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Just in time for the '08 election cycle comes PoliticalBase.com, a new website for all things political, both national and local:

The idea of the site is to become a non-partisan politics and issues resource for people wanting to make informed decisions when casting their vote, be it in national presidential elections, or elections at the local level. It uses publicly available data and media resources, such as the Federal Election Commission, Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube videos to build a database around each politician, their fund raising or issue, and then cross pollinate it with data about where other candidates stand on issues. The site also has bloggers and moderators and hopes to have a community which will help build the data and pages. All of the data is editable by anyone, so essentially a Wiki-model of building it up.

For now, the site is primarily launching with databases/stories on presidential elections, and the founder, Shelby Bonnie (former chairman and CEO of CNET) hopes the base will increase as users build up. The plan is for advertising from all sides of the political spectrum to be the main form of revenue. The issue is scaling, and developing enough users so that the site sustains itself beyond the presidential election cycle. Then there is competition from all existing politics news and info sites, though their focus is to run with the news cycle, and PoliticalBase hopes to be a resource site which uses news as data pieces, and then uses reader/user contributions.

One interesting feature is how much big company employees contributed to politicians, and to whom: examples include Google employees, Viacom, Yahoo and CNET.

Get ready for November 2008!

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