Yaron is Writing

Anyone who’s been using Discourse DB to follow current events (I’d like to think maybe such a person exists) must have been surprised at the news today that John Bolton has given up his attempt at a Senate confirmation to be the U.S.’s UN ambassador. After all, according to the analysis page, the opinion that he should have been confirmed is the fifth most popular one on the site! It’s almost as much of a surprise as… the failure of the second- and third-most popular opinions. Those are both against the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (the two are about two slightly different versions of the act), and that act ultimately passed. Which might suggest that the volume of commentary in favor of a specific action is to some extent a function of the nervousness people have about that action not happening, and not necessarily an indication of how popular that action is.

Then again, maybe there’s only so much that can be extrapolated from this case; the rejection of Bolton was an issue of internal politics and didn’t even reflect the views of a majority of the Senate. On the two issues that have substantial commentary about them on the site that have gone in front a popular vote, the 2006 Connecticut Senate election and the 2006 California gubernatorial election, the direction of the commentary has matched the eventual outcome. So maybe it is an indicator of popularity.

Speaking of the analysis page, I neglected before to thank Greg Williams here, who not only wrote the RDF::Query Perl library that I used to create the page, but also was very personally helpful when I wrote him with some questions about using the library.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Discourse DB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.