WWD Coffee Break – Elections and Future News

ScreenshotWeb Worker Election ’08Glassbooth is a nicely done Web 2.0-ish candidate finder for the 2008 U.S. Presidential elections. You go through an Ajax-enabled page indicating which issues you think are important, another page indicating you stance on particular campaign questions, and then get to find out which candidates you agree with the most, with summaries of why and links to source material. I suspect we’ll see a lot more election-oriented web work as we roll into 2008.

During the recent Australian elections, my Twitter-stream was full of interim results, being reported by friends on the ground there. This year the social media is going to help push out election results to the connected class faster than ever. Next time, will grassroots reporting start to actually replace mainstream analysis?

See the News Before it Happens – Future Scanner is a vaguely Digg-like site, with short summaries of stories and user voting to determine which ones are most interesting and thus featured. The twist: they get their original input by scanning the web looking for predictions about what will happen next year, the year after, and beyond. Use their timeline to navigate so you can see just things that are predicted for, say, 2018, or narrow down the category to Energy, Culture, or Entertainment (among others). I’d like to see them add Delphi-like voting among their regular users to adjust prediction dates; given the right population, that could turn into a fascinating interactive site. But as it is, it’s a nice take on the news that often gets buried among the standard “if it bleeds, it leads” mainstream fare.

Don’t Write Facebook Off – Despite the recent privacy brouhaha, Facebook traffic was up 20% month-over-month, according to the traffic metric mavens at Compete. That matches up with what you told us, that Facebook remains as useful as ever for those who use it. But: if you are in the minority who are concerned about he privacy implications, the new Freakin’ Beacon Firefox extension will warn you when you happen to be using a site that’s sending your information over to Facebook.

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