May 17, 2007

Collective - Future of "virtual lobbying"

Mohamed comments on Collective, a new project with aim to collect and amplify votes on voting-dependent social sites like digg.com:
They have now created a new web app called Collective that allows users to easily “game” social news features by enabling you to co-ordinate large groups of friends/supports to skew online results. It does this by letting you send out “All Points Bulletins” to supporters urging them to take some sort of action on social sites like Digg, YouTube, Reddit, BBC News, etc. The action the end-user needs to take ranges from just viewing a story to voting on a story (or “burying it”) or to e-mail it in order to promote it to the most e-mailed stories list.

Of course, this sort of thing has been going on for a while - people have been e-mailing lists saying “Hey! BBC has a poll so please go and vote for side X” but a tool like Collactive makes it so much more “organised”.

Interestingly, they offer an “enterprise version” as well…I can see lobby groups and net activists making heavy use of this sort of tool in order to promote their cause or to give “their side of the story” more prominence
I'm a skeptic when it comes to the "wisdom of crowds" both in real life like elections or online but this one is spooky. That means sites/blogs that wants to be "digged" should cozy up to sites like collective. This will surely have serious implications for advertisers and advert revenues too. And is the future of "internet lobbying"?

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