For months, I’ve been telling Raj that he should use LinkedIn. His answer was always the same — “It’s for you agency types. We brand marketers don’t use it.” Then, one recent afternoon, as we sat in the mild contention that Chinese food brings, both of us peering happily into our laptops, he looked up and said to me, “Wow, there’s a lot of people on LinkedIn I didn’t think would use it.”

True, that.

I was recently browsing profiles — the corporate equivalent of surfing on Myspace — and discovered an interesting one. His name is Rick, and his profile says he is “currently in development on the world’s first “political appliance.”

Just so you know, I love the word “appliance.” It has the most delicious quality to it when used as a qualifier, as in “acceleration appliance, or “cultural appliance.” It even makes “love appliance” seem not as sleazy.  When I went to Rick’s Web site (by taking the name of his company, removing the spaces and adding a .com at the end), I was presented with a very George Orwellish flash intro, that ended with an esoteric, but beautiful thought: that the greatest product of democracy is hope. It then simply reveals the logo of the company: Democracy Machine.

So, what could a “political appliance” called the Democracy Machine be? A job posting on LinkedIn gave a further clue. It states thus:

From the PTA to the Presidency, if it involves participatory governance, the Democracy Machine will be the “go-to” application that empowers everyone equally, regardless of background, wealth or contacts.

This is interesting, and hearkens back to a speech I gave at a Web 2.0 conference last year. I presented the evolution of  social network into a toolkit that would help an individual with a specific perspective manage the entire lifecycle of her personal enterprise. If that paradigm were to applied to politics in its truest definition — social relations involving authority or power — then a “political appliance” could potentially become a set of tools for an individual of any political strata (from you local elderman to an independent running for councilman, to an organization supporting the relection of a governor) to manage his or her communictations and campaign cycle.

Think about it — most political Web sites activate primarily during campaign season. They are smorgashboards of applications — random acts of outreach, if you will — and end up creating a management nightmare. Now, imagine if there existed a Web 2.0 application that could allow a politician connect and collaborate with an active community of voters,  giving them the social-networking versions of all the appropriate and necessary tools: surveys and polls, marketing material, communication protocols, and campaign management. Here, “politician” could be someone running for school  government, or even president of the local lemon grower’s club.  It could even be a 501c3 executive director, in which case the “network” becomes one of donors and philanthropists.

The possibilities are mind-boggling. Well, whatever Rick’s up to, one thing’s for sure.

He’s got a knack for naming and copywriting!