What makes this an ingenious member engagement tool for Digg, is that sub-par articles with a high number of comments are likely to incite action. In the past, many of us simply ignored the sensationalist stories that plagued the lower echelons of Diggdom. Nevertheless, with trolls being a driving force in the determination of trends, users will find themselves clicking through simply to right the wrongs in the Digg universe. While real-time shopping notifications like Woot's Twitter account incentivize users with deals, Digg knows that its members will keep coming back to maintain a sense of justice. The company will be rolling out the trends feature in the near future.

Profile options are already being changed in response to popular requests; a new section of contact information that you can expose only to selected groups of people has just been added, for example. This opportunity to influence how Google describes you via your profile could be a very important one, and it's worth your while to take a look at the discussion and cast some votes for and against ideas. As we write this, only 600 people have so far.

For example, Google Social Graph API creator, Brad Fitzpatrick, posted a request to add rel="me" markup to the profiles so that the smart applications (like this one) can tie together all the accounts from various websites people list on their Profle pages. Several other people asked to have music playlists or GTalk IM status messages included in Google Profiles. Others asked that Google Profiles by tied to Gmail contacts for easy viewing in other applications.

There's a lot of optional fields you can fill out in a Google Profile now. You're asked to list where you work, where you went to school, where you've worked in the past, what your "superpower" is and other information. When Google Profiles got pushed to center stage yesterday, we voiced a concern that most peoples' concerns about what shows up when people search for their name on Google is too much information. Being told that the answer is to give Google even more info about us, in order to have any influence on our public appearance, seems ironic at least.

The Potential For Innovation

The potential for innovators to make use of these profile pages, if they are marked up well and made available, is really incredible. Just imagine: Dear Google, please show my software to all the people you know with Google Profiles who have listed their Delicious accounts, have bookmarked in Delicious more than 10 links around the web with one of 10 common food-related tags, who live in California, Oregon or Washington, and who have YouTube accounts as well. I want to gather a list of the videos that are most popular this week with food lovers on the West Coast.

That might be a pipe dream, but it certainly wouldn't be technically difficult if markup was good, the data was exposed well to developers, and Google Profiles caught on well enough to build a large data set. Imagine the incredible variety of potential permutations of profile fields, cross referenced with data found on linked-to third party websites, that such a scenario would offer.

There are simple issues and there are complex ones that come up when public profiles become important on the biggest information discovery site in the world. There are privacy concerns and there are wishes and hopes for data-centric innovation. Who doesn't have thoughts about how they would like to be described to the world? Now's your chance to vote on it.

The U.S. Voter Info site was developed in partnership with with several state and local election officials, the League of Women Voters, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and others involved in the Voting Information Project. In true Google form, the site appears to as just a simple interface that hides the complicated data processing going on in the back-end. All you have to do to use the new site is enter in your home address in the box provided and click "Search."

Google then returns a host of personal voter information about your location including the number of days left for absentee ballot requests, a link to your local government's page where you can request an absentee ballot form, as well as other links to local government sites providing registration forms and other relevant election info. (The types of links will vary some from state to state). There's even a phone number to your state's voter hotline provided.

On the right side of the screen, a Google map displays. There is a green pin in your neighborhood and a red pin where your voting location is found. Then, with one click, you can get directions from your house to the polling site. This is very convenient, but unfortunately, when plugging in my own address, Google was not able to locate my voting location. Hopefully, others will have better success. (Let us know!)

In addition to the web site itself, Google is offering a "where to vote" gadget that can be customized and added to any web site. More importantly, there's an API available which allows third-party developers access to this data.

We Could Have Used This Sooner!

The only major criticism we have is this: why did they have to wait until now until launching? We realize that there are still several days until the actual Election Day, but this information would have been great to have a bit earlier. Given that absentee ballot forms have deadlines prior to Election Day and many states have already started the early voting process, it's a shame this web site wasn't available sooner. However, now that the site is ready, we look forward to using it for many years to come.

Maybe it's no big deal, but we think it's an interesting question. What do you think? Let us know in the poll below, even if you work in PR yourself.

RSS readers can click here to view or participate in the poll.

Earlier this month we asked whether good tech even needs PR. In that post we discuss some important things PR agencies do for their clients - things that make voting for them in polls look downright silly. That's our take on it, anyway, what's yours?

Photo: raise your hands for jesus by Flickr user johny hunter.

"There is a certain element of mob mentality (ala Digg) that may ... hinder actual progress," said commenter Megatron. "The internet is great for giving everyone a say, but it tends to bring out the wackos." While commenter Morgan noted that you risk alienating many of your constituents if you pay too much attention to the type of people who would participate in a site like Oh Boy Obama -- which as we said would likely be the most fervent campaign supporters.

Kuhl's "Fix Washington" campaign is essentially the same idea -- a user generated political think tank -- but on a more local level. Dr. Denny at Scholars and Rogues isn't buying it. "Rep. Kuhl has reduced the American system of government to a reality game show," he wrote. "He's asking for his constituents to do his thinking for him."

However, like Oh Boy Obama, Kuhl's idea isn't necessarily a bad one -- though it does have faults. Kuhl is actually following two of our rules for crowdsourcing. He's realized that crowds are better at vetting content than creating it -- though he's asking for idea submissions, the real meat of his project is in letting users vote on the best from a preselected list. And therein lies his second smart move -- he's realized that not everything can be democratic and will be selecting the five top submissions himself.

Kuhl's idea also has the same problems as Oh Boy Obama. It's very unlikely that most of his constituents have ever even been to his web site, which means that the people submitting and voting on ideas are likely not the best representation of his district. Further, it will be interesting to see how he'll verify that the people voting on and submitting ideas actually are his constituents. However, as Tip O'Neill said, all politics is local. Kuhl's idea, while not perfect and perhaps just a publicity stunt, is a novel idea that puts a little extra legislative power in the hands of the voters at a local level... should they choose to participate. I'll be interested to see how it turns out.

The site, which says that it wants to give "the Obama grassroots a platform to submit and vote on ideas to better the 2008 primary and general election campaign of Barack Obama," works in generally the same way as the Dell, Starbucks, or Salesforce sites do. Users submit ideas, then vote and comment on their favorites. The top ideas right now are "Make transparency a central issue in the campaign" and "Keep the Obama logo and visual identity for the general [election]."

Josh Levy at TechPresident thinks that the site was "likely borne out of necessity," because the netroots has criticized Obama for not reaching out to online activists. With Obama's embrace of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, and his dominance of those online forums (compared to other presidential candidates), it's hard to figure out what else he could be doing to engage the online audience, though.

Ben Smith over at Politico believes that Oh Boy Obama "doesn't quite fit the mold" for the Obama campaign, which he sees as wanting to maintain "tight strategic control" at the expense of "real community engagement." That also seems a little off the mark, though. We wrote in March about the Obama campaign's use of wikis in the Texas and California primaries to organize on the ground campaign efforts. Wikis were specifically appealing to Obama because they allowed volunteers to shape the messaging and quickly collaborate with each other without the need to go through a webmaster. Or in other words: Obama was willing to relinquish control in favor of organizational speed.

Regardless, Oh Boy Obama is making use of a good idea from the corporate world in a way that makes sense in the political world. The Obama campaign will likely be able to cull some good ideas from the site while they shape their general election campaign this fall (assuming Obama gets his party's nomination). Even though Oh Boy Obama users will be the most dedicated campaign supporters -- not representative of the country at large -- the site can be used as an early testing ground to guage reaction to new ideas. And at the very least, getting involved with sites like Oh Boy Obama will help the Obama campaign energize the grassroots.

Govit acts something like a social network for politics. Each member of the House or Senate gets their own profile on the site that has a bio, fundraising information, and voting record, as well as how that member of Congress stacks up against Govit -- do their votes match the will of the people? Users can rate Congressional members, comment on them, and say whether or not they would vote for them.

On a more personal level, Govit allows members to befriend each other, which basically just lets you to compare your voting record to that of your friends if you have your profile set to public view. Unfortunately, by setting Govit up as a social network, the site becomes sort of a microcosm view of the American political system at large -- or at least it has the potential to. If we pretend that Govit becomes popular enough to actually have a national impact (i.e., politicians actually start paying attention to it), because it is set up in a manner where people are encouraged to shill for votes, it is easy to imagine the same back room dealing that goes on in Washington taking place on the site.

It's hard to look at Govit as the true "will of the people" because users have the option to make their votes public -- thus creating the potential for groupthink. Perhaps that is the will of the people anyway, but it would be easier to trust Govit's numbers if users at least didn't know who was voting which way until after the final ballot was cast. In other words: secret ballots tend to yield better results.

Still, Govit provites a useful tool for keeping track of what Congress is talking about, discussing it with like-minded folks, and seeing how your representatives match up with your own views. If you and your congressman are consistently voting on opposite ends of the spectrum, you might think twice about voting for he or she next term.