Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Straight Choice | The election leaflet project. Nice crowdsourcing app by Richard Pope, Francis Irving and Julian Todd—UK political leaflets are hard to keep tabs on due to the way they are distributed over small geographical areas, so this site encourages you to take photos of leaflets delivered to your home and tag them with postcode, party and key topics.

# 8th June 2009, 4:23 pm / crowdsourcing, francis-irving, julian-todd, politics, richard-pope, thestraightchoice, ukpolitics

Obama ’08 for iPhone (via) Slick app, impressive for a three week turnaround. I’m guessing it uses the phone number area codes in your address book to arrange your friends by state for the “call your friends” feature, which is an ingeniously simple hack.

# 2nd October 2008, 6:13 pm / barack-obama, iphone, politics, ravenzachary

Growing the ORG community. The Open Rights Group want a fiver a month from 750 new people to support their excellent work fighting for digital civil liberties in the UK political arena. Going by their past performance this is a very worthwhile investment.

# 7th July 2008, 6:42 pm / civilliberties, digitalrights, openrightsgroup, politics

A Look at the Presidential Candidates. The Big Picture (the Boston Globe’s fantastic photojournalism blog) presents a fascinating collection of historical photos of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain.

# 4th July 2008, 9:09 pm / barack-obama, john-mccain, photography, photos, politics, thebigpicture

Google Reader ruins Christmas (via) New sharing feature automatically reveals shared items to Gmail contacts, causing political rows.

# 25th December 2007, 2:59 pm / google, google-reader, politics, privacy, sharing, social-networking

Death and Taxes (via) Beautiful massive zoomable/pannable infographic of the 2008 Federal Discretionary Budget.

# 19th April 2007, 2:37 am / ajax, infographic, javascript, politics

Discourse DB. A collaborative effort to collect the opinions of the world’s journalists and commentators about ongoing political events and issues, powered by Semantic MediaWiki so there’s metadata coming out of its ears.

# 12th April 2007, 4:38 pm / discoursedb, mediawiki, oxfordgeeknight2, politics, semanticmediawiki

’National interest’ halts arms corruption inquiry. “It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest.”

# 15th December 2006, 2:09 pm / law, politics, scandal, uk