We just turned on the switch (thankfully missing the red button - whew!) and BeHeard.com is ON-LINE!
The site currently in a public beta phase with blogs and forums while numerous expanded features will be added as they become available. Now you might be asking, "What the hell is BeHeard.com?" It is a non-partisan political forum that Brian Walters has been dreaming about for quite some time. To get the site out as fast as possible, we partnered together and brought the site on-line today.
I tend to stay away from politics and probably won't be all that active on the site, but I can assure you that Brian will be extremely active. He will most likely be very verbal, stirring things up as much as possible. If he gets out of hand, send me a message so that I can remind him that he needs to take a non-partisan stance to the subjects being presented. I encourage everyone to do this as well as he does like to debate. So, if you like to talk politics (one of the three taboos for most sites), then you are welcome to do it here.
The first two add-on features to the site will be the ability to perform a historical search for any legislative member or piece of legislation and for users to be able to create groups with a dedicated blog, forum, calendar, wiki and media center. The legislative database is huge and we are currently working out an efficient way to present the data to you. A typical piece of legislation is over 1MB of XML data, plus we have pictures and the complete resumes for every US legislator going back to the early 90s. Users will be able to place links in their posts that take you directly to a section in the legislative database. This will force users to reference their facts or get flamed to HELL!
Again, this is in a beta stage, with debug code, so you might run into bugs from time to time, but we encourage everyone to check it out and talk about your political opinions on the issues. If you come across a bug, or think of a feature that would be great for the site, write a post in the Site Feedback forum.
ENJOY!!!
I'm sure that you've all seen the latest Apple commercial that has been running for a few weeks, where you see legalese scrolling up the screen, but did you realize that the legalese is for Apple? It's an Apple commercial with Apple making statements, so the legalese is for Apple not Microsoft. I luv the commercials and my iPod, but I am a PC and I think that Apple shot itself in the foot with this one.