Populum.com is in development. It will go live by late 2010, possibly later, as a unique media, blog, social networking website. Meanwhile, it is being used as the "back end" of other websites in what will become the populum network of websites.

Our long term plans will include support for members at numerous websites through Populum.

We are currently using Populum for some of our mailings.

For inquiries about populum, write to rob at futurehealth dot org

Here is a partial list of the features that populum website software either currently supports or will support within 90 days:

Blog and link aggregation site which also is designed to operate as a FREE tool for internet activism and advocacy.

The pilot site using populum software, www.opednews.com has been awarded grants by the Sunlight Foundation, Sparks of Light Foundation and the Bread and Roses Foundation.

We provide some tools that no other sites offer and some tools which we integrate in ways that make our site worth using or recommending. We are considering proposals from users interested in specific content subjects, partners and investors. Part of the mission of OpEdNews is to support other non-profits, so we are also interested in exploring ways we can support other non-profits.

1) a hierarchy of content-- articles crawled by google news, yahoo and other news sites, diaries/blogs crawled by technorati (we're ranked as of this writing at 567 out of over 100 million blogs)

2) Customized action pages: write an article and create an action page specifically for that article.

3) Member Created polls with cross-tab demographic analysis. We know of no other content management system with built in capabilities to create polls that automatically provide demographic analysis.

4) Pages for every state and county in the US. And inside pages for every tag and every sub-directory. During the struggle for democracy in Nepal, we published 43 articles to the Nepal page. Maybe we helped a small amount to provide a needed outlet for the voice of democracy. We've built our pages so local communities at any level can tap the power of our site to create a local alternative media capability that goes far beyond the simple website most volunteer webmasters are able to host.

5) "Think Twice" software: There are words we don't want to censor, but that we really prefer not to see in articles-- cunt, bitch, nigger, nazi, zionist,whore, fuck, arse, bollocks,  are all abused. Some are used to shield hate, anti-semitism, misogyny or racism. If a member submits content with any of the words we have listed, the Think Twice software presents a message, when the content is submitted, suggesting that the word in question is often abused and suggests that there are alternate words which can be used to make the writing better, clearer and less at risk of evoking hurt by people who have been victims of abuse of the word.

6) Group Pages and functions: Join as a group-- either your 501C3 or just a group you put together. Then, post articles, blogs, links, events on that page, where your group has its own calendar. Any member can add content to the page easily. Create polls that just the group takes or let all site members take them and then see how just the group votes in comparison to others.

7) Congress Pages (funded by sunlight foundation) a page for every member of congress, with info on the legislator and enabling of posting of articles, diaries, events, and polls on the page, all with threaded, color coded commenting.

8) Unique directory system with automatic smart tag suggestion through analysis of contents of submitted articles, diaries, links, etc.. Members can add tags.

9) Tag Cloud control panels for all directory levels, all articles, and soon, for member, groups, locales and tags.

10) Very Friendly archiving system for writer content, tagged keywords, so we tend to see higher page view rankings on alexa.com than sites with more visitors than we see.

11) Easy embedding of youtube videos, upload of images, and links to audio.

12) any member or group can submit articles or links to editor moderated queue.

13) rss feeds for every member, tag, locale, directory level

14) member image enhanced, threaded commenting with flagging that includes recommending.

15) color coding of comment text and background to differentiate members.

16) member pages that are smart and deeply interwoven with the site.

17) content moderated by 30+ volunteer editors. They use a queue control panel that provides content submitters with a semi-automated and usually personalized replying confirming the publication or rejection of the content-- something highly unusual on the web.

18)  editor content promotion control panel with comment and tell-a-friend counts to aid in assessment.

19) very soon-- dem by dem cross tab analysis of member demographic data

20) very soon-- ranking of articles and authors by date range, by tag, by directory level and locale among the following parameters:
  comment count, editor recommends, tell-a-friend's sent, and the following member ratings: value, importance, writing quality, kindness and meanness/incivility. Members ratings for all of these will be shown where they post content. Articles and other content will be promoted partially based on these factors. This system uses a control panel, so a reader can filter content over selected time periods (24, 48, 73 hours, a week, a month, 6 months, a year) for any tag page, directory or locale page, group page or author.
 
21) very soon-- mashups with map APIs that show where readers of the different content areas described above come from. For example, you'll be able to see a map showing where readers of any given article come from.

-This unique content management system is built by populum.com. Additional sites will soon be running on the platform, all registering members through a central registration that will allow sharing of user information and settings across websites.  Some of future sites will, like OpEdNews.com, be non-profit sites and some will be for profit. We hope to see the platform widely adopted by individual users and group operations, though expect it's power will lend itself to groups.