A reader sent this in with the subject line “how I got my news during the Obama rally”

via flickr user jen and joe

I’m so proud of our country and of TPM right now. What an amazing night.

New Flash/Actionscript work at TPM: The Palin Effect. I also finally freed TPM from sidebar oppression for glorious 900px wide special projects.

Imitation the most sincere form of flattery? My first venture into Flash/Actionscript programming, an interactive map of McCain’s robocalls and mailers for TPM, was copied, snazzed up and released by the Obama campaign a day later. Many thanks to TPM intern Josh Sherman for helping create the map and working with me with on another Flash project we’re planning to release on Monday. I’ll x-post here when we do.

I’d like to write a little bit about the project that has been consuming me for a little over a month. Now that the beast has been unleashed for about a week, I have a little bit of perspective from which to write about how it came together. That beast is called myTPM, a suite of community tools for Talking Points Memo built on the brand new Movable Type 4.2 Community Solution. While Andrew Golis and Josh Marshall have been batting around ideas for a revised version of the community site TPMCafe for some time, in the past month Andrew and I (along with an extremely talented group of programmers from Six Apart) sat down to make this upgrade a reality.

The process started with Andrew and I literally sketching out the core two elements of the new tools– the blog/profile and the Dashboard. The blog would, yes, be the reader’s blog. But it would also be a repository for all of their actions on the site– their comments left throughout the site, and posts they recommend others see. The Dashboard is almost the inverse of the blog. It is a unique-view page that shows you information river-of-news-style about the people you follow. The result, I feel, is a new sort of social network. An intellectual social network based around the exchange of ideas about news and politics. Yes, it relies on what have perhaps become Web 2.0 cliches: friending, newsfeeds, RSS, comments, etc., but uses them to deliver relevant information. With so much information accumulating just at TPM, the Dashboard is TPM’s answer to filter failure.

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