Mark Pincus Blog

will ferrel does bush

my friend sunil forwarded this to me...really funny...

http://www.transbuddha.com/mediaHolder.php?id=1147

essembly.com - a political social network

i've been playing with essembly for the past day. it's the coolest political web site i've seen (because it's about interacting over informing) but it stops short of enabling the kind of grass roots organizing i've been hoping and searching for.  [if you want to try it, email me and i'll invite you on.]

it seems like the founders are trying to keep it stealth for now as they have not responded to several emails from me (or they just dont want to talk to me.)

what's cool about it is the simple way it lets users create their own 'resolves' - kind of your own little survey or policy proposal that goes out to everyone to vote on. it's fun to watch the action in votes and comments.

also cool but not used yet are the groups functions which enable candidates, coalitions and issue campaigns to organize, set their platforms and recruit.

where it falls short for me...first, it appears to be for profit which is fine, but may drive the wrong incentives. which leads to my second issue, we lack any leadership on any front. everyone is so neutral that nothing changes. we need a web movement to reform the system (i've blogged about my hopes to create an eparty). a neutral site will devolve into a message board where people are forever fragmented.

what we need is a site that can help facilitate organization and collective voice. it should gently point out our similarities on many issues rather than essembly's simplistic (but fun) approach of showing your % correlation with another person on issues. while that's cute, i'm looking for a site that can promote my overlaps with seemingly disparate people and groups so we can form NEW coalitions that can replace the current power base.

overall, i'm psyched that these kids created essembly and see it as a big step in the right direction of 'radical democracy' and hope that they/we can take it further towards enabling real action and not just real interaction.

Google adds tagging

nathan weinberg reports that google turned on tagging yesterday. sounds pretty cool with autocomplete suggesting tags you've used previously. i'd love to see a more intelligent tag suggester that would propose popular related tags.  though this gets to a point rarely discussed...what motivates people to tag? and are all tags the same?

seems that a publisher is tagging to a) help readers organize their posts and b) increase the liklihood that their post is found by the right target audience. for me this is largely guesswork. if i were more active on delicious i'd have a better sense of what tags relate to which groups. for example, i've seen that there is now a 'peopleweb' tag that even relates back to my post on this. but does that mean that if i tag a post as 'peopleweb' it will be found by those people tracking this topic. seems there are a number of startups working on this concept. one of those being yodel which i hear will be debuting in some way this week.

anyway, my suggestion to google, yahoo and delicious on the user tagging side is to suggest related popular tags and suggesting to 6A, matt mullenweg (who we may soon see tags from) and blogger is to give your bloggers a better way to actually self-publish. that means more than just pingomatic. it means connecting them to all popular tag directories and therefore popular tags.

initially, this may cause a ton more tag spam but that's ok. i think this would quickly evolve to much more specific tags to enable groups to stay small. so once 'web20' gets too popular and it starts diluting, it evolves to 'web20conference' or web20flickr. this is what happens with group formation anyway. on tribe we saw this with the big burning man tribe that was then followed by burning woman and burn austin and so on...groups initially form around their most common denominator but quickly splinter. nobody wants to have a conversation about 'venture capital' but many want to talk about 'web 2.0 investments' or 'mobile games' (which from today's wsj story sounds too crowded now too:).