To give more insight into debates and a different sort of view of the arguments people are using in debates, we put together a debate stats page.  The statistics reflect the kind of language people are using to debate their points, including word length, readability scoring of the arguments, and a word frequency cloud.

We’ve been putting up the election debates, like tonight’s Vice Presidential Debate Transcript, and the VP debate stats show that Palin used more complicated phrasing than Biden.  We’re using a standard formula to rate the grade level of the arguments called the Flesh-Kincaid Readability Grade Level formula.  It takes into account the average length of sentences and the average number of syllables in those words to determine the readability of the arguments.

Since the graph of word lengths shows that Biden and Palin used about the same length words, that means her sentences were longer overall. The stats for the Presidential Foreign Policy Debate show that the language level McCain and Obama used was more similar.  Both spoke at an 11th grade level of understandability.

As always, let us know what you think about the stats page, and any suggestions about other sorts of info you would want to know about debates you’re participating in.

Election Day is closing in so quickly!  We’re happy to announce that we’ve widgetized CreateDebate2008 to help get the word out.  Now its really easy to embed and share accurate election information.

Please help us inform the populace by embedding this widget on your blog, website or social network profile!  The widget is below, give it a whirl and use the get & share tab to distribute.

Here at CreateDebate, we’re following the elections closely, especially the debate coverage.  A recent cnn article about how Obama and McCain are preparing for their Presidential debate shows their respective attitudes and strategies.  McCain is continuing to campaign as usual, fitting in practice sessions and preparations with his aides when they can.  Obama has cleared his schedule and is training and preparing by looking through old footage of McCain debates, practicing with an aide playing the part of McCain.

McCain will prioritize the debate practice on Thursday, and doesn’t have a person dedicated to giving rebuttals and cross-talk.  At this point, they’re reviewing facts and questions that are likely to come up.

The two approaches focus on different aspects of the debate.  Obama is prepping hard for the activity of debating, making sure he’s ready for the pace and actions involved in exposing weaknesses in arguments, crafting your own arguments so they withstand fire from your opponent.  At this point McCain is concentrating on the facts, the technicalities that underlie the debate.  He’s memorizing facts and figures that will support his argument when he finally makes them.

Obviously both candidates are preparing for all parts of the debate, but at this point an analogy might be that if they were teams preparing for a big game.  The McCain team is running drills, concentrating on their fundamentals.  The Obama team is doing scrimmages and running game tape to analyze the opponent for weaknesses.  They are concentrating on the overall game.

What the cnn article glosses over is what these preparations might signal about the leadership skills of the candidates.  When the future president prepares to meet with foreign heads of state, what will their preparations be?  When the future president addresses the UN or the congress, how will they approach it?  We’ve had debates about whether the changes in the Vice President debate format were fair, and what the implications for the real world might be.  Watching how the candidates juggle all their obligations and the priorities they assign to the pieces of their campaigns gives us a glimpse at what the future of America might be under their presidency.

Which of the Candidates will be better prepared?   We’ll have to wait till the debate to see.   Let us know what you think about which candidate will win the presidential debate in the debate we have up.

For those of you who’ve already found yourselves hopelessly addicted to Twitter, we’re here to help.  We just set up a CreateDebate account on Twitter that intermittently tweets the title and a link to some of the most popular debates raging on our main site. Make sure you follow us!

Twitter works great with mobile phones so now its possible to keep up with CreateDebate while you’re on the road.  If you are lucky enough to have an iPhone, try using the Twitterrific app, it works great. On that note, since CreateDebate is optimized for Safari, the entire site looks and works great on the iPhone.

We also just rolled out some small, yet significant changes to The Waterfall.  The Public Waterfall still lists all of the newest arguments, spanning every debate. In addition, there is now a personal waterfall for each user, which only includes the arguments written by that user. To find somebody’s personal waterfall, go to their profile and click “View All” under the Arguments heading.

Every waterfall (public or personal) also has an RSS feed that makes it possible to keep track of your arguments (or anybody else’s) by using a feed reader.  Ultimately, that makes it possible to pull your arguments from CreateDebate into many other sites, like Facebook or MySpace. If you set up something cool this feature, let us know about it!

We could make it possible for your arguments to be automatically pushed into FriendFeed or Twitter. If you’d be interested in something that, let us know!

Have you ever wanted to add a description to your debate to clarify exactly what you want everyone to debate, or to provide some further background information on the debate you’re creating?  Well now you can, thanks to the new optional  ”Debate Description” field available when creating a debate.  

We’ve also made this feature retroactive so you can go back to debates you’ve already created and add a description via the Moderator Panel. Now you no longer have to add an argument to a side of the debate to provide further information on the topic at hand, and it won’t get lost in the shuffle during the voting process.   Simply add a debate description and everyone will be able to view it to understand exactly what you want debated. 

Let us know what you think!   

We’re happy to announce that CreateDebate now offers fully customizable RSS & XML debate feeds. Now you can integrate a personalized debate feed into your blog, your website or your Facebook/MySpace profile. You might also want to use a news reader or RSS aggregator to watch for the exact kinds of debates that interest you!

To simplify the feed customization process, we just launched a new tool that makes it very easy to build the perfect feed. Just click here and use the drop-down selectors to specify the kinds of debates that your feed should include. Once your feed has been built, you can paste the URL into any web or client application that accepts RSS or XML feeds.

Here are some helpful resources to get you started:

RSS is a simple way to syndicate content, stories, and information. It lets you easily subscribe to a website or the sub-sections of a website that you’re interested in. All you need is a news reader to display them. If you don’t already have one, you should check out Google Reader.

To add a personalized feed to your Facebook profile, check out Blog RSS Feed Reader. Our CreateDebate profile uses this application. It’s maintenance free and very easy to set up.

For your MySpace profile, check out RSS Reader. This application makes it very easy to add your debates to your profile. You may only want to display the debates that you’ve created.

To add a custom feed to your blog, look no further than your dashboard.  WordPress, Blogger and TypePad all offer a means by which you can integrate RSS feeds into your blog. To extend the functionality of your blog, you might want to add a plugin or widget that will give you greater control over how the RSS feed is displayed. If you use WordPress, you may find the KB Advanced RSS Widget to be helpful.

If you operate your own site, you may want to take advantage of our XML API, which offers more information and greater flexibility. The API documentation explains the parameters and values that can be used to query our servers. It also explains the XML specification that is used to return the results.

Remember, all our content is under a Creative Commons License, which means you are free to mix and mash our debates into whatever app you’re building. If you are a developer interested in building a CreateDebate widget or application, we would love to hear from you! If you have questions or comments, please contact us.

We are very excited to introduce our newest feature: Argument Tags. Now every time you create a new argument you can create a set of keywords or tags that summarize the main point of your argument, so you can let other users easily identify what your argument is about. Tags enable you to categorize your argument when it may fall outside the bounds of the sides of a debate or when you want to summarize the main point of your argument in a popularity contest.

Tags are displayed on the right side of each debate where you can see the overall score for each tag as well as view all arguments with the same tag (example: Which is the best superhero movie?). Also, the top three argument tags are displayed for Popularity Contests while you’re browsing debates so you can get a sneak preview of the debate, and see which arguments are winning.

Please send us feedback on this new feature. We love hearing from you!

We just implemented a completely new algorithm to make the debate scoring system more accurate and more transparent.  When you add an argument you will now have the opportunity to explicitly identify the side where you’d like your argument’s votes to be allocated.

To make it as user-friendly as possible, CreateDebate will do its best to predict which view you support but the final call is up to you.  If you realize that you need to change where the points are being allocated, you can just edit your argument and switch it up (so as long as nobody else has voted or replied already).

Thanks for continuing to share your thoughts & suggestions!  As always, we’d love to hear what you think of this new improvement.

We’re happy to introduce another cool new feature: The Waterfall.  The Waterfall gives you an easy way to find the newest arguments that have just been posted to CreateDebate, looking across every debate.  We think you’ll find The Waterfall to be a great all-purpose landing page since it serves up all of the newest content on a silver platter.  We have also whipped up a new RSS feed that can deliver The Waterfall directly to your favorite reader.  For more information about the RSS feed you can read this.

Keep sending us your feedback!  What do you think of The Waterfall?

Just rolled out a much needed feature that I hope you’ll all enjoy!  Finally, the voting buttons have a brain.  Throughout the entire site you’ll now be able to see which arguments you’ve already voted on (and how you voted).  Feel free to change your up/down vote for any argument as much as you’d like.  If you’d like to retract your vote, you can do that too.

Thanks for all of your feedback.  In the next couple of weeks we’ll be dropping a bunch of new features that will address many of your comments.  As always, we’re looking to you for your thoughts on how CreateDebate should work, so keep sending us your ideas & suggestions!