How It Works

Vocal Nation is built around an intelligent voting system. By default, all content is ranked based primary upon the average of user's votes. To vote, simply login, and drag the voting sliders next to each posting. If you feel that a posting is politically biased, you can also set its leaning slider accordingly. Vocal Nation allows you to customize your news stream. Narrow your results by time period or category. Search recent articles for a keyword or phrase. Browse by news source within the Feeds / Sources section, or by region within the Regional Spotlight section. Open up the Filter Results menu on the right of a postings page to browse content by political leaning, media type, or to include just your favorite feeds. And be sure to check out our world map for a different perspective on things! There are two ways to add postings to the system: manual submission and feed digestion. For manual submission, click the New Posting link in the top right corner of the screen. There you can write a new article, embed a video or audio clip, or link to another web page. Feed digestion is an automated way to add content to Vocal Nation. This method checks with your favorite blogs or news sources throughout the day to see if they have any new content. To do this, the website must have an RSS feed. Invite your friends to Vocal Nation so you can share news items with them. You can visit any user's profile to read their comments and see their favorite articles. Add users you like to your friends list so that you to easily check back for changes to their profile, new postings, etc. To save a user, visit their profile page and click the "Add to Friends" link.