VoteTheSite.com, a micro-site my good friends at New Media Campaigns have built, is conducting an on-line experiment to explore just that question. VoteTheSite.com pits congressional candidates’ websites against each other race-by-race. Races can be viewed randomly or by state. I was surprised by the range of quality congressional websites have. From top notch sites in Texas’ 5th to the really poor websites in Georgia’s 1st they run the quality gamut.

VoteTheSite.com - Vote on Political Websites

After the elections have taken place the votes on websites will be tallied up and compared to election results. Should be really interesting to see what the outcome is and how strong website quality correlates with campaign success.

Within the first 24 hours over 5,000 votes have been cast. Congrats to the New Media team for getting this out the door so quickly (with a little help from the Mechanical Turk)! Go vote on the websites in your state…

VoteTheSite.com was written (in under 2 days!) on an early version of the PHP Framework, the Recess! Framework, I’ve had my head down plugging away on the past couple of weeks. Expect blog activity to pick up as the Recess! Framework moves closer to a public release. Sign up to be notified of the release at RecessFramework.com.

… the Web 2.0 Expo!!! (Not Saturday night, sorry, but Tina Fay is amazing.)

Arrived in the big city on a flight and found my way to an old linux guru colleague and UNC classmate Jared’s Manhatten pad. He’s graciously offered a sweet couch to crash on while the conference is going on. Supremely clutch.

Looking ahead at the schedule of sessions going on at the conference makes it clearly evident this is going to be a crazy, fast-paced week. I don’t know what the connectivity story is over at the Javits Center but I’ll be doing my best to live blog or almost live blog on the sessions I’m attending.

Here’s what the list is looking like at the moment:

Tuesday, September 16

• Building Successful Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications - Dion Hinchcliffe
• Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches - Cal Henderson

Wednesday, September 17

• Lessons from Visual Programming with JavaScript - John Resig
• Moving Pictures - Cal Henderson
• Go REST with Rails - David Heinemeier Hansson
• Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems - Joshua Schachter
• New York’s Web Industry From 1995 to 2008: From Nascent to Ascendent - Fred Wilson
• The Death of the Grand Gesture - Deborah Schultz 
• High Order Bit - Jason Fried
• The DIY Guide to Growing a Company - Maria Thomas
• Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape - Gary Vaynerchuk

Thursday, September 18

• Enterprise Radar - Tim O’Reilly
• It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure. - Clay Shirky
• Building in the Clouds: Scaling Web 2.0 - Jason Hoffman, Alistair Croll,Alex Barnett, Dwight Merriman,Jinesh Varia, Pete Koomen
• Trends and Technologies in Where 2.0 - Andrew Turner, Mikel Maron
• Scaling Digg and Other Web Applications - Joe Stump
• The Sequel to SQL: Why You Won’t Find Your RDBMS in the Clouds - Geir Magnusson Jr
• Scaling Synchronous Web Apps: Lessons Learned from Meebo - Sandy Jen
• User Analytics: Building Flickr Stats - Paul Hammond

Friday, September 19

• Arianna Huffington in Conversation with Tim O’Reilly 
• Tim O’Reilly, Arianna Huffington
• (Re)making the Internet: Accounting for the Future of Information, … - Genevieve Bell
• What ManyEyes Knows - Irene Greif
• Organizing Chaos: The Growth of Collaborative Filters - Jay Adelson
• Because We Make You Happy - Ben Huh
• Next Generation of Video Games - Shana Fisher
• The Real Future of Technology - Dan Lyons aka Fake Steve Jobs
• Content Matters - Liz Danzico, Jeffrey Zeldman,Alex Wright, Kristina Halvorson, Paul Ford, Bre Pettis
• What Would Google Do? How Media Must Revolutionize Their Thinking - Jeff Jarvis, John Byrne, Steve Adler
• Tying it All Together: Implementing the Open Web - Joseph Smarr 

Stay tuned!