VoteOften Brings Political Focus to Social News
Mark Hendrickson
12 comments »
Is Digg not satisfying your desire for political news on this Super Tuesday? A newly launched site called VoteOften wants to step in and fill the void.
VoteOften is a social news site like Digg but with additional features that set it apart. In addition to user-submitted stories, the site algorithmically pulls in the top political stories from several reputable news sources. Stories are not only voted up or down but rated for their liberal or conversative bias as well. They are also tagged as relevant to particular candidates or issues, so you can view all stories related to, say, Barack Obama or national security.
More advanced features include the ability to rate candidates based on how they are portrayed by a particular story. You can indicate whether you got a good or bad impression of the candidates mentioned in a story, and the site will generate a bar graph showing how everyone felt about the candidates in aggregate.
Since this site just launched, the homepage stories are not terribly fresh yet; this will hopefully change once site activity increases. Check it out, participate, and go vote.
Why vote if I won’t win?
I actually feel bad for Romney. Just coz the guy is Mormon, no one wants to vote for him…
On the flip side, I just saw Barack Obama’s house. It’s HUGE!
Pancakes are good, but always calling them “Super” is a bit of an over statement isn’t it?
Mark is pretty late to the game here. Skewz.com has been around for months. TechCrunch is clearly losing its edge. Not much of a crunch…kind of sopping wet actually
Yeah, Skewz.com is definitely better. If they could just get 25% more creative with how they operate some of their functions and then make the site more visual…it could really blow up.
20DC.com is doing live results all night at http://www.20dc.com/stuesday.php and also has an online primary open until midnight. swing by and check it out. results will be posted as they come in!
I say VoteOften is much better, I’m really liking this site. Great election coverage at VoteOften, no Super Tuesday articles are on the top of Skewz? VoteOften’s bias implementation seems sleeker as well. Looks promising
No comments at VoteOften, doesn’t look like there are any users.
So today I read about VoteOften.us. According to this posting the site “just launched” but some of the stories (from AP) are 70 days old. Those are on the front page. I mean for the site to be successful, the stories need to be current. Maybe as the site is open for longer, more users will join and the content will become more up-to-date.
Also, the site has a social networking kind of feature, so you can see how your friends have ranked stories. I thought this would be particularly interesting leading up to the election in Novemeber. It would be a great way to share articles with my friends. On every page of the site (for now at least) there is the following banner “Welcome to VoteOften, where you can find out what’s hot in politics. Take the site tour. Tell a friend!” There is nowhere on the site (I spent a good 20 minutes perusing the site) to send an invitation to your friend. So let’s say I send out an email to all my friends, urging them to join and be active so we can share stories. That’s great but unless I am able to connect to them, we won’t be sharing stories. At that point we might as well just email articles to each other.
So that’s a big flaw. I emailed the site a bit before 10 this morning, but still have not heard back. Will update if/when I recieve a response.
Also, when I click on friends, the site says “you haven’t added any friends.” Well that’s pretty obvious to me. On most social networking sites though there would be instructions as to how to add friend or how to find friends who had posted similar stories. Adding stories (submitting) is easy enough. I have posted 4 thus far. I posted all 4 about 3 hours ago. One story has three votes (one is mine), another has 12 votes, another only has two (so only one person besides me cares about that story), and the final submission only has my vote.
Bottom Line: The site seems to have a good concept. Too bad I can’t add friends to really utilize that idea.
The site is terrific, great for me because I love following politics. It adds more depth to social news as there is a multidimensionality to voting in that you can vote for the bias of an article as well as rate individual candidates mentioned in each article.
In response to Carissa, I don’t see any 70 day old stories on the frontpage, most of the stories are only an hour or so old, and the older ones on the front page are only a day or two old. It’s been a bit since her comment though, maybe it’s changed.
Also, there is a tell a friend feature, just click “Tell a Friend” and a form appears where you can notify a friend about the site. I’ve just used google talk to send the link to friends so I haven’t tried it yet.
Regarding adding friends, it took me a bit to figure it out, but in another person’s profile, click the plus sign that’s labeled add to friends and it sends them a friend request. I added a couple friends, and the friend notification is great, much better than Digg’s. It gives short descriptions of what your friends are doing on every page.
I say definitely check this one out, they’re doing lots of cool new things, especially for those interested in politics and the election.
skewz.com seems much more powerful but i’m open to check this one out, i’ve been using skewz.com and found it off of another site.
I also like skewz.com better…