We at blist are really excited that the Barack Obama transition team is using blist to help power the Change.gov site. They are using blist in a simple but useful way. The Obama-Biden team has decided each month to voluntarily publish the names of all donors to their transition project. You can read more about the decision to publicize donors to the transition in this press release. The donor list is maintained at this page.
When you visit that page, you’ll notice it’s dominated by a table of donors. That’s a blist widget - a self-contained version of blist that can run on any pretty much any host page.
In past months change.gov used a plain HTML table but they replaced it with blist for a few reasons. First, you can dynamically re-sort the table by any column. Simply float your cursor over the column heading and click on the little arrow that pops out, then choose “Sort ascending” or “Sort descending” based on your needs. Second, it has a really useful search engine built in. Do you want to find out if your relatives or your neighbors donated? Just enter your last name or your city name into the search box and press [Enter] or click on the magnifying glass and the donor list will hide all but the matching rows.
Haven’t tried blist yet? blist is the easiest way to create, share and publish lists and data. Sign up today. blist is free for personal use.
This is awsome news! Congrats!
Pretty darn cool Kevin. They paying you?
Interesting to see Blist used by a large scale “publisher.” What’s the way out in case Blist changes its business model, goes bankrupt, or any other reason why a publisher might want to change what they’re using to handle such lists? Some sort of CSV export I presume? As a publisher I tend to look as “my way out” before I’m going to really consider embedding third-party software to deliver functionality (if it’s something I want to offer to my readers on a long term basis, not just an adhoc one-off add-on).
In the mapping world for instance, there’s the Mapstraction library. I think it would help adoptions if some common standards pre-empted (at least to some extent) vendor lock-in in the online database/spreadsheet world (i.e. it needs to be reasonably painless to move from, say, Blist to Zoho or Dabble DB if need be). I mentioned CSV import/export, and no doubt data portability is a start. But how do you preserve *functionality* from web app to web app?
Congrats Kevin, this is awesome!
[...] where President-Elect Barack Obama’s transition team can interact with constituents, just unveiled a neat tool using startup technology — through blist, the simple database for non-experts, the team is sharing its giant list of [...]
I had this pointed out to me just before I saw this entry. Nice work!
[...] of your political leanings, this is pretty cool. Change.gov is using a Blist spreadsheet on the donor page. blist has two great things going for it. One, it’s among the coolest Flex applications out [...]
@Oliver Travers:
We do have a CSV export feature; as you say it’s incredibly important to be able to get your data into and out of blist easily.
Thanks,
Matt
Thats really huge. Any service would appreciate such opportunity.
Out of curiosity I checked how other major services would handle the task blist is responsible for right now.
http://webappsatwork.blogspot.com/2009/01/who-else-wants-to-be-chosen-by-obama.html
Are you planning an api in the future?
I love your product and would be interested in building other products around it, giving people the ability the query the data in an ad-hoc manner.
I would want to be able to get at the data and the data definition in an automated way and further down the line be able to update it.
Warmest regards, Mike
[...] it’s a good read, right? In any event, blist really peaked my curiosity when I heard that the Obama-Biden transition team used blist for their Change.gov site. So I checked out blist and was taken by its ease-of-use and robust functionality. Currently there [...]