Sometimes I think there's a curiosity gene or a tweak of the nervous system in early childhood of some folks that prevents the "why's the sky blue, daddy?" knob ever being resettable '0'.
Seeing as how my knob's stuck, I'm always ISO tools that'll lead to more than "just because..." I'm particularly fond of those aiming to ascertain patterns of 'relatedness' among individuals in a group or among groups in larger mixed populations. Some folks here may recall my pointing out the utility of NameBase.org's social network application that diagrams relationship implied by the coincidence of two people as they are both considered relevant to the topic of a particular researcher's publication.
Let's see, Jeff Gannon and...Intrigued I hope?!.... - - - >>>
I always like to point to
Karl Rove for example.
Grover Norquist or Andrew Fastow, who'da guessed it?!
Anyhow, my research reflex seems to work better with visual models and so along the way, I've always an eye out for these things, how I discovered the Touch Graph Browser of Google's 'related' Sites. My favorite thing to do with TG is in discovery of other research tools, oddly enough!
Why mention all this in passing? Still searching, I came upon a site recently of a guy who seems to be attempting what I want to do, establish a database of political entities for exactly the purpose of intuiting the network of their social relationshps in a sort of visual wiki fashion. It might be a little too open-source for my purposes as I think some things just aren't likely to wiki well, a joint project of bu$h and dean partisans, for example ;-)
But I'd like to see this guy's thing given a go and figured dKos maybe just the place to promote some web activism.
Please, go check out and help Doug McCune develop his Political Friendster network, it may just help us get by in these times!