Site for political junkies

NY Times:

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More than a year after leaving CNet Networks, the online media company he ran for six years, Mr. Bonnie is into his next project, Politicalbase.com, which is as much an online political forum as a stockpile of election data.

One of a growing number of Web 2.0 companies — a category of Web sites that let visitors modify content and contribute material — Political Base has features ranging from serious blogs and a variety of YouTube videos to campaign finance data displayed on a Google map.

“I think of it like a big political coffee shop,” said Mark Nickolas, an outspoken blogger on Kentucky politics and a former campaign manager for Democratic candidates in that state. (Mr. Nickolas’s blog, bluegrassreport.org, was blocked two years ago to state employees by Ernie Fletcher, then the governor.)

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Mr. Bonnie, a Democrat, sees the site as a place for people of all political stripes to educate themselves on the issues and candidates while they participate in blogs and create new ways of looking at election data.

Political Base is a “structured wiki,” meaning users can edit most of the text but cannot change the underlying database. The site uses the same publicly available Federal Election Commission data used by dozens of other sites. The site lets users correlate data, creating comparison charts and maps showing candidate strongholds.

One of the more useful features, the 2008 Primaries Quiz, will match you with candidates given your position on several dozen issues ranging from the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and illegal immigration to school vouchers.

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It will be interesting to see if it is skewed by by Democrats who use it. Still the maps and the data are probably useful for anyone. The lead story today is on projecting Democrat delegates after Super Tuesday voting and the next story shows the disparity of gender voting by the parties. Democrats have a real problem with male voters.