I'm spending most of the week at eTech, one of O'Reilly Media's premier gatherings of technologists, that happens every year in San Diego. I have fond memories of attending this conference three years ago, when it included a special day on "Digital Democracy" focused on the emerging impact of the internet on the last presidential election. I'm not sure what I'm going to learn here, but I find it refreshing to get out of the political environment every now and then and talk with people who are used to making things that work, who take for granted that the systems they are working on will get overthrown every few years, and who know that the best ideas are probably being developed out on the edges, by some kids in a garage...

Leaders of non-profit organizations all across the country may want to sit up and take notice. Ben Rattray has opened the public beta of his new site, Change.org. Here's what he says about it:

I've been collecting string about Avaaz.org for a while now, but after I queried founders Ricken Patel and Tom Perriello (of ResPublica) and Paul Hilder, and they begged off on a pre-launch interview, I figured there was no hurry. But their site is now live (thanks Ruby for pinging me on that), so here's a first take.

Avaaz.org is using "The World in Action" as its tagline, and the first clue that this aims to be something different is the site, which comes in English, French, Korean, Chinese, Spanish and Portugese. The English version, however, is clearly NOT aimed at us Americans: it's got a photo of Tony Blair that reads "Even he is pulling out/Block the escalation in Iraq," and starts with this text: "George W Bush wants to pour more petrol on the fires burning in Iraq. But the new US Congress has the mandate to douse the flames. If they hear from all of us, they might find the guts to do it!" (Petrol is gasoline in British, by the way; and douse is to put out.)

So it turns out I was wrong to say yesterday that Lisa Williams' plan for her useful new site Placeblogger.com included "selling ads across its whole network of sites." That prompted queries from some curious bloggers who bristled at the possibility that Placeblogger was going to try to make money off their free content, without their participation or renumeration. I thought I had heard Lisa describe this approach last summer at Dan Gillmor's "unconference" on citizen journalism that took place the day after Wikimania at Harvard, but I guess I didn't listen carefully enough. So let me correct the record and offer these amplifications directly from Lisa:

I read your blog entry yesterday, and I remember being a little surprised by it because you said that I had plans to advertise across a network of blogs. It's an interesting idea, but it's not something I'm working on.

In general I'm interested in two things:

1) Making it easy to discover local sites and sending interested people to them. Placeblogger is explicitly designed to NOT keep people at Placeblogger. One of the major investments of time and what money did go into it went into making modifications to Drupal's aggregator module to limit how much of a post was shown. For awhile, I actually ran it (in test mode, before it went public) with headlines-only. What I discovered is that most people don't write good headlines. Some were just dates; in any case, they didn't give a visitor enough information by themselves to let someone decide if they wanted to click on that link or not; I wanted these to be comparable to what a search engine like Google shows along with the text link in search results. So now it's headline plus ~200 characters, enough to give a visitor encouragement to go there but no more. The other main thing we had to develop was automating the creation of OPML lists of feeds that people can download and use in their own RSS reader. This would send people directly to those sites, not to placeblogger, because the OPML files contain RSS URLs for the original sites. Placeblogger doesn't produce new RSS feeds for anything other than its own original content -- basically, the blog that's on the front page and some longer feature articles, and profiles of projects and placebloggers. Come to think of it, the only other thing we spent time and money on, from a development standpoint, was making a new Yahoo! maps module for Drupal, which Bryght will be making available to the Drupal community at large.

2) An open, widely adopted geotagging standard. In my view, one of the reasons that local sites (both independent placeblogs and newspaper sites) don't do as well as they could, economically, is because they are at a disadvantage in a keyword-driven online advertising economy. But what is discoverable will be advertised against. So if all local sites had easy-to-use tools to tag stuff, they would, I hope, be able to generate more online ad revenue. This effort would be a failure if Placeblogger were the only organization using it -- I would hope that it got used by all sorts of organizations to develop all kinds of yet-to-be-imagined stuff.

I think another thing to consider is that I don't have a written business plan, I'm not making the rounds at investors, and the whole site was done with "sell stuff on eBay" levels of money, not big grants or big investments. I have an experimental attitude towards the project -- I want to see how far I can get towards the two goals I talked about above. Now, it's true that getting there would take more money, and it's the kind of money I couldn't pull out of my wallet. The question is, which kind of funding and which structure works better at achieving these goals? I haven't answered that question myself.

Now, this all sounds pretty cool to me. I especially like Lisa's point that "what is discoverable will be advertised against." In my view, there's really nothing wrong with that, and more people with websites--be they bloggers or nonprofit groups--really ought to think about more ways to make themselves findable online, and then allow context-relevant ads alongside their content if they need the income. If Placeblogger helps galvanize wider use of geo-tagging (are the microformats.org guys thinking about that?), that would be a good thing.

If all politics is local, then locally-focused blogs are obviously important to anyone engaged in politics. But since the internet doesn't come with zipcodes attached to urls, it's not obvious how to discover these nodes of conversation and community? How to find blogs that are local hubs? Here are seven easy (and free) steps you can take:

1. Look up your location (town, city, state) in Placeblogger.com, a spanking new directory of 650 "hyper-local" bloggers built by former journalist and blogger Lisa Williams (of H2Otown), with advisory help from Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor. (Full disclosure: I'm fans of all three.) Since the site is new, the coverage is still choppy (Williams only has two blogs for Baltimore, for example, and one hasn't updated in more than a month), but I expect it will grow as local bloggers use its registration tool to chime in. Placeblogger has ambitions of selling ads across its whole network of sites, which may become a magnet for local blogs to come on-board. (UPDATE: I got this wrong; having mis-heard something I thought Lisa said about Placeblogger last summer up at Harvard. She informs me that there is no such plan; I will have a more detailed post about her ideas for the site up shortly.)

Swivel, a web site that lets you mash up your data any which way you like, went public yesterday and it promises to be an easy way to make graphs out of almost any data set.

The home page features graphs that makes some interesting sociological claims. Today I've learned that:

Chicken and bottled water are in, red meat is out.

More wine was consumed and over the same period that violent crime went down, suggesting a correlation.

Having discovered Evoca through Sherrod Brown's use of the service to enable campaign supporters to post audio endorsements on his website, I emailed the company's CEO and co-founder Murem Sharpe to find out more. She is a technology entrepreneur and former Fortune 500 executive who worked on Capitol Hill during college and post-college.

PDF: Does it cost anything to use this service?

Evoca offers a free account with up to 60 minutes of recording. If someone has more to say, for $4.99 per month, we offer up to 200 minutes of recording time. We also offer transcriptions and translations through a simple click and order. Pricing varies by language. Members also can sell and purchase premium recordings.

PDF: Where are the audio files stored and who owns them? Are there assurances that the files can't be misused, or is that risk inherent?

The audio files are stored on Evoca and are owned by the person who creates them. Evoca.com acts as a venue for users to create, organize, share, and search audio recordings and does not own any of the content that is hosted on the service. A member can choose to make a recording public or private. All public recordings can be downloaded and the HTML code we create for each public recording can be copied/pasted into any blog or website. Private recordings are, well, private. Our privacy settings also apply to albums and groups.

Sherrod Brown's campaign is doing something cool: they're inviting supporters to post audio recordings explaining why they support his campaign for the U.S. Senate, using a web service called Evoca. It's a smart way to get ordinary people involved in a campaign. And given that we all respond better to unscripted human voices than to scripted pitches, it may be a great way for the campaign to discover new sources of creativity and support.

Right now, the Brown campaign is going for the simple approach. A supporter can record a message using a microphone on their computer, or by calling a local phone number. The campaign is asking them to give their name, city of residence and profession, and then editing out last names on the recordings. The campaign is also telling its supporters, "Don't worry if you make a mistake or go too long. We will only post the best portion of your recording."

For a harsh and hilarious review of HotSoup, the new political social networking site led by a raft of Beltway big-feet, read Blog P.I.'s take. Mike Turk says "it may be the most poorly conceived idea since Kevin Federline." Ouch!

Technorati Tags: HotSoup

Want to get a look at the innards of HotSoup--the soon-to-be-launched new entry in the social-networking sweepstakes? While the site's homepage will turn you away, just go to any of these links--HotIssues, About, Press, or Contacts and you're in. They've also left open links to several of their "Opinion Drivers"--famous people from the worlds of politics, business, religion, and popular culture who presumably are going to blog brilliantly for the site, which aims to focus heavily on politics. Looking forward to the deep thoughts of cyclist Lance Armstrong, lobbyist Ed Gillespie, veterans activist Bobby Muller, or "political diva" (that's her online handle on the site) Donna Brazile? You can check them out too.