WebProNews spoke with Chris Tolles, the CEO of Topix, who told us that voters are trending online because they get a more balanced view. The study also found that voters are going online in order to participate in political discussions and debates.

Tolles told us that this trend would increase in the coming years as voters strive to have a “personal relationship” with news. He also said that politicians would have to learn how to leverage online platforms such as Topix, Facebook, and Twitter, to ensure that they are connecting with the conversation.

Where do you go for your political information? Let us know.

Previously, Topix allowed its users to access the news of any region of their interest and to comment and discuss it. The response was great. Over 1 million people posted more than 5 million comments, which totaled up to more than 30,000 comments each day. The majority of the traffic was from local channels. The only problem — there was still a lack of local news even with 50,000 news sources. The news that was there, was not able to be conformed enough with merely algorithms. As a result of these findings, Topix.com completely opened up their site in order to give any user the power to discuss, as well as edit and share the news of their choice.

Topix is unique in that, no one else has all the local content around news that they have. People in small towns especially enjoy the site, if their town does not receive a lot of coverage.Topix acquires around 10 million comments each month. According to Tolles, Topix considers themselves to be a standard body and not a journalists’ organization. They do not want to give any one person full authority over a specific region.

In the beginning, Topix founders created the first open development directory for the Internet called the Open Directory Project, but is now the largest human-edited web directory. Jimmy Wales, best known for his role in founding Wikipedia, was a first licensee of of the Open Directory. According to Tolles, Wales credits the Open Directory Project as the genesis behind the idea of Wikipedia. Tolles does point out that they borrowed the idea of logging and making public logs from Wikipedia.

According to Tolles, advertising has been a difficult issue for Topix. They currently only use Google, but will most likely begin to directly sell to specific advertisers. Topix.com does include a Classified Ad section on its site that is being monetized on Google. As they obtain more traffic, they will get more ads. According to Tolles, it’s a challenge to monetize locally, especially since everyone is not on the Web right now. They believe time is in their favor since the Internet is continuing to grow and flourish.

Topix CEO Rich Skrenta talked about the redesign on his blog. He said, “We had built up a strong local audience on the site, but a lot of it was SEO, and while users were clearly getting some value out of our product, we hadn’t made something that people really cared about.” Skrenta rejected suggestions that Topix should copy sites like MySpace or Digg before settling on the new design.

Blogger Kathy Sierra has canceled her appearance at the e-Tech conference in San Diego due to death threats. Graphic violent images and threats started appearing on her blog and another one run by people she said have been critical of her and other prominent bloggers like Robert Scoble. Sierra said, “I do not want to be part of a culture where this is done not by some random person, but by some of the most respected people in the tech blogging world.” Police are investigating.

If you need a job, you need an identity on the Web. ComputerWorld cited a pair of surveys where many recruiters and hiring managers use search engines to find out more about job candidates. Some also use social networking sites to screen people too. Marketing pro Andy Beal suggested people should buy their domain name, know what’s on Google about their names, and own their personal brands as much as possible.

Topix CEO Rich Skrenta said that although “Our entire industry is scared witless by Google’s dominance in search and advertising,” it is possible to compete with them in search as a sub-segment of the Internet market. Skrenta emphasized simplicity and said anyone battling with Google for search should “forget about asking users to do anything besides typing two words into a box.”

Rumors about a possible Google Phone received another boost as photos of the new gadget began to circulate on a mobile phone forum. Garett Rogers speculated that the pictures of the Samsung built mobile have probably been manipulated even if they are of a real prototype. Google reportedly has about a hundred people working on software for the device.

Microsoft has opened a social networking site for the finance industry. The Dynamics Live Community beta site recently opened during a San Diego conference, where Microsoft staffers have been calling it a ‘MySpace for financial pros.’ The new site offers articles and expert columns as content, and blogs and forums for its users. Networking features are listed as ‘coming soon.’

News aggregator Topix.net paid one million dollars to purchase the Topix.com domain January. Topix CEO Rich Skrenta told the Wall Street Journal the two domains have been running side by side since then, and plans to switch to the dot com address. But Topix could face a loss of search engine traffic during the changeover, and Skrenta’s plea for help from Google received a canned response to post his request on a support message board.

“This can’t be the process,” Mr. Skrenta says. “You’re cast into this amusing, Kafkaesque world to run your business.”

Defense contractors have been big players in crawling audio tracks for online video. Beet TV said Podzinger, a subsidiary of BBN, has crawled one point five million YouTube clips since December. Podzinger’s Alex Laats said they crawl thousands more each day. Beet TV also claimed that the same technology has been used by government agencies for a variety of other tasks since 2001.