Every piece of political news that appears makes me a stronger believer of that statement.

A while ago a post entitled “Solve Some Real World Problems” popped up in Google Reader from Chris Brogan. It’s no surprise, really, that the politics of politics could easily be considered one of the problems technology could help to solve. Numerous startups have tried. None have really caught on, though (at least as far as I’m aware)… why?

The need for a new system

I’ve started to think about what it is I don’t enjoy about politics and how it is presented and discussed online.  There are actually several factors I feel are missing from the current dialogue when looking at a specific post from a commenter or forum user:

• Accountability. A majority of posts are written anonymously or under a pseudonym. Who is this person? Are they liberal or conservative? Where do they stand on issues?
• History. At the same time, it’s important to know what the person has said in the past. What has this person said in the past? What is the scope of his/her contributions to the discussion?
• Reference. Many posts cite speeches or past candidate views. Where can I read where the points within the post were originally raised?
• Freedom. Often comments are based solely on the fact that they involve their favorite candidate. Do you support a candidate but not agree with one of his or her views? (*gasp*)

The style of discussion is also important.  This also lends itself to many options:

• A free-form discussion forum
• A discussion forum based off of broad topics (a speech, an issue, etc.)
• A discussion forum based off of external news articles or URLs (digg-style)

I would probably argue for the third option in this case.

From all of this, I feel a successful forum for political discussion would need a few features:

• A login system with required registration (name, location, political affiliation, and supported candidate(s))
• Some sort of comment rating and user karma system
• A user post history
• A (very) easy way to cite external sources
• Invitation-only… at least to start

Does Digg or Reddit already cover these bases? Yes, to an extent. But I believe the political discussion is so unique that it needs its own specialized arena.

What do you think?

I would love to hear what you think about this. What do you believe is missing in the current online political discussion? How could it be changed into a more effective and productive conversation? Do you agree with what I’ve said… or what have I left out? Is there a site that already does this well?

If you’re a new reader to ANW, welcome. Don’t be afraid to comment! I’d also love to hear from people with all sorts of political affiliations: liberal, conservative, and anything in between. Thanks for participating.

One of the key tenets of the connected and shared Web world of today is to let best-in-breed service providers handle the complexities of your Web environment. How valid does that philosophy turn out to be when one of the specialized providers has service interruptions?

Services around the Web felt the pinch of service outsourcing this afternoon due to an internal communication problem with Amazon’s S3 and SQS services. The effects of the outage for some were purely cosmetic; Twitter failed to load user avatars for a period starting around noon Eastern time. For others like Basecamp and other 37signals products, the downtime caused features to be disabled temporarily.

The hardest hit this afternoon, though, were services whose entire system revolved around Amazon’s service. Users of SmugMug were greeted with a picture of the service logo watering a garden of servers and a brief message explaining the current situation. The company’s reaction? “We’re not happy about it, of course…”

Amazon does provide a service level agreement (SLA) for their AWS suite; any uptime of less than 99.9% of any given month results in either a 10% or 25% credit of that month’s service cost. (A 6-hour isolated outage on a 31-day month would result in a monthly uptime of 99.2%.) With the number of services that fundamentally depend on external providers for the entirety of their business, is a simple SLA valid?

As SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill wrote this afternoon on the SmugMug Status Updates blog:

Since problems in this industry are inevitable, and Amazon’s performance over the last two years has been so exceptional, we’ve been afraid an outage like this. I’m sure there will be more over the next few years, too.

While MacAskill’s point may sound pessimistic, it’s historically valid. While using best-of-breed services and APIs provides a service with a host of tangible benefits, it comes with the risk of multiple points of failure for a connected Web business.

(In 2006, MacAskill wrote a post detailing why S3 is a good choice for his business.)

Many users of Twitter found posts from their followers announcing the death of NBC political analyst Tim Russert this afternoon in their Twitterstreams. As the news spread, the Twitter crowd mentioned some of their memories of election nights, whiteboards, and episodes of “Meet the Press”. People from all over the globe put aside their political differences and remembered their favorite moments of a great reporter.

As the tweets came flowing in, a new type of memorial formed at conversational tracking sites like Summize. A search for “russert” revealed a broad compilation of announcements, emotions, and well wishes. A real-time anthology of reactions evolved as more Twitter users learned of Russert’s passing.

Maps of 100 recent Twitter users who posted about Tim Russert today. Images created with the Summize, Twittervision, and Google Maps APIs.

Now, just hours after the first announcement of Russert’s death, hundreds (if not thousands) of people around the world have joined an impromptu community and contributed to this new form of spontaneous memorial. It’s a fitting tribute for a journalist by those who watched and respected his insight.

I just wonder when they’ll replace the term “photostream” and the flickr.com/photos/username URLs.  Then again, you can still buy TV shows and movies in the iTunes Store.

Link: Video on Flickr!

Link: Photoshop Express

For an added perspective, the sum of Verizon’s total bids topped the gross domestic products of Nepal, Georgia, Equatorial Guinea, Paraguay, Mozambique, and about 60 other countries on the CIA World Factbook list.

(The FCC provides PDFs of the results announcement and the results table.)

Link: Verizon and AT&T dominate airwaves auction

My current hypothesis is that there are at least three positions of prominence in each segment — three ways to be number one, if you will: The First One, The Free One, and The Good One.

It’s a good read for any platform: desktop, Web, or mobile.

Link: The First, The Free, and the Good

Link: Y! Live

Link: Live Search Maps

Link: Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry