Daniel pointed me to current.tv today, which I’d seen a few months ago when Al Gore announced it. Now it’s live. A great concept, well executed. It makes me wonder where the ideal point is on the spectrum between pure, direct democracy and more representational democracy. YouTube is pure, Current TV is just slightly more representational. Reddit is pure (or “self-representational” with collaborative filtering?), Google News is radically representational. The user base toward the pure end is really transparent! YouTube is so clearly focused on teenagers, either because it is marketed to teenagers, or because teenagers are the ones pushing on the edge of video right now, or because it just happened to hit upon something that teenagers had wanted: a place for laughter in dark times. They’re certainly addressing more than one need. Then there is Reddit, with its tech focus. Reddit has grown up around geek culture in a lot of ways, so it’s targeting geeks both implicitly and explicitly (though not as explicitly as, say, Slashdot).

Are better forms of government possibly emerging from all this technology? Imagine a congress consisting of everyone in the country, bills voted on by everyone, with collaborative filtering so you only see bills or parts of bills that matter to you.