Originally posted on 3121’s blog.

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Earlier this summer, I had the opportunity to sit down with Paul Vogelzang of Capitol Communicator TV and discuss 3121. Video below, highlights after the jump…

So - what is it like, LinkedIn? Facebook? Amazon?

Paul: By starting small, are you going to, you know, build out profiles? Is it going to be kind of a LinkedIn for the Hill?

Leslie: A lot of people are actually calling it the LinkedIn for the Hill. Local bloggers, Frank Gruber over at Somewhat Frank, Nick O’Neill at Social Times, even Adam Ostrow at the Mashable blog, they were kind of all talking and saying, “you know, this is kind of like a LinkedIn.” But the thing about LinkedIn, you kind of populate with your CV or your resume information and I don’t know about you, but I don’t update it regularly. And I think that’s something that it’s going to be a hybrid between the concept of kind of a stagnant kind of two-dimensional with that three-dimensional social layer. So you’re going to be able to friend up with people, you’re going to find colleagues. It’ll be kind of like Amazon will recommend to you, “Hey Paul, you know, you’re a Press Secretary in the House and you’re a Democrat. Here are people that you might like to meet,” and so it’s going to very kind of inviting in the sense that if you’re a young staffer trying to figure out who’s who and what’s what, and then if you’re a staffer that– you know, you kind of have an established network, this is just going to be an extension of that Rolodex that you already have.

So - what about searching and finding who and what you need?

[…]

Paul: What about searchability by issue? You know, will you have, like, a health care component? Will you have an energy component? Will you have an economy component? Can we actually get in there and look by kind of subject matter by member?

Leslie: Absolutely. Two key features; the first one, on day one is not going to be an empty room. Like I said, there’s going to be 9,500 records and all of that information will be searchable. So you can start typing in someone’s name and it’ll start auto-completing. “Oh, do you mean this individual? Do you mean this staffer?” When you start typing in concepts like budget, military, anyone who services on those sub-committees will have already been pre-tagged and pre-set in a group on the side. […] and, two, as any social media… Wikipedia user knows, the longer the community’s around and the more people add to it, you can add to your own profile, you can also actually add tags. So if you’re interested in health care or Medicaid or even something more finite like H-1B visas, you know, those are all things that you can tag within your content. And then you hope that other people are then also referencing and kind of tagging their profiles and what they’re doing.

Leslie Bradshaw is a 3121 Community Manager and member of the Public Affairs team at New Media Strategies.