i think a centralized disccussion has more merit; hopefully the overlap between the sites is high enough that the people who ardee interested in this stuff will read it here, esp now that it made the rec list (which rather surprised me).

Cool. Are you working on a facebook app, may I ask?

thank you for replying. Congratulations on a literally game-changing application, and the 25million mark. I wish you guys were around back in the Dean Nation/baseball bat days.

Bearwith me, I tend to get wordy...

simply put, a page on ActBlue is like a single blog post. Its created y one person, its got a unique URL, it exists as an "end node" - the idea is that people get to it and STOP, and ACT.

Adding folksonomy capability to ActBlue as I suggest above would be like when tags were addded to Dkos and mydd. By allowing users to tag both individual candidates AND specific ActBlue pages, you are creating horizontal linkages.

For example, suppose we have a tag called islam. Now I might create an ActBlue page devoted to my candidates and tag it such; but so do others. Then, someone new coming to ActBlue with only the idea tha they want to support muslim-friendly candidates, but who are new to politics and do not have the resources that I and others do to actually research wih candidates might meet that criteria, simply will lok for candidates and pages tagged Islam. This is a much more valuable and targeted "search" than simply typing "islam" into ActBlue's existing search boxand hoping for relevant hits in a candidate bio or an ActBlue page description, because the tag was applied by a human being.

The key here is that the new user, withh money to burn and a desire to effect change for progressive  politics, can immediately leverage the experience of the more seasoned users and start making a difference. They can jump in; that lowers the barrier to entry and - of course - increases the amount of money you can raise/coax out of pockets.

Remember that ActBlue pages, like blog posts, are a vast ocean. No one can credibly argue that tags have been anything but massively useful for blogs; witness the runaway success of Flickr, del.icio.us and Technorati.

You express your reluctance,

to give candidates official tags (i can't imagine everyone agreeing on these designations) so we're left w/ the open approach of varied fundraising pages.

no offense intended, but this betrays a misunderstanding of how tags work. You imply that tags are official, and closed. In fact they are precisely the opposite. I will leave it to others to expound more on the merits of tags, but I can point you to this reading material for starters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

http://www.adammathes.com/academic/compu ter-mediated-communication/folksonomies. html

in a nutshell; add tags to (a) candidates and (b) ActBlue pages. For quality control, require that to tag a candidate, you must be a registered user AND you must have made a token donation ($2) to the candidate. Allow anyone, even non-registered users, the ability to tag ActBlue pages (but allow the owner to edit the tags). This will create rich, detailed metadata that will vastly increase the targeted traffic to pages at ActBlue and result in more overall donations.

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Note that tags are only half of what I recommended. The other half is to crerate explicit linkage to Facebook, LinkedIn, and mySpace. I shouodl be able to add a widget to my Facebook page that lets my network on that site immediately donate to my pages of choice, for example. Thats only the most obvious trans-community connection, but there are a lot more things you can do. I am hoping that others will chime in here so we can get a real brainstorm going on what forms those connections might take.