My goal is to try and get a small critical mass of users by tonight to use it during the VP presidential debate, polish it off and offer it to a larger audience for the last two presidential debates.
http://opinionslide.appspot.com/
Can you make it move faster in response to holding down the arrow keys?
Maybe do a gradient instead of just a plain bar? Like, red on the left and green on the right?
I think vertical might work better than horizontal.
Maybe it should slowly return to the "resting" position. Otherwise
Ustream.tv has a feature you might want to look at called "Shout"....
What I'd love to see is not just an up and down. I'd like to see a "meaningless spin/rhetoric" side of the scale. Maybe it's just an extra button you hold down when you think something is meaningless banter.
I mainly want this so politicians will see that spin measured and after a few sessions of "99% spin" they'll work on getting their spin meters down into reasonable levels.
Another thought is to have half of the audience do "agree/disagree" sliders and the other half do "specific-answer/meaningless-spin". We need to call just as much attention to the latter as we do the former.
Keyboard support, so users can tab to it quickly and position the indicator with the arrow keys (think about the HOME and END keys as well, for fast end-to-end motion), is a must.
Good proof of concept of what could replace the standard row of 3-5 radio buttons to capture how a user a feels.
I thought about using 3-5 radio buttons, but it's a lot harder to click on the little tiny radio buttons than it is to slide a slider.