrations, forms of any kind. It shouldn’t take more than two steps to finish the process.

The Guardian’s slick 9/11 interactive wisely asked readers to log in via Twitter or Facebook to participate. While this is kind of a login/registration process, it’s a snap and very common online. This also let them grab a photo for use later in the interactive.

Another cool Guardian example is this collection of Sarah Palin emails. It takes a vast collection of emails and boils it down to a simple one-page-please process for readers.

2. Input should add to the bigger picture

CBC’s 9/11 “Muslims in Canada” mosaic

If you build a successful community interactive, you’ll wind up with a bunch of responses. These need to be presented back to your audience in a simple way. This involves gathering meta data from your submissions. This could be a graph that tracks all reader responses like a poll. It can also be a visualization like a heat poll or map. It could even be a colour-coded interactive with each reader’s individual response.

The point is, when you look at it, you shouldn’t just see a bunch of responses. Those responses should come together to form new meta data about the topic. So when the CBC gathered reader responses about 9/11, it presented them in a weird colour-coded mosaic that let the reader understand — at a glance — where other Canadians fit.

3. There should be some wow factor

 NYTimes Debt Reduction Poll

It’s perhaps the most important part. If the end result is not impressive, you’ve failed. Because the wow-factor is what motivates people to share the interactive. It’s what convinces them it’s something greater than a collection of reader feedback. It’s not a forum, it’s not a standard poll, it’s a community interactive!

The best interactives provide immediate satisfaction on this regard by revealing the wow-factor right away. That’s one reason the NYTimes heat poll is so impressive. It let’s you quickly share your opinion on a hot topic and see where you stack with thousands of other readers. It’s novel and exciting. Same with The Guardian and CBC examples.

Show me more!

I tried two social media experiments and I learned a lot in the process.  The first was ”My Toronto,” a glorified poll and comment system tracking reader feedback on Toronto budget cuts. It failed. Why? It wasn’t easy to participate (several steps and confusing at that), there was no bigger picture (results were just shared as a list of comments), and there was no wow factor (after submitting, your comment was posted and no meta data emerged).

The second experiment was this heat poll, also on the Toronto budget cuts. It was quite successful. It’s essentially a take on the NYTimes heat poll but used no Flash and was quick to set up. It was fun to share, simple to use, and gave an immediate reward. It produced meta data.