Charbax.com

Although the number of registered users of http://barackobama.com is impressive, their multi-user blogging portal at http://my.barackobama.com is cool. I wonder how many of those hundreds of thousands of blog posts that were actually read or how much those user-generated blog posts actually mattered.

As far as I understand it, the way Barack Obama’s campaign had the worlds best usage so far of the Internet in a campaign (second best could be Ségolène Royal’s lost french presidential campaign), has been especially to collect money in the form of millions of small donations. And to do the online organizing of getting out the vote efforts in the form of getting millions of supporters to personally call voters (which is better then robocalls), knock on their doors, do meet-ups, know about local events and stuff like that. Also the usual most effective way to communicate with supporters has been newsletters.

Putting some wiki, chat or user-generated blogging type blog comments on http://change.gov I think may be more of a gimmick then really useful and powerful. Live webcasts from the White House would probably be an awesome highlight and a worlds first. Already right there, they could provide hundreds of interesting hours from those meetings, those deliberations, commities, speeches, diplomatic meetings and all that.

I think they need to create an online congress where every citizen is a representative, can vote on all ideas, can suggest ideas, can amend ideas, express themselves in meaningful ways. Then all this needs to be done using clever algorithms to promote the good ideas automatically using clever new wisdom of the crowds algorithms. On the Internet, one vote shouldn’t count as one vote, votes should count proportionally with the influence and activity each verified user has on the rest of the community. This way, an algorithm can automatically filter out the experts and the representatives.