Following my recent post about a color-coded reputation management system* for politicians (indicating their truthfulness by the color used to display their names on web pages), I came across Politifact and its Truth-o-Meter.
Politifact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly that will “analyze the [presidential] candidates’ speeches, TV ads and interviews and determine whether the claims are accurate.”
I found it via the techPresident blog, where Joshua Levy notes that the it could benefit by being opened up to users:
…and let them pore through the records and make the connections. As Jay Rosen’s recent overtures to crowdsourcing and the various projects of the Sunlight Foundation have shown us, the crowd is smarter than a few individuals; open up the process to them and you’ll be amazed at what they find.
And I’d like to see a system that follows you around (the way a reputation does in oral cultures), so there’s less cover provided by the fact that the ratings are tied to particular locations on the web, which most people probably wouldn’t end up visiting. A system that follows you around like, say, your name.
*Inspired in part by Luca de Alfaro’s Wikipedia trust-coloring project.