techPresident Launches Politickr
Yesterday techPresident – a group blog covering the intersection of technology and the 2008 presidential race – launched Politickr. It’s their great implementation of the site I originally developed at Politickr.net.
I helped Josh Levy and Shai Sachs transform the site I originally put together – using only Yahoo! Pipes and FeedBurner with a dash of CSS – into a dynamic site that tracks all the content put out by declared and potential presidential candidates.
You can drill down to see more types of content for each candidate, and subscribe to your favorites to keep up with what they’re doing online. But what I think is the coolest part is the tag cloud section. This counts the number of words used in each candidate’s blog and displays the most frequently used words in a cloud. You get a really interesting visual from this: Josh mentions a few, like Romney’s most frequently used word being “Dad,” for one.
The clouds are also a good check on how well-messaged each blog is. Giuliani’s cloud gives a good picture of his platform: “fiscal discipline,” “leadership.” (No 9/11 though?) Tom Tancredo’s blog is telling of his single-issue soapbox platform: “amnesty,” “illegal immigrants,” and “immigration” are among his biggest words.
Bookmark Politickr to keep up with what’s going on in 2008, and subscribe to your favorite candidates’ feeds. I’ll post about any updates or new features that come up.