Webware

(Credit: Twitter)

Now live, from the team behind Twitter: a site for tracking "tweets" pertaining to the fast-approaching U.S. presidential elections. Enter an election-related post on the page and it will appear in the continually-updating feed, which also aggregates other Twitter posts that contain election-related terms like the candidates' names.

In July, Twitter announced that it had acquired Summize, a popular search tool based on the Twitter application program interface (API). Now called Twitter Search, the Summize technology appears to be behind the filters on the election site.

If the 2004 elections hailed the debut of bloggers and the 2006 mid-term elections were when YouTube popped onto the scene (just ask former Virginia senator George Allen), it's looking like 2008 will be the election cycle where Twitter sped to the forefront of the political Web. The campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain have created Twitter accounts for up-to-the-minute news and updates--the most recent updates are featured at the top of the Twitter election site--and the micro-blogging site has proven to be a must-use tool for opinionated news junkies and aspiring pundits.

But Twitter is still small enough so that it's possible to generate a simple "election feed" without encountering too much noise or irrelevant banter.

Twitter has also partnered with experimental news network Current TV on its election coverage, and selected live "tweets" will be displayed on-screen during its coverage of the presidential debates. Those are slated to start on Friday night, but Republican candidate John McCain's participation is still up in the air due to his announcement that he would suspend his campaign to focus on the ongoing Wall Street calamity.

Will he debate or not? Check that nifty new election page on Twitter. They're talking about it.

Automattic, parent company of blogging platform WordPress, has acquired IntenseDebate, the free blog comment enhancement tool. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The service launched a little more than a year ago with several innovative features that effectively take over a blog's commenting system and add things like reputation, ranking, and a centralized area where blog administrators can manage comments across several sites at once.

Automattic and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg says two of the main reasons for the pickup are IntenseDebate's e-mail replies and rating system which will likely make their way as the default offerings on WordPress.com and WordPress.org products in the near future.

For the time being, IntenseDebate has closed its doors to new users. In a post about the acquisition co-founder Jon Fox says it will be reopened to all as soon as it can prepare for a higher level of scaling. How big you ask? Like all of WordPress.org installs and WordPress.com, 4 million-plus users big.

The good news in all of this is that, according to Fox, IntenseDebate will remain a cross-platform product. From its very beginnings it has been open to other blogging tools like Blogger and MovableType. If anything, the closer integration with upcoming versions of WordPress should help accelerate development.

Current, the edgy news and culture channel co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, has come up with a new way to broadcast the presidential debates: show Twitter commentary on what people are saying.

Through an official partnership with the microblogging service, Current will broadcast "Hack the Debate," which will live-stream on Current.com as well as air on the network. Twitter updates, or "tweets," will be shown in real time for all four debates (three with the presidential candidates and one with the vice presidential candidates), which begin on September 26. It makes a whole lot of sense, given Current's slant toward young and tech-savvy news hounds (i.e., the people who use Twitter) and heavy focus on user-submitted content.

"The debate stage is only set for two candidates, but Current was founded to make room for millions of participants," Current CEO Joel Hyatt said in a release. "We're thrilled to work with Twitter and take advantage of their extremely powerful communication platform, giving people a chance to speak directly to Current's nationwide television audience."

Last year, MTV featured Twitter as a promotion platform for the Video Music Awards, and featured some popular tweets on-air, but did not incorporate them into a live broadcast.

Current has not said how the tweets will be selected for on-air display, but it's likely that they will be hand-picked to provide a range of perspectives and serious commentary. So expect more about the candidates' differing views on the economy...and less about vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's hair.

When I talked to Opposing Views CEO Russell Fine in preparation for my review of the site a week ago, I asked him if he honestly thought that his service, which recruits experts from both sides of contentious issues, would actually change anyone's mind. The question comes from my observation that the profusion of contemporary media choices--by which I mean talk shows and blogs--allows users to easily associate themselves with content that fits into their own particular views. And that it's so much easier to read people with whom you agree than it is to open yourself up to being proved wrong or ignorant.

Fine believes that everyone is on the fence about something, and that Opposing Views can help people find opinions they identify with so they can hone in on a stance. And that if they do have a stance on a topic, they can learn on the site how to argue it more effectively.

Two other sites for hosting debate, Where I Stand and UberSpat, have similarities to Opposing Views, but they both miss their marks.

These two sites put the opinion of their users foremost, which is all well and good and Web 2.0-ish, but it doesn't make for very deep reading. On both sites, the primary content is the opinion of users, in response to issues posed by other users.

Where I Stand mixes in expert opinion with users' rants.

Now, there are elements on both sites that have potential. On Where I Stand you can "follow" users you're interested in, and then when they post new stances on topics you'll get an alert. The site, indeed, is designed so users can "define who they are by their opinions."

The site does encourage users to seek out and post the official positions of notable thinkers (or failing that, journalists). There's also a big effort to translate content on the site so users can read about topics and opinions in their language no matter what the native language of the debate is.

But for the most part, gut-level arguments on poorly-articulated questions override the sense that there is actual thought happening on Where I Stand. I spent a fair amount of time on this site and didn't learn a thing, except which way the Where I Stand user base leans on various issues.

UberSpat does a slightly better job of breaking out "official" content from user votes.

Competitor UberSpat has a slightly better architecture. It gives more weight to "official" positions supporting or refuting various arguments. Users then vote on those positions. However, the site's users do an uneven job of pulling in sources to support positions, and there's no breakdown of the arguments as there is on Opposing Views.

If you have an issue you want to see argued, you can easily launch the debate on either of these sites. But the responses you get, while you may them gratifying to your ego, are unlikely to educate or enlighten.

As businesses go, these are both fairly hands-off services. If users take up residence on either of these sites (against my advice, they probably will), both the sites can be run with very lean teams, and might be able to rake in enough advertising to be self-supporting. But they feel like most Facebook apps: Faux viral, and frothy.

Opposing Views, comparatively, is an expensive operation. Issues are selected and defined by paid editors, and crafted to be neutral and clear - appropriate canvases on which topic leaders can paint their opinions. The team then goes out and finds the best representatives for the pro and con of each issue, and they make sure that these people stay on target, not just talking to the issues but staying in their fields of expertise. The payback for collecting these opinions and experts is higher-quality content that can later be re-packaged and re-sold. It also makes for a much better read.

Opposing Views is a new site for debate that's launching today. The content on it is great reading. And as CEO Russell Fine said, "I get a lot of people angry. Which is mission accomplished."

I love that.

The site poses questions to people known for representing strong positions on them. The questions are precisely those you don't generally ask at cocktail parties, such as "Is there a God?" and "Should the death penalty be banned?" Plenty of sites address issues like these, but Opposing Views, as a site, takes no position. Rather, it's a platform for debate. Opposing Views' value add is the structure it provides, and the team's skill in recruiting spokespeople on opposite sides of the issues.

Opposing Views landed spokespeople from both presidential campgaigns to debate the candidates' economic plans.

Maintaining balance in the product will be difficult. In the pre-launch site I looked at, the quality of the debate was variable, from middling to excellent. Mostly, people taking opposing positions were fairly matched, meaning some debates were more engaging than others. On the question of which presidential candidate would be better for the American economy, Opposing Views landed a coup: official representation from officers in both the McCain and Obama campaigns. Contributors like that attract other quality writers. Meanwhile, the staff at Opposing Views vets the qualifications of all contributors, and bans comments that don't follow basic rules of decorum and debate.

The main content on Opposing Views is highly structured. Debaters can address a question by making short headline statements to support their position, which they can then expand on at length, with HTML video embeds and hyperlinks if they wish. Opponents can create a rebuttal to a particular argument in addition to posting their own list of statements supporting their position. Multiple experts can support one position and the site segregates their answers.

The sites's users can comment on arguments and vote them up or down.

Is this argument, the American Coal Council has a rebuttal to the Rainforst Action Network's position on building more coal power plants.

Currently, most of the debates on Opposing Views are "stance" issues, to use Fine's terminology. They're arguments around areas of interest. Eventually Fine hopes to have more "transactional" debates that veer towards advice. In particular, he's looking at medical topics, and he says he has a way to keep the content general enough to be interesting to readers while also providing a level of personal service that, as it appears to me, veers a bit close to the Yahoo Answers model.

My advice: Try the site. It might open your eyes on issues you care about. It might make your blood boil to see how people in opposition to your views represent themselves. But we could all use more exposure to ideas that are counter to our own.

Where's the money?
Opposing Views is not a nonprofit issues site like ProCon.org. Fine is in this game to make a buck, and believes that advertising and selling opinion research generated on his site will work as primary revenue models. Supporting those are the potentials to act as a speakers' bureau (where better to find a speaker on a topic than on a site about debate?), and as a white-label platform he can license to sites like local newspapers.

The key to the main revenue streams is search engine optimization, and in this regard, the more experts he gets on the site the more traffic he'll get, since, as he says, "All these experts, they'll bring their crowds with them."

See also: Helium, BigThink, Fora.

During the ABC-Facebook Democratic and Republican debates in Manchester, N.H., Saturday night, the social-networking site launched a politics "Soundboard" (screenshot shown here) that racked up more than 35,000 comments during the East Coast broadcast alone.

MANCHESTER, N.H.--It sounded like a good idea at first: let Internet users be part of, virtually speaking, the Democratic and Republican presidential debates on Saturday evening by posting comments on a special Facebook message board.

But it turned out to be one of those ideas that may be better in theory than in practice. During the East coast broadcast of the debates, Facebook users posted around 35,000 "Soundboard" messages, meaning that at perhaps 50 characters each, that's some 1.75 million characters to read during an approximately three-hour period. All of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, by contrast, is only 700,000 characters.

To read all those messages, at 20 per page, you'd have to refresh your browser's screen 1,750 times. That's not even counting comments posted by west coast Facebook users (Facebook, which co-sponsored the debate here with ABC News, said the west coast figures were not yet available).

No doubt, the political twitterers must've felt empowered to know their Soundboard comments were being beamed out to an audience of potentially millions of Facebook users, and, if plucked by ABC's designated Facebook-monitoring reporter on TV, millions of offline viewers as well.

Still, it's a little unclear whether the comments will prove all that useful for campaigns looking to boost their candidates' standing.

... Read more

Yesterday we were all aflutter over Disqus (review) and Intense Debate (review)--two companies offering similar products for replacing an existing blog comment system, and one is centered around universal profiles and comment tracking. Today we're taking a look at SezWho, a comment enhancement service that's been around since June (we briefly wrote about them last month), and has since been integrated into more than 300 sites.

Instead of replacing your current system, SezWho layers on a reputation and rating system to your comments. Registered users can vote on the usefulness of other people's comments, and that rating goes into an aggregate ranking that's a part of a user's profile. Like the solutions from yesterday, rankings are universal on any site that's integrated SezWho, meaning you're taking a track record of all your posts with you to other sites, where other users can explore what you've been commenting on, and how other users perceive you. The goal is to help sites sort out the good and the bad (employing self-policing from the users), and simultaneously letting people share and explore links amongst themselves.

Show off your most established commenters with SezWho's Red Carpet widget.

(Credit: SezWho)

This morning the company is announcing several new features. Two--one for site owners, and one for SezWho users at large--are all about user visibility. The first, called Red Carpet, is for site owners, and is similar to the top-users widget I mentioned with Intense Debate. Red Carpet lets site owners promote some of their most active discussion participants with a visual ranking widget that can be put anywhere. In a perfect world, users will see this somewhere and either explore some of the content these users have been reading, or feel the need to participate to get a place on the list.

The other widget is a SezWho profile badge, which users can post on any blogs or personal pages. Mousing over the badge causes it to pop up with a user's SezWho profile, including links to their latest comments, and other user ratings. Between the two, I see Red Carpet getting more traction, as blog owners seem more likely to promote the use of such a system to give their blog, and some of their older posts additional exposure in other parts of the SezWho network.

The new profile widget can go anywhere. Mousing over it would give you a quick look at a SezWho member profile.

(Credit: SezWho)

What might end up being the most useful addition is a new set of metrics rolled out last week to both SezWho users and blog owners. Users get to see a more open set of stats about how many people are rating their profile and comments, while blog owners get access to a new internal tracking tool that shows where any incoming SezWho traffic originates. The data charts aren't as extensive as something like Google Analytics, but it's a nice addition for site owners to keep an eye on user involvement.

On a side note, our (CNET's) TalkBack commenting system has a similar feature for rating a user comment's usefulness, and users can hop between our various sites with one account. The biggest difference is the option to jump to other sites with that same ID.

I must say, I really like the idea of SezWho. Comment rating is a very useful way to sort through the good and the bad--assuming your audience is keen and plentiful enough to make it worthwhile. Where SezWho inherently falls short is how deeply it can be integrated. While it's nice that you don't have to replace your current system, you're missing out on a single user profile for both the site and commenting system--something which is possible with larger Web-based blogging platforms like Wordpress.com and Blogger.

Consider today two-for-Tuesday on Webware, because we've got another universal comment system coming out of private beta today. This time around it's Intense Debate, a new service that replaces your blog's standard commenting system with an enhanced version that features analytics, user profiles, and a tracking system.

Like Disqus, which we looked at earlier, Intense Debate is full of all sorts of commenting goodness like deep structural threading, an up or down voting system per comment, and integrated user profiles with reputation. You also get the bonus of a really slick dashboard that lets you track which posts are getting the most comments (with shiny charts) and some community tools like an easy-to-use widget that lets you promote some of your top site commenters on your front page--similar to what several popular Weblogs Inc. blogs used to do.

For the sake of your users, there are also some handy ways they can interact with Intense Debate's system without getting jettisoned off the post. For example, users can register with the service right in the comments field, either using their registration system or with an OpenID. They can also subscribe to the post's comments RSS feed (which Disqus also has) as well as sign up to get notified when someone replies via e-mail.

Switch the style of your site's comments on the fly with one of three built-in styles included.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

What I find most appealing about Intense Debate's approach are its setup tools and administrative controls. Besides some of the visual analytics I mentioned earlier, the setup to white or blacklist certain words or phrases can give you a whole lot of control over automating comment moderation. You can pick one of three ways you want comments to appear on the page, and even tweak the look and style of them with one of the included themes, or use the version that will try to mimic your site's design--which I found to work only so well on a custom Wordpress blog. Advanced users can go in and skin the heck out of the thing by linking up to a custom CSS file.

The big thing services like Intense Debate and Disqus offer is the holy grail of a universal ID for comments, something I touched on earlier when taking a look at Disqus' approach. I think the hardest hump for these services to get over--a problem a product like coComment doesn't have--is that it requires adoption by content providers instead of users. I'm happy to install a browser plug-in or sign up for one account in one place, but blog owners with closed or proprietary systems will have a tougher time making that kind of move, unless these services offer significantly more to users and site owners than other plugins or built-in user registration tools on popular platforms.

To see Intense Debate in action, here are a few blogs that have integrated it:
The Gong Show
Colorado Startups
The Thinking Blog
TechStars

Intense Debate comments in action as seen on ColoradoStartups.com.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In a joint announcement on Thursday, YouTube and CNN unveiled their plans for co-sponsored Democratic and Republican presidential debates that aim to bring the standard televised events into the digital age of mashups, remixes and viral buzz. Not only will video content from the events (as well as other CNN debates) be made available for sharing and distribution online, but the debate questions themselves will come in the form of videos sent in by YouTube users.

(Video: YouTube's call for submissions)

In a dial-in press conference, representatives from both companies explained the new process and answered questions from reporters--on hand were Jon Klein, president of CNN U.S.; David Bohrman, CNN's senior vice president and Washington, D.C. bureau chief; Chad Hurley, YouTube's CEO and co-founder; and Steve Grove, YouTube's news and politics editor.

All four projected eager enthusiasm that this new debate format would bring a more democratic angle to the way campaign dialogue is conducted. "This is how debates would have been done since the beginning of time, had the technology been available," Klein extolled. "It's really powerful, and it really brings the country to the presidential candidates in a very visual and contextual way," added Grove.

... Read more