April 24th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
This week, legislation from 10 U.S. States join our Bill Tracker. Legislation from Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Washington can now be tracked, discussed, and voted on.
We will be adding more States and non-U.S. Countries in the coming weeks and months.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Politics4All has been selected as an Official Honoree for the Blog - Political category in The 13th Annual Webby Awards.
Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by the New York Times, established in 1996 The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobile web sites.
The Official Honoree distinction is awarded to work that scores in the top 15% of all work entered into the Webby Awards. There were nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 states and overmore than 60 countries.
Winners are chosen by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, a global organization whose members include David Bowie, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Groening, Jamie Oliver, Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser, AKQA Global Creative Director Rei Inamoto, and R/GA CEO Bob Greenberg.
Recognition by the Webby Awards puts you in an esteemed group of industry leaders such as Amazon.com, eBay, Yahoo!, iTunes, Google, FedEx, BBC News, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, NPR, Salon Magazine, Evite, Meetup, Wikipedia, Flickr, ESPN, Comedy Central, PBS, and The Onion.
Needless to say, the Politics4All team is pretty excited about this honor. But we couldn’t have done it without all the people who come to our site every day. Thanks for coming to the site and making it what it is!
April 9th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Today we’re launching our Political Feed Reader, a custom, web-based RSS reader (similar to Bloglines or Google Reader) for the personal, non-commercial use of our site members on their MyP4A home pages.
Located in the right sidebar of the MyP4A home page, the Feed Reader allows site members to select a variety of political news feeds from an initial list of over 20 feeds.
Selecting Feeds
Selecting feeds is as simple as clicking the checkboxes beside the feed descriptions you want to receive, then clicking the “Update Subscriptions” button at the bottom of the list to save your choices:
Reading and Sharing News
Headlines for stories from selected feed “channels” (online news, political parties, etc.) will be displayed with a short summary of the article, and the feed will refresh automatically while the site member’s MyP4A page is open in a web browser.
Clicking the story headline will take site members to the full story on the original site, and clicking the “Blog This” link will allow users to share links to the original stories through their Politics4All Blogs.
In addition to automatically refreshing these external news feed lists, site members’ “Recent Activity” and “Latest” tab content will also be refreshed automatically.
Site members are invited to submit requests for news feed sources not currently offered, and we will do our best to accommodate them as we continue offering resources to help our members build and manage their political lifestreams on Politics4All.
April 3rd, 2009 at 1:03 pm
This week we rolled out our first U.S. state bill tracker: Georgia. As with Congressional legislation, State bills can be searched or browsed by anyone. Additionally, site members can track, vote, comment and use the advanced bill searching and filtering tools.
Over the next few months we will continue to push out state legislation through our legislative platform. In addition to U.S. States, we’re also working on adding more countries to the platform starting with Canada and Australia.
With all of the above, we hope to do more than simply provide a means to look at a bill. Our broader concern is to provide site members with helpful and interesting ways to discover how lawmakers around the globe address common issues through legislation, and combine that knowledge with our site tools for information sharing and mobilization.
Some political leaders say they want transparency in government. Some are actually sincere about this statement. We want to take transparency a step further. We want to provide transparency with communication, and connection. Seeing what is being done in government is one thing. Seeing what is going on and being able to express your thoughts with others about it is a much different ballgame.
View bills from the Georgia State Legislature
March 13th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Today we’re launching the beta version of our new Blog Post Import feature which enables any Politics4All site member who maintains a standalone blog site to republish political posts through his or her Politics4All blog. Benefits for our members include the following:
Contact us to request a beta invitation.
How It Works
Requirements
Even if your original blog site contains a mixture of political and non-political posts, you can use your blogging software’s tagging or categories feature to create a politics-only feed (see instructions below under “Creating a Politics-Only Feed”).
Getting Started
Note: currently requires beta invitation
Go to your Politics4All blog and click your blog’s Settings link. From the Blog Settings page select the Import Feed tab:
From the Import Feed tab, enter a valid RSS or ATOM feed URL and Blog Homepage URL in the fields provided:
Next, accept the Terms of Service and click the button to import your feed:
We will then validate and the feed and import your posts going back one month and up to 20 posts.
After the initial import, we check the source blog periodically throughout the day and automatically import your new posts. Imported content includes the following:
Supported Blog Software
Thus far this has been successfully tested with feeds from Wordpress, Blogger/Blogspot, LiveJournal, Newsvine, and Textpattern. However, most valid RSS or ATOM feeds from any blog software should work.
Write Once, Publish Twice…Distribute (Almost) Everywhere!
Because we already provide “share-out” links for members to share content through Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Buzz!, etc., bloggers can use our platform to more easily share their published content through other social networks.
Creating a Politics-Only Feed
This is only necessary if you publish non-political posts on your standalone blog.
Most popular blogging software supports tagging and/or categories and allow people to produce feeds featuring only content with a specific label, tag, or category. Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, and Textpattern have all been tested successfully in this area. Here’s how to do it:
Step 1
Create a tag that you only use for posts that contain political content. The obvious choice for this tag would be “politics” , but it really doesn’t matter so long as that tag is used only for posts that contain political content.
Step 2
Determine what the web address to your politics RSS or ATOM feed should be. If you’re not sure, find your blog software below for political feed url examples that should work for you in most cases. If your software isn’t listed below, check with your blog software’s support site, or contact us for help.
NOTE: The following RSS and ATOM feed url examples assume your political tag, label, or category is “politics.” The “<bloghomepageurl>” should be replaced (in most cases) with whatever the web address of your blog’s homepage is.
WordPress ATOM: http://<bloghomepageurl>/feed/atom?tag=politics
WordPress RSS: http://<bloghomepageurl>/feed?tag=politics
Blogger ATOM: http://<bloghomepageurl>/feeds/posts/default/-/politics
Blogger RSS: http://<bloghomepageurl>/feeds/posts/default/-/politics?alt=rss
LiveJournal ATOM: http://<bloghomepageurl>/data/atom?tag=politics
LiveJournal RSS: http://<bloghomepageurl>/data/rss?tag=politics
Textpattern ATOM: http://<bloghomepageurl>/atom?category=politics
Textpattern RSS: http://<bloghomepageurl>/rss?category=politics
February 9th, 2009 at 11:35 am
One of the things we like to see is people discussing, debating, and working with and against each other to figure things out, so we’ve enabled commenting on polls in order to provide more opportunities for sharing thoughts and opinions. Many great debates over the last few months have centered around blog posts and Congressional bills, and we hope that commenting on polls adds an interesting dimension to participating in polls and to the free exchange of ideas that we all believe in and enjoy.
January 21st, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Guy Kawasaki and the team at Alltop.com added Politics4All to their “digital magazine rack” in the politics section. We are pleased to have been added to their community!
Alltop is the “digital magazine rack” of the Internet that covers popular topics from “all the top” sites on the Web. They group these collections into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, military, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and moms. At each Alltop site, headlines of the five most recent stories are displayed about that topic and updated approximately every ten minutes.
Alltop relies on several sources to choose the site’s for their “digital magazine rack”. These sources consist of Google searches, site and blog content reviews, researchers, recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, people who write to them and their “gut” feeling.
Politics4All main blog stream, which is made up of all the blog posts from users on the site, was added to Alltop’s politics page.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Politics4All made it through three rounds of voting to win first place for the best political Website in Mashable’s 2nd Annual Open Web Award’s for People’s Choice.
The 2nd Annual Open Web Awards is a multilingual, international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology which recognizes and honors the top achievements of websites and services in 26 categories. Over 100 of Mashable’s Blog Partners help make this the biggest Open Web Awards to date spanning 25 countries and written in 10 different languages.
We were up against some great political Websites, 270toWin, CreateDebate, Freedom Speaks, Govit, GovTrack, HuffingtonPost, Infidels are Cool, Precise News and you2gov.
We would like to thank everybody who voted and supported us through the voting rounds. We couldn’t have done it without you!
November 24th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Polls
Need to gather a little bit of feedback on an issue, or just find a new way to bring attention to it? Create a poll. Now, individual site members can create custom polls linked from their profile pages. This feature was previously only available to groups and campaigns.
To create a Poll, Just choose the Polls link in the Citizen Links box on your MyP4A page
click the New Poll link
and you’ll be taken to a page that allows you to set up a poll:
“Blog On P4A” Bookmarklet
Another new feature, the “Blog on P4A” Bookmarklet, makes sharing relevant political content on the web much easier. The bookmarklet allows those with Politics4All accounts to easily clip a portion of a story on another website and blog about it on Politics4All.
First, ADD the bookmarklet
The bookmarklet can be added by going to Your Settings > Tools and following the instructions under Bookmarklet:
Choose
Next, USE the bookmarklet to share news and other content
To use the bookmarklet while you’re reading an article on another website, use your mouse to highlight a small portion of text you wish to quote
click the Blog On P4A button in your toolbar or in your Favorites
and you’ll be taken to a new entry in your Politics4All blog, with the quote, link, and title already filled-in:
If you’re not currently signed into Politics4All, you’ll be prompted to sign-in before the process can be completed. Once on the new blog post page, you can edit the title or quote if you wish, and add your own comments before posting. Please follow all copyright and fair-use requirements when quoting from other websites.
Congressional Roll Call Votes
Roll Call Votes for the Congress are now being fed into Politics4All. We’ve currently got the votes for the 110th Congress, and will be aggregating the 111th Congress on a daily basis when it convenes in January 2009. For bills that have been voted on, the vote information is linked from the Recent Votes section on the bill’s Status tab:
In this case, following the House Roll Call Vote #681 link will bring you to the vote results page for #681:
Check it out and let us know if you have any problems using these features.
November 19th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
The first and final voting rounds of Mashable’s 2nd Annual Open Web Awards will be held from November 19th to December 15th.
This is a great opportunity for Politcs4All to receive international recognition for our achievements. To get here, we went through the nominations round in which Mashable Open Web Awards received over 43,000 verified nominations across all the catagories. They narrowed the nominations down to the 10 most-nominated sites and services in each category, Politics4All of course being in the politics catagory. We want to thank all of those who voted for us during the nomination round.
Now that we have reached the final round of voting, we need your support again. Voting will start November 19th and end on December 15th.
Please cast your final vote below if you are a big fan and believe in what we are doing here at Politics4All!
Vote Now: One Vote Per Per Day
Voting has ended and we made it to the final round!
