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Folksr is here - again! Distributed votings using Microformats

How folksr works

In a nutshell: Folksr does what it tagline says - it allows you to get your opinion be heard louder and drive more attention to what you're saying. With folksr's votebacks you organize web-wide votings in a way that is both fun and useful.

Folksr does this by aggregating vote-links (a simple Microformat) from the web. Basically:

  1. you publish a vote-link (that's just a plain HTML link with a tiny addition) anywhere on the internet and
  2. tell folksr about it, folksr will go and look for your vote. If it finds it and recognizes the URL where you point to it adds your vote to a voting that is related to this URL.
  3. You will then see your vote added to the voting results on folksr.de and can publish these results on your own site.

That's it. That easy and simple. For signing in folksr relies solely on OpenID (required only for adding a voting). So, folksr is all about open data and "the web as a plattform".

How can I get you involved?

With folksr, I am looking for your help. :)

I'd highly appreciate your feedback, suggestions, support ... and of course ... participation!

I'd particulary like to ask you for suggestions and help to get some initial "real" votings going.

What could possibly be done to motivate you to try folksr and publish a vote? What topics would be interesting enough? What else?

What's next?

Aside from real usage which is the most important thing for folksr to evolve now, the next important thing might be to further work on the presentation and interface design.

I feel folksr is way to text-laden and doesn't communicate its own purpose very well. I will continue to try to improve that. Suggestions are very welcome. Unfortunately, as a programmer, I am pretty much an all-fingers-thumbs moron when it comes to logos and other graphics. So I also very much appreciate every single bit of help here.

Also I plan to add the following features in the near future:

  • plugins for some blog engines for pinging folksr about new votes when published (Chris Messina suggested the term "voteback" which I think is a perfect match, thanks Chris!)
  • a timemachinesque history to review past states of votings and charts to visualize a voting's history (initially suggested by Brian Suda)
  • tagging for votings (also suggested by Brian and others)

Learn more ... and try it out!

Head over to these sites to learn more about folksr. And don't forget to create a voting and/or leave your votes :)

Other resources: