Friday, October 29, 2004 11:19 AM
New website go live everyday. Many are retreads of the same old, same old. Today, however, someone sent me a note about an interesting new site which is attempting to get its arms around the always spinning political and legislative process by leveraging both existing and emerging technologies. The site,
Personal Democracy Forum is part blawg, part headline aggregator and part information hub.
The creators of the site put is this way:
Technology and the Internet are changing democracy in America. We envision this site as one hub for the conversation already underway between political practitioners and technologists, as well as anyone invigorated by the potential of all this to open up the process and engage more people in all the things that we can and must do together as citizens.
Over the coming weeks and months, we are going to experiment with various ways of nurturing and expanding this conversation, ranging from blogging to investigative journalism, interviews, profiles and guest columns. The focus is going to be on new tools, processes, uses and trends--not on scoring partisan political points. We value your input and ideas.
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The feature that immediately caught my eye was entitled: "The Top Senators in the Blogosphere." This features utilizes Technorati to try and highlight the United States Senators currently enjoying (or not enjoying) the most buzz in the blogosphere. In fact, you can see the buzz factor for all one hundred senators: the list. Further, by clicking the link next to each Senator's name, you can see a list of all of the headlines related to that Senator and find out exactly why he/she is generating so much or so little interest (click here to take a look at John McCain's buzz)
I am going to take this a step further and pose the question: Can you see where this is going? Every vote, every position statement, every news bit, every press release, every bit of pundit spin, every...well everything, related to our elected officials will ultimately be organized and available at the click of a button.
My own sense of where the value of all of this lies is best explained via an example: a Bill in which I am particularly interested getting debated in Congress. In the future, via technologies that aggregate and link together disparate information sources throughout the blawgosphere, I will be able to click a button and see not only the text of the Bill, but my elected officials' position, news concerning the Bill, legislative studies, lobbyist analysis, and etcetera, etcetera. All of that information exists today, but finding and organizing all of it is a monumental task; it simply is not manageable for the average citizen.
I can't say for sure that Personal Democracy Forum is headed down this road, but it sure seems like it to me. Stop by and check it out.