Last year I posted a poll here, and promised that the results would be turned into a map of dopers’ political opinions.
So it’s done, as promised, but it’s not a fixed map - the project (my masters thesis) ballooned into multi-user interactive opinion-map-exploration software. It’s called MeaningMap and it’s available here:
The results of the sdmb poll are in the topic universe called “Oddballs.” This is a good first place to look - the other topic universes don’t have any data (you guys are basically the first ones to see it).
It’s set up so that anyone can post a new opinion anytime, and that essentially becomes an agree/disagree poll, which other users vote on if they want. Then the patterns of votes determine the opinion map. It’s all automatic, based on statistical relationships between the votes on opinions people add.
Please check it out, post some stuff there, and give me feedback (in this thread) if you find bugs or have ideas about how to make it more self-explanatory. Please help me make it idiotproof before it gets out to a wider audience (i.e. one with an even higher proportion of idiots ;).
Thanks in advance for your feedback, and enjoy.
Ray