Loosely based on the idea of Google's PageRank (a measurement of a page's authority, based on the strength of incoming links), I think it would be interesting to have one or more measurements of PoliticalRank for web sites.

Unlike PageRank, which is more of a quantity measurement, PoliticalRank would be a quality one - evaluating the relative political position of a website on a basic left to right scale (where left wing pages would be quality, just kidding!).

You'd need to write a bot that would collect a massive database of webpages. Then you'd evaluate the relative politics of each website (and perhaps each page on each site) based on factors like keywords, the site that the page was on, incoming links, outgoing links, and ultimately on user site reviews.

I'm working on version 3.3 of the software!

My main goal is to increase the interactivity/community-building features. Thus I've added the ability to Write Comments. You can write a comment on almost everything. You can delete other people's comments (Ex. if someone writes a nasty comment about you in your profile).

I've added photos. You can upload one or more photos for a person or group that will be displayed with their profile and in a photo gallery.

Currently I'm working on the ability to add "friends".

There are a couple smaller things that I might do now or later - including adding tags, popularity based functions (what resources/people/groups/events are "hot"), and links to your other social network profiles.

NuSOAP has a new release out - 0.7.3. If you want to do web services with php I recommend using it.

There is a small NuSOAP community that I'm hoping will grow. We're encouraging people to use the forum on sourceforge.net for support (and retiring the email list).

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57663

The Guardian, a progressive UK newspaper, is creating PDFs of its stories every fifteen minutes.

It's like they are printing a fresh newspaper every fifteen minutes! Or at least a semi-fresh one.

United for Peace and Justice is organizing 11 regional protests on October 27. It's an interesting alternative to the more-typical national or semi-national mobilizations. Normally the mass mobilizations are in DC, NYC, and Los Angeles (with Chicago another possibility). I don't recall the last time someone did this type of decentralizing - fitting between the national mobilization and a day of action with protests in 100 cities.

Now if only the US could catch up with Canada. Canada is debating whether/how quickly to pull out of Afghanistan...

Students for a Democratic Society put out their first News Bulletin. This is a good sign.

10 weeks after its summer conference, SDS still hasn't approved an organizational structure for itself, nor does it have any people officially filling positions. Though apparently this doesn't seem to be a problem for most of its members - as group and member levels are, I'm guessing, likely very high =)

Two people recently released a paper on the

Social and Political Views of American Professors which shows a strong liberal bias (and one that has probably existed since the early seventies), particularly in the social sciences. It is worth reading (or at least skimming).

Unfortunately, while they do a lot of cross-tabulations, they do not do any linear regression models that would allow one to get a multi-variable analysis of what is going on (perhaps they have plans to do that later - as this is only a "working paper").

The Campus Climate Challenge nicely released a copy of their survey results providing an insightful look at who is active in the student climate change movement.

The results show the lack of diversity that is typical of the student environmental movement (and to a lesser extent of other student movements). Particularly worrisome is the degree of race and class stratification.

Geographical Diversity
Students are from liberal states - like the northeast, and less so from southern states. For instance, Texas has about 7% of the combined US/Canada but only 0.6% of respondents. Florida has 5.4% of the US/Canada population, but only 2.4% of respondents.

This has larger implications beyond the Activism Network software.

Nobody, to my knowledge, has done a good job of creating an activist calendar that is used by a lot of organizations. There are a lot of calendars that are used by only several groups, but nothing with breadth.

(Please correct me if you know of a good example.)

For instance, there are a lot of IndyMedia sites. They generally have a calendar, however the calendar is only used by a small number of groups. An exception to this is Seattle - which is weird because they're actually using a pure text calendar (not calendar software).

What would make you visit CampusActivism.org (or ActivismNetwork.org) more often?

What kind of features would it take to get you to visit once a week?

What would make you more likely to tell your friends about this site?

I'd love some user feedback on these topics!