Politix Blog

BachelorsDegreeOnline recently wrote up a list of 20 cool online tools to help get youth up to speed on the details of American democracy, and we’re excited to see Politix listed among them:

They write “Politix takes election news aggregating one step further by letting you filter the news that’s important to you by candidate, location, or issue.” Check out the full list of online election related tools here.

Politix hit Washington, DC to stage a happy hour and discussion of politics and technology. Expert guests such as Google‘s Account Executive for Elections Andrew Roos and Nathan Daschle, CEO of Ruck.us shared their views on connecting politicians and voters via new media and technology. Editor-in-Chief David Mark and Senior Editor Mary Noble hosted the event at The 201 Bar near Capitol Hill.

Daschle, Roos, and Craig Gilbert from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel discussed Paul Ryan’s role and whether his plan for Medicare helps or hurts the ticket. Marci Harris, CEO of POPVOX, and Politix’s Mary Noble discussed whether there’s competition for political energy between sites that spark online debate – communities like Reddit and Politix – and sites that encourage political activism, like POPVOX. The conclusion was that discussion sites don’t channel voters’ energy away from political activism because political activity online isn’t a zero sum game. Online commenting feeds activism, rather than one activity displacing the other. Americans go to sites like Politix or Reddit to enjoy heated debate; and then they take that political energy with them into activism, online donations, and so on.

Meanwhile, DCI‘s digital guru Julie Barko Germany shared her knowledge of how social media like Facebook and Twitter can help politicians learn what voters think, as well as communicate their message to voters. Richard Benedetto, from American University, shared his thoughts about the role of media bias in this presidential campaign – and how campaigns can use social media and other technology to overcome it.  And Darrell West, vice president and director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, discussed how emerging mobile technologies are shaping campaigns.

Andrea Seabrook described her new project, Decode DC, a radio podcast series that aims to get inside DC in new ways and get behind the conventional political wisdom. Natalie Jennings, election blogger at the Washington Post, talked about how presenting Twitter highlights – like her planned round-up of the best presidential debate tweets – has become a huge traffic driver. David and Mary also talked about how Politix is growing and beginning to realize its potential as a community that inspires online engagement and bi-partisan debate. The event went so well that we’re planning another in the Bay Area in late November, with a focus on how technology impacted the 2012 presidential race.

We’re excited to be in great company with others working to improve politics through technology, and look forward to bringing people together around these topics in the future.

In developing Politix, we wanted to give you a place to interact with political news and engage with users on the issues you care about. We also wanted to design the site so that you could easily interact with the Politix community anywhere you go. This week, we’re excited to announce that we’ve released our Android and iPad apps!

Now, you can access Politix anytime, anywhere.  Download the app to get notifications on your favorite device when you have new replies, vote ups, and endorsements. Check it out here.

We’ve recently added a few exciting new features to Politix! Now you can:

Connect more easily with other users.
Now, all comments (including replies) have their own reply links that you can use to respond directly to the author of the comment. Plus, when you hit reply, now you’ll see the text of the comments you’re replying to, so you don’t lose track of the conversation. And we’ll also notify the person you’re replying to that they’ve got a new reply to help you keep the conversation going!

Also, now you can use “@[Username]” in any comment to reply to someone specifically, or to bring them into the conversation. We’ll send them a little notification to let them know you’ve mentioned them.

See a detailed breakdown of voting results.
Now on every debate map, you can click “See full results” to see a detailed breakdown of the voting, by Gender, Political Party, and Age.

Detailed data breakdown from a Debate Map

Share your votes.

We’ve enabled Twitter sharing in the last step of voting, so you can easily share your statement and vote with your social networks.

Explore More Content Pages.
We’ve had a lot of interest in stories about religion, so we’ve gone ahead and made a Religion page. And in case you missed them, we recently added Race, Guns, and Drugs issue pages as well.

The People Pages are expanding also! Now you can easily check out the latest and greatest from Politix on Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Harry Reid, and Eric Holder.

Get to know us. We’ve beefed up our Contact Us page with pictures and bios so that you can get to know our team.

We hope you’re as excited about these updates as we are!

IdeaMensch, a site providing interviews with entrepreneurs bringing ideas to life, caught up with our CEO Chris Tolles for an interview. Chris answers questions ranging from how the idea for Politix was born to his three favorite online tools to the most important thing to pick in a job. Check out the full interview on IdeaMensch: