Routine Order

Now there’s free internet voting for everyone except the governments. Yes, you can hold an Internet election, for free.

Selectricity is an MIT media lab project that is in the incubator program. Right now it allows you to create quick polls which are fun and easy. Later, then intend to enable cryptographically secure, verifiable voting based election using different methods. This will enable organizations, individuals, families, and other groups of people to securely and confidently vote on the Internet and make decisions democratically.

What a cool idea! Any why it took so long for someone to think of this and implement it is a mystery.

Visit Selectricity, and give the quick vote a spin.

V7N Search Marketing News:

Wikipedia introduced the no-follow tag, presumably as way to prevent people using Wikipedia to pass link juice. Even when most Wikipedians wanted no-follow removed, Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, hs chosen to keep no-follow.

Looks like Jimmy Wales is twice the hypocrite - once for wanting to keep adding no-follow to wikipedia links even after the democratic decision making body of wikipedians voted in majority to remove the useless “no-follow” addon, and then again for not using the said no-follow attribute for links from wikipedia to his other ventures, including wikia.com which happens to be a for-profit venture. I guess the bottom line and business demands are strong enough reasons to controvert established systems at will, for anyone. This is real bad news, but expected new, nevertheless.

No-follow was such a braindead idea - the only folks that ever did gain from the action of webmasters was google - their problem got reduced, but webmasters, including yours truly regularly get pummeled with unwanted visitors.

The V7n folks seems quite cool: check out this post on the art of refunds - they at least seem to get the part about how to deal with unsatisfied customers right - the point John makes about tolerating a few scammers to keep the majority of legitimately disconcerted clients is something that seems to slip by many online dealers, unfortunately.

Estonia is all set to be the first country in the world to allow voters to vote over the Internet in a public general election! The system was tested recently where people could “vote” to choose the king of the forest from among 10 animals. They did not disclose the results, so we don’t know who the King is.

Interestingly, this small Nordic nation seems to be secure in its faith in technology:

The security angle of voting via the Internet has not raised many worries. “E-voting is not so difficult to think about here. We are used to using the Internet for business and for almost 10 years we have been using the Internet for banking,” he said.

Compare this to the US, where the diebold voting machines have caused enough problems and doubts repeatedly. I guess it is just a matter of trusting the provider - but then again, how much can you trust a company or organization that provides the internet-voting service? Just as much as you can trust the election officials in an “offline” election, I suppose. The distinguishing difference is that, offline, more people are involved in the voting and counting processes, so it is more difficult to game the system.

Estonia set for world’s first Internet election - Yahoo! News

So John Edwards joins the race to become President, and hires Scoble to Blog for him?

Great, you say? Well, wait a second. Scoble is a geek - he worked for Microsoft and was good at apologizing for the many shortcomings of the monolithic software giant. He was really good at dropping names, connecting with people etc. But, and that is a big “but”, he did it all for a software firm. Can he pull that off for a politician? I guess not, and here’s why:

Scoble is not really behind blogging tools, the technology and the stuff that goes with it. For one, his blog is hosted at wordpress.com, a service provided by wordpress. So you hire him, and you still need to hire a technologist - someone who can keep your blog running in the face of heavy traffic, and optimize and design it so it pulls readers by virtue of its looks and functionality. So why not hire someone who can do both things, or can at least advise on the technology behind it all?

Scoble is old, let’s face it - he’s got family. Passion is what pulls readers. Give me a twenty-something with fire in his guts for what he’s bloggin about, anytime. I hope you get where I am going with this train, ’cause its one of those freight-train like trains of thought - I don’t really know where it is going, but I’ve hopped on now

Lastly, Scoble’s skills covering technology are admirable, to say the least, and it is difficult to imagine he will put the rest of his blogging on hold, or even slow down temporarily, which means the Edwards campaign won’t get 100% from their blogger.

Call me a skeptic, but I can’t think of one good reason why a technology blogger will help you win a presidential election. Oh well.