Web as the Never-Ending Election

Did you know that a pangram is a phrase that contains all of the letters of the alphabet? Yeah, I didn’t either until yesterday. Here are some links:

What do burgers have to do with democracy and social media? A lot, according to Jed Sundwall in his article on why policy makers need to be paying attention to Twitter and social media in general. Earlier this year Sundwall took to Twitter to get burger recommendations in San Diego. Quickly he realized that other people wanted burger recommendations too, and different people had different opinions about which place had the best burgers. Soon the Burger Mob was born with the goal of picking 12 burger places and getting as many people to go to them as possible and then voting on the best one. While the stakes are obviously lower for the Burger Mob vote, Sundwall notes that the government needs to learn from and respond to the democracy of the Internet, where everyone is constantly voting on things, liking or disliking, making things go viral, creating a backlash.  Slate