My Speech as President (Preliminary)
This podcast shares an entrepreneurial idea that will revolutionize the world of politics by exposing the world’s most brilliant speakers on any given topic and empowering everyone to contribute meaningfully in a truly democratic system.
The podcast itself is preliminary and not intended for public adoption. I go deeper into theory than the general public would care to hear, and plan to release a video-cast in the future with the objective of inciting massive public demand.
First few minutes are informative and background - the meat of the idea comes middle to end. Feedback & critique appreciated!
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I need to listen to this when I get home from work.
Interesting idea although I think generating the publicity to get it off the ground is going to be the main barrier for the site to be successful. The problem I see is that any kind of marketing campaign probably won’t be successful unless there is already good content on the site. Thus getting the first set of information out there is going to be a big hurdle. It may come down to having to manually go out and find media and articles already in the public domain that you could cut and paste to get some information to start out with.
Another issue I see is that the rating system you are describing sounds like it may be a little too complex for the average user to go along with, especially when the site is young and hasn’t obtained much in the way of a loyal community of editors. Have you considered starting out with a two-tiered system for reader generated feedback? The first tier could allow people who didn’t go thru the process of registering to rate the articles. The second tier could then be the people who were willing to go through the registration and knowledge testing process. The second group’s opinions could be emphasized more in rating the articles. Maybe down the road, once the site takes off, you could stop using the unregistered user ratings, but I think that while starting out it is going to be important to have as many people rating articles as possible.
Tommy - great points. Getting the site large enough to hit critical mass will be a challenge. It’s not explicitly mentioned in the podcast, but the site would also have to contain forums to enable non-spotlighted individuals due influence & a means to gain influence through their contributions to the discussion.
As for the rating system; I agree it’d be complex, but most of the complexity could be hidden from the user. People wouldn’t need to understand the algorithm to participate. Basically it’s just like digg.com is currently, but with a weight added based on your knowledge in the domain. I hesitate to open ratings without registration as it’d make it too easy to exploit ratings in the system. Those who don’t wish to go for influence through the knowledge-rating will still gain lift through feedback in the forums (a la slashdot.org).