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.

[Tags: politics news media ]

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YouTube and PBS are asking us to video and post our voting experience. The videos will be collected here.

I was already planning on Flickring my absentee vote for Obama, just for the joy of it. [Tags: politics e-politics media youtube ]

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I hear he also writes for a newspaper…

(Congratulations to Mr. Krugman! I guess telling the truth and being right occasionally pays off.)

[Tags: paul_krugman economics ]

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Publishers mean no disrespect when they refer to the load of unsolicited manuscripts as the “slush pile.” Actually, they do mean disrespect. But we all know that somewhere in the slush there must be some manuscripts worth publishing.

So, Harper Collins is crowd-sourcing it. At Authonomy, you can add your own ms, or vote on those of others. The top 5 at the end of every month get a once-over from a HC editor. And the rest can go publish themselves at Lulu, where you can find my own non-award-winning young adult novel, My $100 Million Dollar Secret.

(Thanks to Elaine Warner at A Broad Abroad for the link.)

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous writing publishing slush_pile ]

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Sounds at the end like the room may be laughing at the reporter…

[Tags: politics media obama mccain fox_news ]

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The Washington Post has a nice set of interactive features for “decoding” the debates.

You know what would be even better? The open access Larry Lessig and a left-right coalition is calling for.

[Tags: debates e-democracy politics everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The Brian Lehrer Show, on the nation’s largest public radio station, WNYC, is asking listeners to use a set of wiki pages to help produce six segments about the candidates’ positions on some of the less-hyped issues in the presidential election. The first issue to air will be the Internet and Broadcast Regulation. It will be on this Friday, 10-12 (EDT).

[Tags: net_neutrality everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I love Twitter, but I’m wondering whether it’s the right tool for getting together to do a group-watch (we’ll laugh, we’ll cry) of the Democratic convention tonight. Would old-fashioned IRC be better?

I like IRC as a way of watching an event together. So, suppose I set up irc://www.freenode.net/democonvo tonight and opened it to anyone who wanted to join. As opposed to Twitter, the group would be smaller, it would consist of people who were there only to talk about the convention, and it would encourage more back and forth because the set of readers is the same as the set of potential writers. (With Twitter, the people you read don’t necessarily read you.)

On the other hand, Twitter brings together unexpected people who are highly unlikely to jump into any one IRC chat, especially mine. On Twitter, I’ll be able to read running commentary from Joe Trippi and Michael Turk (Democratic and Republican Net strategists). I can pretty well guarantee that neither will show up to an IRC chat that I throw.

So, I’m not sure what to do…

[Tags: twitter irc social_media politics ]

Dave Winer’s got an IRC going right now. He’s at the convention as a blogger…

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WE magazine has launched with a set of articles by, and interviews with, a stellar set of folks, including Stephen Downes, Dan Gillmor and Ethan Zuckerman. You can read it online for free, or pay for PDF or a paper version.

[Tags: we_magazine media ]

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This could well be it. Of course, it may be fabricated, in which case, it’d be much less awfully funny, and funnily awful.

[Tags: humor media ]

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