I have always been intrigued by virtual stock exchanges. I spent a lot of time in college playing around on the Hollywood Stock Exchange and I try to check out new ones as they emerge. Empire Avenue is a virtual stock exchange with a twist: you are investing in users of the site, and other users are investing in you. What makes it more interesting is the direction that Empire Avenue plans to take in the near future. Here is their description of the site:

Empire Avenue is a revolutionary online influence stock exchange combined with an advertising platform that allows individuals and organizations to convert their online influence and reach into revenue. To this end we will be connecting advertisers, consumers and influencers in a manner not as yet undertaken in the online space. Through the Empire Avenue influence stock exchange and its tracking features we will measure the influence value of individuals registered with Empire Avenue.

Influencers will be given control over the advertising they carry, and advertisers will be better able to reach their target consumer. We believe that this better targeted advertising approach will lead to better returns and leads for advertisers. Empire Avenue sets itself apart not only in its unique feature set, but also by paying influencers the majority of advertising revenue generated unlike other major advertising networks.

Empire Avenue plans on becoming an advertising platform for individuals. It would seem that a user’s stock value would determine their advertising rate. While it is not yet clear exactly how this model would be implemented since the site is currently in beta without the advertising component, it is an interesting idea.

A user’s stock price appears to be determined by the investment of other user’s as well as social network and blog activity. Empire Avenue connects with Twitter and Facebook in order to do this, and blog RSS feeds are peer-endorsed in order to be included.

Built into Empire Avenue is an achievements meta-game, where users can earn rewards such as virtual currency to purchase more shares or additional/expanded features.

I’m curious to see how they implement their advertising model in the future. Interest in individual advertising by influencers has been growing, so their success could have an effect on the expansion of that model.

If you are interested in checking out the beta, I have one invite to give out, leave a comment with a valid email letting me know.

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Credo Action’s OMGGOPWTF campaign has redefined the practice of paid email list building. Traditionally businesses and organizations would pay hefty sums of cash for email lists from marketing firms with a cost-per-email pricing model. Unfortunately for both the list customer and the people on those lists, unsolicited email doesn’t get a good response and honestly just pisses people off. Credo’s campaign is essentially a pay-per-email campaign that works and benefits everyone in the process.

Instead of paying an organization for their email list, every week Credo chooses a new progressive organization to receive up to 50 cents for every person that opts in to Credo’s mailing list. Each person that visits the website takes a 5 question quiz about stupid things Republicans have done or said the previous week, with each correct answer earning the chosen organization 10 cents.

The result is each week a new progressive organization, with people on its list that would likely be interested in Credo Action, uses all of its communications resources to get its members and supporters to take the quiz. This week it is the Young Democrats of America, so YDA ended up blasting its email list, posting to Facebook and Twitter, and encouraged members to spread the word to their own networks. All those people are now opting-in to Credo’s email list, and after a week passes and most of the people associated with YDA that would take part have already done so, Credo moves on to another organization.

For 50 cents or less an email Credo is getting an opted-in email address from someone that identifies with a progressive organization, and instead of paying some sleazy marketing firm they are helping that progressive organization. By having the sign-up as a trivia game it becomes more viral, since people are more willing to share a quiz than a basic sign-up page. It’s a really smart win-win idea.

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Now that Twitter has rolled out their Lists feature to everybody, one question remains: when will we see the dark side of Twitter lists?

So far most lists have been positive, based on topics covered, status, groups, etc. However, it is only a matter of time before negative lists begin popping up.

By negative lists I mean things like “overrated,” “douchebags,” “corrupt,” “evil,” or even more sinister lists like “babykillers,” anti-homosexual, etc.

These negative lists could be especially harmful because the link to the lists a user is on is right on their profile.

Once this happens Twitter will have to make a decision about whether or not a user can remove themselves from a list, and/or whether lists can be flagged for abuse.

What are your thoughts on the potential for negative Twitter lists? Do you think a user should be able to remove themselves from lists? What steps should Twitter take?

UPDATE: I ran a quick test and I can confirm that by blocking a Twitter user you remove yourself from any of their lists and prevent them from listing you again. While this solves the isolated incident, I still wonder about the possibility of a large group of people engaging in a sort of negative list flash mob on an account, something like the Twitter version of a negative Google bomb, which would require that person to manually block all those people to finally remove themselves from all the lists.

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Transparency Corps is the crowdsourcing project of the Sunlight Foundation that allows participants to take part in tasks that improve government transparency. One of the current tasks, “How Many Votes,” has participants look up the election information for members of the House and Senate, including number of votes, % of the vote, and the year of their last election.

When a participant starts the task, the name a member of Congress appears with a form to input the data as well as a link to that member’s state election page. After finding the information for about 80 members I thought of some ways that the process could be improved.

1) Include the Congressional District for House members – A few states require you to choose the district in order to view the election results. Since currently the form page only includes the state and party, participants would have to either keep trying different districts until they found the member they were looking for or do a Google search to find the district. Both options take time. If the form page included the district of representation that step could be skipped.

2) Allow participants to go through a state delegation in sequence – Currently when you complete the information for a member it assigns you a seemingly random member next. This requires participants to keep jumping back and forth from state elections pages. I created a bookmarks folder with the links to the direct results for each state when available, but the process still wastes a lot of time. For a state like California with a large Congressional delegation and all of their results in the same place, I would have been able to hammer out the information for 52 members of Congress very quickly if I could have done them in sequence.

3) Find a way to account for appointed Senators – I kept being asked to enter the past election information for Senators Gillibrand and Burris, who both were appointed and have no election information for that post. The form does not allow you to enter zeros or indicate an appointment, so they kept appearing as an assignment.

With those changes I think the community could get through the compilation of that election information a lot faster.

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Only five days after I wrote about how you shouldn’t create your own social network, a new social network, mypoliticalworld.com, was brought to my attention.

Now, I normally don’t jump to conclusions with these things. I set up an account and check out the site/features and then I make a judgment as to whether or not a site has any utility and/or potential. Unfortunately this time around when I was setting up my account something so glaring really ruined it for me: a political social network misspells the name of the Democratic Presidential nominee.

That’s right, users can choose whether they support John McCain or Barrack Obama. Are you frackin’ kidding me? You are billing yourself as a social network for politicos. Of all places you would expect such a site to spell Barack Obama’s name correctly.

You know what feature they do have? That’s right, you guessed it. It tells you the weather of your hometown. Whoopty-friggin’-do. Guess what? I was just outside. I know it is 104 degrees and hotter than hell. What relevance does that really have to a social network about politics? Were they spending time coming up with that feature instead of getting the Democratic Presidential candidate’s name right?

In order to be fair I will actually address some of the “features.”

You can write your own blog that is then aggregated with the other blog posts people have done. So far it appears that a good chunk of it is just people cross-posting their stuff from their other blogs so that maybe 3 more people will read it.

There is a lackluster jobs board that is just weak compared to the other political job resources out there. Here is a question. Why would a Democratic political operative search through a job list with a bunch of jobs for Republicans when they can just go to a better list with only Democratic and Progressive candidates and organizations and vice versa? The answer: they wouldn’t.

There is also no way to find out if people you already know are on the site. There is no contact importer nor can you browse users. Then again, with only 500-something users, odds are none of your friends were gullible enough to sign-up for an account (yes I know the irony here).

Speaking of features, how about the forum that nobody uses? Totally sweet. I love dead forums almost as much as I love the Twitter Fail Whale.

MyPoliticalWorld is also trying to be your homepage by aggregating content through RSS feeds from HuffPo, BBC, etc. Once again, there are so many better options for this.

Look, the site is so friggen’ bad that the “two young professionals” who co-founded it are ashamed to step out of anonymity. How can you start a social network where you expect people to reveal their identities and share information about themselves if you, the founders, aren’t willing to do the same thing? Having a real person associated with a start-up is textbook. Unfortunately, the anonymous founders apparently lost all their textbooks while they were being very important DC political operatives. It happens, I understand, but most people would read up on this stuff before launching something. Just saying.

You know what the best part of the site is? The Rock the Vote voter registration widget on the home page. You know what is weird about it though? This network is apparently “for politicos.” Most of the political operatives I have met and worked with were already registered to vote. I’m not knocking using the widget, it just seems like the best thing about the stupid site isn’t relevant to its demographic.

In other words, don’t even bother with this site. Seriously. I’m not kidding.

Thanks, or maybe I guess no thanks, to Sarah Burris for bringing this to my attention.

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Here is the introduction video with YDA Political Director Tony Cani:

And here is mine:

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Ameritocracy.com is a site that shows you quotes from politicians and allows you to rate and comment on what is being said.

Julie Germany of IPDI has a great Q & A with Ameritocracy founder Porter Bayne about the new site.

Ameritocracy allows users to rate the credibility and relevance of statements made by political figures. Do you think that the most recent statement by John McCain is complete crap? Rate it down and share your comments about it. Is there a statement that is getting a ton of mainstream media attention that you don’t think is worth even 10 seconds of air time? Drop its relevance. You can also submit quotes that you have heard or read to see how the community feels about them.

The site shows the most and least credible sources according to the votes of its users, and it serves as a good indicator of the perceptions of different statements flying around the media.

Currently Ameritocracy is in private beta, but the good people of Ameritocracy have given me 50 invites for my readers, so if you are interested in giving it a spin, sign up at http://www.ameritocracy.com/signup and use beta invite code bondelli. Only the first 50 people to request will get an account, so sign up while you can.

Once you have played around with the site, share your thoughts and ideas here in the comments.

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