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November 2, 2008
I’ll set up a chat room at irc://irc.freenode.net/electionjoho if you want to chat your way through our surprising and heart-breaking defeat on Tuesday. (No jinxing here!) Starting around 8:30 pm Boston time?
For this, you’ll need an IRC chat client. I like Chatzilla, a free Firefox add-in, but there are lots of clients around.
November 1, 2008
Pew shows that the Net is second only to tv as our source for election news. It’s 72%, 33%, 29% for tv, Net, and newspapers.
This can be slightly misleading, though. For me — and I am confident that I am 100% typical of people who are like me — the only election news I get directly through TV comes through The Daily Show and Colbert. Otherwise, the ecology of news works like this: Someone posts a bit of news on some site. That snippet may well come from a mainstream source, or it may not. But like a greasy crumb dropped on the sidewalk, it’s instantly swarmed by ants. The ants — that’s you and me, sister — point at it, link to it, explain it, deny it, make fun of it, connect it with something else, and send it or what we’ve made of it around the world. The morsel is gone, digested, appropriate. The ants are the media.
The mainstream are only noticed if they’re doing as good a job at being a news ant as the rest of us.
Report any voting problems you have using #votereport in your tweet. You can see them aggregated at TwitterVoteReport.com,
October 29, 2008
This site has a tracker that tracks all the electoral college tracking polls. Each row represents a different tracker.
We can only hope that there are several of these sites, so we can track the trackers tracking the trackers.
October 28, 2008
Jose Antonio Vargas has an interesting article in the Washington Post about watching global blogs watch the US election. He focuses on Voices without Votes, an offshoot of Global Voices. Why, did you know that six local candidates in Brazil added “Obama” to their names?
Just a reminder: MyFairElection.com is asking people to sign up to report on the conditions they find at their local polling place so that the site can create a “weather map” of electoral fairness.
October 27, 2008
John Kelly at Shifting the Debate has posted a diagram of the 100 most blogged political videos, showing their distribution across the party chasm. Bruce Ettlinger, of the Berkman‘s Internet & Democracy project blogs about it, calling out some particular vids.
October 25, 2008
October 23, 2008
Volunteer programmers, designers and activists across the country will coordinate in online chat rooms and at real-world coding parties on Friday to build Twitter Vote Report, a groundbreaking web election monitoring system to fight voter suppression and disruption efforts. Anyone with a Twitter.com account will be able to use their cell phones or computers to send a message notifying voters, election monitors, and the media of problems around the country. A web map will display incidents in real-time.
For more info about how you can help, here. And if you want to help out on Friday’s code jam, go here.
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