President Feed: Widgets and Politics

I've added the fancy-schmancy flash widget from PresidentFeed.com to the right hand side of the blog. If you haven't checked out PresidentFeed.com, you should! Sign up and vote!

It's fun to watch the approval ratings shift after casting your approvals and disapprovals. For example, after watching the Republican Presidential Debate on NBC. They asked McCain if he believed in evolution, he said yes. Then they asked for a show of hands of those that do NOT believe in evolution. Brownback, Huckabee, Tancredo all raised their hands. Well, that gets a 'disapprove' vote from me any day. Come on guys, wake up. Also, really, do we want "President Huckabee" hanging over us for 4yrs? That sounds ridiculous.

After watching the Democratic debate I cast some votes too. I dissed Kucinich, because he seemed to squirmy for my tastes. And I dissed Gravel because he came off as "the crazy old man in the corner".

President Feed: Update

Tim O'Brien and friends have made some nice updates to PresidentFeed. I see you can remove your vote, without having to cast a new one now. The UI is cleaned up, it looks a little more - I dunno - serious I guess. The new widgets that show approval percentages, and vote charts. Very nice.

One thing that was removed, that I think is unfortunate, is the links to the candidate sites. I'd love to see the site aggregate news info about the candidates. Having one site that gets news updates for all the candidates in one friendly place; that'd be extremely cool. Hell, even if it's just links to a news.google.com search.

What do you think Tim? :P

President Feed

My friend Tim O'Brien put together a really cool new site called PresidentFeed.com. It is sort of like a live running poll of Presidential candidate approval ratings. You cast your vote for a candidate you like, and you can remove that vote and give it to someone else later if that guy (or gal) does something stupid. On top of that you can also add "thumbs up/thumbs down" ratings to candidates (think Tivo, without the neat sound).

On the tech side it's all ajax web 2.0 style built on Rails. I love the look, I hate the ugly banner add at the top, but hey gotta pay for the hosting somehow.

Tim is also running a blog about it over at http://presidentfeed.blogspot.com. Check it out.