If the Sunday talk shows are Pundit Central , online town halls are the Pundit Periphery. Many users come to the Net hoping to engage in lively, high-minded discussion only to tire quickly of rants, flame wars, and commercial spam. Without collaborative filtering, the only way to moderate the discussion is to use a top-down approach, like the tightly controlled method used at Al Gore's town hall . Tom Campbell , limits the number of questions that can be discussed. Quorum.org uses collaborative filtering to moderate the discussion from the bottom up.
Users fill out a short questionnaire about their political values and issue priorities.
This doesn't mean that you read only the things that you agree with-it means that you read things that you are more likely to be interested in, which probably won't include rants, flames, and spam. The site is also staging an e-debate between the senatorial candidates and congressional candidates in the Philadelphia area. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to make the questions any more interesting. Still, the event bodes well for the development of interactive political events. The debate includes not only the questions that were asked of the candidates, but also the questions that were not asked, and there is the potential for voters to discuss what the candidates said, what they didn't say, and why.