Poligraft Launches. Swear.
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, August 5 2010
Earlier this week, I teased you all with pre-mature notice that the Sunlight Foundation's* new Poligraft.com had launched. This afternoon, I pinkie swear that the site is actually up and running.
What Poligraft does is, in effect overlay political contribution data like PAC dollars and fundraising tallies on top of the day's news, with the hopes of extracting more meaning from the intersections. Cold hard data fleshes out the story. It's not perfect. And it's not altogether clear that people will use something like Poligraft beyond an initial test-run. But something about seeing the actual dollar amounts of corporate contributions alongside political maneuvering makes you look at even fleeting news in a slightly different way.
For another perspective, check out what Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic had to say.
One added note: as a writer, there's one other seemingly unintended possible use that I find intriguing. You can go ahead and paste any old chunk of text into Poligraft and still run it through the Poligraft engine. That opens up to writers the chance to pre-screen pre-published work, and perhaps uncover some hidden connections between the people and companies and interests you're writing about before you hit publish. Poligraft might prove to be an neat niche gadget for the general public, but an actual core tool in the toolset of the journalist and blogger.
*Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.