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Do The Right Thing

I don’t typically write about many new Web 2.0 products, but Do The Right Thing is doing something interesting. The site works on a modified Digg model. If you see a story you like, you click a button to declare your interest in it. But then you also rate the social impact of the subject of the story, either positive or negative. Over time and given enough users, you can look at all the stories about a company like Starbucks and see how they’re doing. This is something that people do when reading the news anyway โ€” e.g. “I feel worse about Exxon Mobil because they outsourced 20,000 jobs to India” โ€” and having them explicitly rate stories like this is a quick way of taking the temperature of the social climate around issues & companies and recording the results for all to see.

It would be interesting to see if people would be willing to specify some demographic information (provided that it’s not sold to a third party) like sex, age, race, religion, political party affiliation, and income bracket…that would allow the social impact data to be sliced and diced in interesting ways. Even without that data, the opportunities for data analysis are intriguing…like graphs of a company’s social impact over time.