Moralize.us is a site with an interesting concept: users post hypothetical scenarios, and other users vote on whether a course of action is right or wrong, according to their own personal moral codes. It's a nice theory, that we can crowdsourcing our tricky moral dilemmas. In practice, though, the responses mostly seem to hover around the level of discourse you might find in the comments on a YouTube video.
For example, someone asked "is it right or wrong to push a fat man off a bridge in front of a speeding train to stop it from killing five people?" The responses ranged from "Right: he's fat" to "Wrong: the fat man is Michael Moore." This is not exactly erudite stuff here, friends. Our recommendation: if Moralize.us is going to be more than a place for lame jokes, they should just ditch the ability to leave a justification, and just ask users to vote right or wrong. The data would probably be a lot more meaningful -- because hey, they're at zero now, and it can only get better.
Have you ever heard a public figure make a claim that seems a bit preposterous? In the year of a U.S. presidential election, more people are going to be scrutinizing candidates -- and political bloggers -- and wondering if what they're saying is true, exaggerated, or just completely made up. That's where Ameritocracy comes in. You can add a quote, and Ameritocracy users will rate its accuracy and its relevance.
We think this is great fun, because it takes a step toward realizing our fantasy of siccing Slashdot commenters on all of our nation's politicians. Sure, the accuracy ratings might be questionable, but they should continue to improve as the site gains additional users. Ameritocracy is full of diverse issues and opinions, so if you can't get worked up over the election, maybe you have an opinion on propositions like, "The mobile phone may be the most potent tool ever invented for the elimination of poverty."
Poll Junkie is a no-frills web service that lets you create simple polls without having to sign up for an account. All you have to do is give your poll a name, a date on which to stop accepting responses, and then you can configure your questions.
The site lets you create four types of questions: multiple choice, yes/no, rating, and ranking. You can have multiple questions on one poll, and you can optionally be notified by e-mail when a user completes your poll.
When your poll is set up, you are presented with the main poll link (to give to the people you're polling), and a view link so you can see the current results.
What's wrong with Ubuntu? No, that's not a rhetorical question. The developers behind the popular open-source Linux distribution are soliciting feedback using a Digg-like forum called Ubuntu Brainstorm. Anyone can submit an idea, and other users can vote a story up or down. The top suggestions are then showed on the front page of the site, bringing them more attention.
The concept is based on Dell's IdeaStorm web site, which the computer maker uses to solicit ideas. Right now, some of the top suggestions for Ubuntu are:
A better interface for managing network connections
Use less power
Combine the Preferences and Administration menus and condense some of the submenus
Let users know which application is using a volume that cannot be unmounted because it's in use
A prettier bootloader
Quicker boot speed
And the list goes on. What would you fix in Ubuntu if you had the chance?
If you're not sure which presidential candidate deserves your precious vote, spend 5 minutes on Glassbooth to learn which candidate's views most closely relate to yours. Glassbooth uses a two-part process to lead you to voting enlightenment.
The first part is a point-assignment exercise where you assign a total of 20 points to specific topics (gun control, abortion, health care, etc.) based on how important the issues are to you. It's kind of like video game "Create a Player" modes where you're given limited points to apply to your player's attributes to tweak the player the way you want.
Oh the hands of justice, they move swiftly. Seven years after the 2000 election, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California issued a ruling regarding websites trying to affect the outcome of that contest.
If you put on your memory cap, you may recall that vote-swapping was all the rage back in 2000. The idea was that if you lived in a solidly "red" or "blue" state, you could be pretty sure how your state would sway during the Bush/Gore election. Thanks to the United States' electoral college system, Bush supporters in New England and Gore supporters in Texas were pretty sure they were throwing their votes away.
So you visit a web page like voteexchange2000.com or voteswap2000.com and find someone in another state who is willing to trade their vote with yours. You'll go ahead and help their candidate win by a wide margin in your state if they'll cast a ballot for your preferred candidate. While it was never likely that a Bush supporter would vote for Gore, the proponents of these websites were trying to increase the turnout for alternative party candidates like Ralph Nader.
What's better than a blog dedicated entirely to cool t-shirts? Why, a blog dedicated entirely to cool t-shirts that just launched a t-shirt digging site! Tcritic is a slick blog obsessed with t-shirts of all kinds; the more quirky or clever a shirt is, you can be sure Tcritic will find and blog it. But how can we tell which shirts are truly the best? Until now, we've been lost in an ocean of shirts, forced to fend for ourselves in determining which ones to buy and which to laugh at (and not in the good way) when you see them in public.
But not anymore. The new TDigger site from Tcritic brings digg-like voting to the t-shirt world, complete with a tagging system and an easy shirt submission system. Powered by the open source CMS Pligg and a nice implementation of what looks like Lightbox so you can see a large version of a shirt before voting, Tdigger is a nice addition to a great blog for those who just can't get enough shirts.
With more registered members than all the people in Mexico, MySpace would be the 11th largest country in the world...that is if it was a country. With stats like that MySpace is a logical place for presidential candidates to look for supporters. Currently candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Rudy Guiliani, and John McCain have their own Myspace pages, and soon they'll have their own MySpace primary.
MySpace has announced plans to hold a presidential primary on January 1 & 2, 2008 well before any US states have the opportunity to cast their ballots with every MySpace user having the opportunity to cast a vote for their favorite candidate.
It's no secret that MySpace is made up of a predominantly younger crowd, and members are allowed to create account with no actual verifications that they are who they say they are, making it possible for one person to have as many MySpace accounts as they can create hotmail accounts. So, could a MySpace primary make an impact on the actual election? If someone wins the MySpace primary by a landslide do you think they'll likely fare well in the real one?
If the election were determined solely by the amount of friends a candidate had then Barack Obama would currently take the race by a landslide. Obama is currently rockin 89,465 friends. His closer competitor is John Edwards who has a meager 16, 921 friends. You've got to take into account Obama also has that sweet networking site all by himself as well, that's got to count for something.
Forget about all the text on Digg, this is all about pretty pictures. Picli is a social image voting gallery. Their system closely resembles your typical Digg / netscape / Reddit social voting system, with a twist, it's for pictures only. This interesting gallery twist to the social voting scene provides a constantly changing image gallery for showcasing creative work.
Users sign up for a free account and submit photos to be ranked and voted up. Users can also vote and comment on the photos of others, getting them up higher on the Picli list, and sharing insights and opinions. There are some great pieces of artwork displayed here, including fractal outputs, drawings, photography, and image manipulations.
Jyte doesn't do much beside providing a little fun during your downtime. It lets users claim something they have to say about friends, family, movies, music, virtually anything, then have other users vote on it. If you want to make a comment on how the commercials at this year's Super Bowl were nothing to write home about, and see how many people agree or disagree with your comment, Jyte lets you do it. It's basically another way to add a little social networking into your arguments. The service launched last week and has over 1,100 claims in such topics as food, web, politics, coffee and music. Jyte was created by JanRain, who make identity services for the web using OpenID protocols, which make use of in Jyte.
i-What, i-How's that now, I said, iPubble. What is an iPubble? Like a mis-pronounced iPebble, I guess. Beyond that, iPubble is in the business of helping website operators get the word out while helping you improve your site. Their experts will tell you what you are doing right or wrong with your site, with some good suggestions on how to improve your site. iPubble is a social voting site as well, so visitors can rate the sites they see and if your site is popular, it will receive more attention and traffic. I imagine that iPubble is a play on the term I publish, but I could be wrong. If I disappear mysteriously after this post, don't worry, it is most likely because I ticked off about half of Apple with all the I's in the first half of this post. I think they are pretty sure they own the letter I. Wait til Sesame Street finds out. Be aware that iPubble is technically in "beta," and it doesn't look like there is much content yet to speak of.
In addition to
requiring that all electronic voting machines used in the state keep a verifiable paper trail as well as voting tallies
even in the event of a power outage, a bill Wisconsin governor
Jim Doyle signed into law today requires that "the coding for the software that is used to operate the system
on election day and to tally the votes cast is publicly accessible and may be used to independently verify the accuracy
and reliability of the operating and tallying procedures to be employed at any election." While not truly open
source—voting software vendors will presumably retain all rights to their code—this is excellent news for
verifiable elections.
Moralize.us is a site with an interesting concept: users post hypothetical scenarios, and other users vote on whether a course of action is right or wrong, according to their own personal moral codes. It's a nice theory, that we can crowdsourcing our tricky moral dilemmas. In practice, though, the responses mostly seem to hover around the level of discourse you might find in the comments on a YouTube video. 
Poll Junkie
With more registered members than all the people in Mexico, MySpace would be the 11th largest country in the world...that is if it was a country. With stats like that MySpace is a logical place for presidential candidates to look for supporters. Currently candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Rudy Guiliani, and John McCain have their own Myspace pages, and soon they'll have their own MySpace primary.
