I've been busy lately and thus haven't had much time to blog. On top of that I just bought a PowerBook G4 to replace the IBM Thinkpad that died on me over the summer, and I've got a lot of files to move over, mail programs to synchronize, and new tools to learn. Luckily, lots of people have been very supportive, including brother Dave, Britt Blaser, Doc Searls, Andrew Rasiej, and the good folks at Technorati.
Speaking of Technorati, one of the high points of my trip to San Francisco last week was attending their "hackerthon." I came with a project that I hoped someone might want to code: to take a list of the urls of Members of Congress and create a ranked list of who the blogosphere was talking about. Much to my pleasure, a young man named Aaron Swartz walked up to me after I made my pitch and quietly said, "I'd like to give it a try." I then watched as he banged out a very workable first whack at a solution in less than an hour. (Only later did I learn that three years ago, at the tender age of 15, Aaron was the de facto IT manager of the Creative Commons site.) I don't know about you, but this sort of thing doesn't happen every day, at least not back in NY!
We're working on some issues with the code, but hope to have it ready for the re-launch of the Personal Democracy Forum site in about a week. The big problem is that while bloggers mention Members a lot, they don't tag them with their website url very often. I think that is because it's relatively hard--compared to clicking over to Amazon to get a book url--to find politicians' web addresses.
We could do the same ranking by keyword, but it won't be as accurate (think of those Congressmen Adam Smith and Jerry Lewis, for example, if you want to see how sloppy a keyword search can be). So we're going to make it real easy for bloggers to tag Members of Congress. Hopefully, that will improve the data stream for all. If you have any ideas on this front, let me know. Or just stay tuned for the re-launch.
Posted by msifry at October 11, 2004 11:03 PM