October 6th, 2008, 9 Comments »
Yesterday I was talking to somebody about voting. She asked, and I told her (as I told you) for whom I planned to vote.
She mentioned that her parents always kept their voting decisions a secret, possibly even from each other. I have a vague memory of my parents not discussing who they voted for either. Am I making this up, or was there a prevailing opinion in their generation that you didn’t disclose for whom you cast your ballot?
The essence of this notion seems to be (or have been) “your vote is nobody’s business but your own”. That’s true, and I suppose it was designed, in a Miss Manners kind of way, to avoid heated conflict in otherwise civil conversation. However, times and social norms change.
Plus, if you care about politics and your choice, I’d imagine that you’d want to try to convince other people of your position. And how can you do that without disclosing who you’re planning to support?
Do you discuss who you’re voting for among your family and friends? If not, why not?
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August 12th, 2008, 7 Comments »
The reknowned SXSW Interactive Festival uses crowd-sourcing to sort through their speaker submissions. They publish all their submissions in an interactive ‘panel picker’ and encourage the public to vote on the talks they want to see.
As you can see by the pie chart on this page, the voting is worth 30% of the total selection process.
On Twitter, Boris suggested that we ought to organize a Vancouver ‘vote for my panel, I’ll vote for yours’ squad of voting keeners. So, here it is. Leave your panel names and URLs in the comments, and I’ll add them to the bulleted list below. Vote for the ones that sound good, the people you like, or just randomly until you come down off the drugs.
UPDATE: Er, hang on, Dave beat me to it with an enormous post. If you don’t see your panel over there, feel free to add it both places.
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May 16th, 2007, No Comments »
Truemors is a new, uh, ‘Twitter for rumours of all shapes and sizes’ site launched by Guy Kawasaki. Here’s a bit of analysis from TechCrunch.
I’m not sure about this service, so I’m going to withhold judgement for the moment. I’m not a big Twitter user, nor am I a huge gossip, so I’m sure how I’d use Truemors.
Maybe they should have launched a whole network of very vertical rumour sites, like http://britney.truemors.com or http://hilaryclinton.truemors? Then you could get the otaku for a particular topic to coalesce around it in a very targeted way. Mind you, otaku already have their own communties where they talk about rumors along with everything else. So, I’m not quite sure where Truemors fits in.
Truemors has Digg-like voting where you push rumours up and down the page. To try it out, I posted a rumour linking to a DeSmogBlog story. It’s not really a rumour, but I couldn’t think of any at the moment and didn’t want to make one up (Beatles reunion tour? Germany bisecting again?). I ‘dugg’ the rumour up, and asked Julie to do the same on her computer.
As it turns out, Julie couldn’t vote the rumour up. She got a message saying that she’d already voted on that story. I can only assume (and somebody can correct my ignorant assumption here) that Truemors is using IP addresses to track votes. They’re also using cookies (I just checked in Firefox), but apparently IP addresses trump cookies, or something.
That doesn’t happen with Digg, or other voting sites, and it shouldn’t. Otherwise roommates or families or (in some cases) coworkers couldn’t ever vote up the same stuff. I assume it’s just a bug they need to work out.
UPDATE: I posted a rumour about Truemors’ voting system.
UPDATE #2: Huh, Truemors already killed the aforementioned post. It pretty much said “Truemors counts votes based on IP addresses, so we can’t vote from two different computers on the same IP address. Bummer.”
That kind of blows. If they’re going to heavily moderate content (particularly content which points out bugs in their system), then where are their community guidelines articulating their moderation policy? Did I violate their terms of use?
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