Shelby Bonnie left the company he co-founded with Halsey Minor, CNET, just about one year ago. This morning he launches his next startup, PoliticalBase.
The site, which focuses on local, state and national elections and other political matters, is timed perfectly to take advantage of the 2008 presidential elections and the estimated $4.5 billion that will be spent on advertising to promote candidates and issues.
PoliticalBase is a structured Wiki that encourages research and debate. Users can edit most of the text but can’t change the underlying database structure. That allows the site to slice and dice data for comparison purposes (something that can’t be done with the free-for-all Wikipedia) but still gives the site’s community the ability to create and edit content.
The site is broken down into interconnected categories, including money, people, issues, elections, etc. Clicking on, say Rudy Giuliani shows information on that presidential candidate, including the amount of money raised to date, his religion and party affiliation and biographical information. At the bottom of the page his position on key issues is also shown (for fun, register for the site and click that you do not support him - see how his picture changes).
The Money area of the site is fascinating. PoliticalBase has collected public information on presidential donations made by individuals. Click on any state and then click on a county and see information on each individual contribution, down to the last dollar. Want to skip to the good stuff? Go to the celebrity area and see that, for example, Marc Andreessen gave $2,300 to the Barack Obama campaign.
Other areas of the site have hidden gems as well, such as integration of relevant YouTube videos into the pages. And as PoliticalBase attracts more users and gets more data, they’ll be able to do some interesting analysis and election predictions.
PoliticalBase is located in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco. It’s been funded to date by the five cofounders, all former CNETers: Shelby Bonnie, Mike Tatum, Ethan Lance, Dave Snider and Andy McCurdy.
Does this mean that political blogging is finally a business model? I am a bit ferklempt here since it looks like they “took” a vast amount of ideas rolled out by non-profit organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and are putting them on a site for monetization.
Hmmmm.
Gotta ruminate this one with my fellow TechPresident.com writers.
Liza Sabater, Publisher
http://culturekitchen.com
http://dailygotham.com
Mrrmmm…meh…lets see his marketing strategy.
(besides getting profiled on TC)
Another wiki just related to politics? Something I thought about but why would someone go there if wikipedia is already up to date and managed well?
Recently launched http://www.iamvoting.com which is mainly based on facebook userbase but will be an interesting concept. Current trials in one of the Provincial Election in Canada seems to have produced positive results for that site.
“Shelby W Bonnie
Information Requested @ Self Employed on Mar 5, 2007 $2,300″
I guess when you run the site you can put yourself down as a celeb! You would think he’d update his profession though…
http://www.politicalbase.com/i.....fficeId=71
The 2008 election will be different. Everyone is paying attention to presidential stuff now, but next year they’ll realize that there are thousands of other races.
We’re building a related database called the Legislative Database. Our focus is on all of the thousands of bills wending through the 50 state legislatures, the farm team for nearly all politicians.
It should be a fun year!
Awesome site. Flawless execution. Great job all around.
Nice job Dave in funding this - looks like a great site so far.
WOW. This post made my morning. Not only am i a HUGE fan of Shelby but the idea of marrying a potentially profitable company with civic conscience is just amazing.
It would be good to see more companies that aim to help inform people about truly important issues.
Holy crap, am I seeing things? A USEFUL site in the middle of the endless piles of garbage that this site reports on. I’m actually going to be USING this!
Long overdue site. Its success will be determined by how well it manages to keep the facts section impartial. I wouldn’t even have included any news stories.
I wonder if Shelby would take a wad of cash to massage the numbers for a particular candidate. (That’s a marketing strategy right there, Json.)
It is a very well done site and I like its feature set, the only problem is that it has already been gamed by the Digg/Techcrunch/Slashdot crowd so every list starts with Jon Stewart and Ron Paul. Unless this site gets used by a wider range of people than this the data and discussion is going to be as worthless as that on Digg.
Here are two more useful sites that focus on the 2008 Presidential Election:
1) http://www.MyElectionChoices.com - A very thorough site. You choose the topics you care about, and by agreeing with actual quotes from candidates, find out who you share opinions with.
2) http://www.wqad.com - A site from an Iowa TV station with a simplified version of a similar quiz.
Looks like a great site to me. Will keep an eye on them
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
This is interesting, but, I hope it does’nt degenerate into a “move-on.org” or some type crap like that. Most people when it comes to politics are woefully ignorant and prefer it that way. All they want to hear is bad stuff about the other guy and ignoring the fact that their guy is even worse. How else could you explain positive comments about Hellary?
oops, I didn’t say that.
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Fake Steve Ballmer, it was original and funny with the Fake Steve Jobs, but you’re starting to drain the last ounce of originality from the bit.
love the points/contribution system — looks like another win for these guys.
Fantastic!! Well done Shelby and crew!
Looks like a really useful site. I’m just not sure how large an audience there is for it. For the average joe, this is probably too much info. Political junkies will love it, but how many are out there?
Of course, Shelby doesn’t have to worry so much about the site making money.
This can be his philanthropic contribution to the web.
Wonder what we happen to this site after the momemtum from the 2008 Presidential elections is over? Are American citizens concerned enough about other political situations of lesser magnitude?
This is Maia, from Spock. Spock also has organized political campaign contributions. It’s pretty fun to play with - we have information about all the people who have donated money to campaigns, both local and national. I guess the examples show it best… you can see the 16,394 people who donated to Rudy Giuliani here: http://www.spock.com/q/?tag_qu.....0supporter
and you can see what politicians American CEOs support here: http://www.spock.com/q/?tag_query=CEO%20supporter
It’ll be interesting to see the role that technology plays in this upcoming election. All of this information has been publicly available in the past, but this seems to be the first time that it is being organized in such an easily digestible way.
Great another site for the Ron Paul army to spam all day. Not TC worthy!
Looks cool. The money is interesting.
Thanks for this link!
The contributing political elite is definitely a solid user-base, but the site really lacks the focused community of a partisan blog. A good resource, but critical mass will be difficult.
Michael:
Nice catch! I can see how the PolitialBase website will be a very useful resource for those politicos and their minions who want oodles of data with which to feed the election fire. I cross-posted on your piece to http://blog.innovators-network.org The Innovators Network is a non-profit dedicated to bringing technology to startups, small businesses, non-profits, venture capitalists and intellectual property experts. Please visit us and help grown our community!
Warm greetings from the frozen forests of Alaska,
Anthony Kuhn
Innovators Network
This site has very questionable information, I think its corrupt.