Why08 Blog

Obama Girl (check out her blog too) is now part of the Why08 community. Welcome!

Big thanks to the geniuses at NextNewNetworks and Barely Political for sending her our way.

There are plenty of places on the web to talk about politics.

Many blogs, newspapers, and columnists have developed thriving communities, ones that we at Why08 are often a part of and enjoy using. What’s out there is, in many ways, great.

So why…Why08?

We want to do things a little differently. Why08 wants to be the big tent for Election 2008.

This is not a place for conservatives, a place for liberals, or a place for independents. It’s a place for everybody.

Why08 has no editorial voice, no ax to grind. Our schtick is the conversation. Conversation creates an active citizenry; people engaged in politics, people who care about how their country is run and who’s running it.

We think conversation is good, and good conversation is even better. And that means there has to be room for voices that disagree, often dramatically. That’s the Why08 big tent.

The problem with a big tent is that it’s easy to get lost. So we’ve created some cool features - the Cabinet and the WHYre - to help keep track of the people and views that strike you personally.

Why08 makes it simple to share your opinions, read about others’, and keep track of the utterly insightful and the totally inane.

Why08 is a social conversation platform for the 2008 Elections.

We hope you enjoy it. You can sign up here.

The Why08 Team

We’re slowly branching out and have our first taste of the real public with our mention on Mashable. Welcome to the private beta, Mashable readers. We’d love to hear what you think about the site! There’s more good stuff coming soon. We promise.

For now, thanks for joining the conversation.

MBB

We haven’t even launched, but we’re already looking for ways to improve. We know we can.

We’ve got plenty of ideas about where to start, but thought there would be no better way to get it right then to go to our users. So, here are four categories we’re looking to develop more in…let us know if you have thoughts on how we should do it or have ideas we haven’t thought about yet:

1) Pinging - You made a post and someone voted on it and someone else commented on it. You commented on another post and someone disagreed vehemently. You want to know what’s going on with your stuff and the stuff you’re interested in on the site. We think we need to develop some more options in terms of email notifications (what kinds would you like?), and more importantly, we’re thinking of developing a feature like Facebook’s live feed, to keep you abreast of the latest activity that matters to you. What would you like to see on that feed? Any other ways you think we should ping you?

2) Social Networking - You want to keep track of certain users’ posts–either because you love them or hate them or something else. We’re thinking of developing a system of ‘friends’ (and maybe enemies?) to keep you connected with the others users you’re most interested in and a system of ‘favoriting’ to keep you connected to the posts you’re interested in. Any ideas on how social networking features might improve the Why08 experience?

3) Topicality - Besides just whether you support/oppose a candidate and why, users have been clamoring for ways to talk about specific issues or respond to particular news events. Should we create issues pages? How would those work? Check out the first comment on this thread for one of my proposals on how we might address this topicality.

4) Distribution - There’s a wider discussion out there and Why08 wants to help its users become part of it. How do we integrate better with the myriad of other forums for discussion on the Internet? Got an idea for a widget that people can embed in their blogs? How about a Facebook app?

Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments section here, or if you prefer, hit us up privately at feedback@why08.org

Thanks,

MBB

If you’re reading this post, it means you’re one of our trusted testers–Why08’s charter members, if you will.

Welcome to the site. We’re psyched to have you here and excited to see you get the conversation started. As I mentioned in my introductory email, this is truly a work-in-progress, and we’re going to need your help to make it work.

We are passionate about enabling and improving political discourse on the Internet, particularly surrounding this important election. Through Why08, we’re trying to build a conversation community to make that happen.

Feel free to post in the comments section of this blog on any of these posts with your thoughts about how things are coming along.

Let the experiment begin!