First let me thank Josh Klein for mentioning this on his blog before I got around to it…

So…

I have recently been working on starting a website called Democratus that will be a sort of “customer service platform for government” and provide a place for ideas for change to come directly from the people and be delivered directly to our representatives and press. We hope to be able to get this website off the ground by early next year, but in order to do that we’re looking for some funding. Recently we applied for a grant from the Knight Foundation, who sponsor a contest for ideas like this, and we’re very hopeful that this will provide the funding we need to launch the site, but we need your help to get the grant.

All you need to do is visit the website of the Knight Foundation and our page there, and register and vote on our idea. It should only take a minute or two and it would really help. If you want to read our application it is there on the website, and if you want to leave a comment on the proposal after reading it (something about how innovative and important this would be in your life, for instance) that would be even better.

Feel free to forward this post to other people that you think are interested in encouraging political participation and efforts to make our democracy more direct.

1) Register with the Knight Foundation: http://is.gd/6cTK

2) Vist our site: http://is.gd/6cU3

3) Vote and comment on our proposal (clicking on 5 stars won’t hurt)

4) And then if you’d like, tell us what you think by sending us an email to Nate.Heasley@gmail.com or nater@naterkane.com

Another Twitter ( http://twitter.com ) API script announced today, Did Yuh’ Know? ( http://didyuh.com ). Did Yuh’ will allow Twitter users to prefix their messages with DYK: or YUH: to note that their message contains short fact, clipping, or idea. Messages with the prefixes will be displayed on the Did Yuh’ site. This service is similar to Sidebar Creative’s http://overheard.it/ and Matt & Mark Armendariz’s (they’re friends but not actually related) http://yayandnay.com

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I’ve been playing with Summize for a bit now. Their super-fast queries are just really gratifying. I’m also a fan of Get Satisfaction (and trying to get satisfaction in life in general as well), though my relationship with GS is much more recent. Yesterday I found an article that showed me something pretty cool that GS is doing. They call it Overheard.

What is Overheard?

Overheard is a new feature of Get Satisfaction that bridges the public Twitter stream into Get Satisfaction’s support network. Overheard lists recent Twitter posts (”tweets”) related to a company and allows any user, employee, or customer to convert a selected tweet into a rich, searchable Get Satisfaction topic.

When somebody replies to a tweet via Overheard, Get Satisfaction sends a reply to that person to let them know a conversation was started in response to their issue.

So now, whenever you post something on Twitter about a company, brand, service or product that’s been added to Get Satisfaction, you’re indirectly adding content to Get Satisfaction. It’s similar to when users of Facebook would accidentally add content to their profiles with Beacon, but not so creepy.