This is a great example of using maps to make your case - poverty rates in Appalachia are correlated with mountaintop removal - there are counties where the poverty rate is 24% or more
Map

I recently came across the "penny auction" phenomena. I'm always amused and often appalled by some of the ways that people use to try and make money on the internet (ex. the Million Dollar Homepage - www.milliondollarhomepage.com).

Penny auction websites use game theory to encourage people to gamble in the hope that they win a product at a fraction of its actual price.

It would be neat to have a website where activist organizations could find similar organizations by answering questions.

(This would work for non-activist groups too.)

I've been thinking about this for several years. How it would also be neat to have tests like 1) What is the ideal organization for me? 2) What is the ideal ideology for me? and 3) What campaign should I get involved in?

As part of my plan to build the greatest US activist events calendar EVER. Here are a couple ideas:

Free Conference Web Hosting - users can choose from basic conference templates. Perhaps using Drupal.

Rasmussen Markets has the public option trading at a 20% chance. Several months ago it was at 40%.

I'd do a link but their website is super slow.

I like the idea of prediction markets for social change!

I've fixed a bunch of bugs on the Energy Justice Network Map and implemented some more features (like a TinyURL).

The "National Map" and "Local Map" features are working a lot better.

Next up - serious revision of the signup process. And then hopefully importing a more recent government data set.

The Energy Action Coalition has a new networking site

I'm hoping that they will start sharing their data with webservices. Open sourcing the software would be good too, but I think sharing might be more important.

We're officially turning the corner on the recession (US, Canada, and I think globally). It's still a recession (and US unemployment is still headed for 10-10.5%), but for the first time the forecasts are getting better.

For a while, I thought it was going to be the worst recession since WW II. I was wrong.

Either the stimulus worked directly, or indirectly by inspiring consumer/business confidence. (I know I haven't got any direct stimulus money, and won't until April 2010).

I've come up with an algorithm that predicts whether a webpage is an activist/liberal event. It's designed for conferences, but works for other events too (convergences, assemblies, climate camps, etc).

It's based on tests done on 20,000 webpages. I ran logistic regression tests using 5000 keywords, of which 170 are included in the algorithm. In my test data set, I correctly identify 74% of the events (on a page level), and 99% of the non-events.

I've been collecting a list of activist websites, primarily english speaking from the US and Canada, for my conference finding bot.

Here is a customized google search that uses those sites:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=006452045356193133822:sp984foeerq