Actual Politics – A New Political Heavyweight
Sunday, September 28th, 2008 |First, for full disclosure, I was alerted to this site by ReviewMe. Regardless of that, Actual Politics is an excellent site.
The site primarily gets content from user submissions; from what I can gather they are particularly interested in freelance writers (aka real freelancers and bloggers that do more than journaling). Like many sites that use this method for content the goal is to give writers exposure to a wider audience, and, in this case, directly pay for articles. This puts them several cuts above other sites that try to generate free content from naive users.
But enough of how they get content, more about the actual content.
Actual Politics has material for every flavor of reader, from the radical to the reactionary. However, they site owners do not tell you what political spectrum an article belongs to, they take much of the spin out by giving readers the ability to rate articles on three levels.
You rate spin, quality, and how much you agree. This three way rating system looks great to me, by making the three values independent you can et interesting sets of ratings, like a liberal user labeling an article as highly conservative, high quality, but not agreeing with the points made.
The front page of the site also gives you good options to quickly sort through the articles. You can view new content, most liberal, most objective, most conservative, and also a featured blog. Beyond the front page, a great job has been done of constructing fairly comprehensive FAQs. Also, there are no comments, instead articles are each given a thread in a forum, the reasoning behind this is that it encourages much more detailed examination and debate of topics. I’ve found that true with other sites, although I do always miss the ability to leave a quick comment, but it is no real loss.
The only drawback I can really find to the site is the requirement to register to access many of the features. I have become rather anti-registration over time. This method though, makes sure the rating systems cannot be, or are at least much harder to be, abused.
So, if you have been looking for a new site to get both sides of the political story, just see your own side of it, or write for a well planned political site Actual Politics should satisfy you.
