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How To Supplement Election Coverage?
An anonymous reader asks "What information sources and social networking sites will you be using to supplement the election coverage on TV next Tuesday? I am ready with a big HDTV with Comcast, a Mac mini, and and an Xbox 360. I also have two laptops (one good for websites and one for streaming video), an old-school Blackberry, a 'regular' cell phone, a Nokia N810, a Squeezebox, and finally Sirius Satellite Radio. Which websites should I watch for live county results? I already know about the Twitter Vote Report for tracking and reporting voting issues and I already watch 'CNN Reporters' on Friendfeed for the national flair. What other Twitter accounts should I follow? Which urgent ones should I send to my phones? Which YouTube accounts or keywords I should subscribe to in Miro? What are the most popular sites for posting 'on-scene' videos — iReport, Flickr, something else? I know most local Fox affiliates are great about streaming, but is there a page that lists all of the streams, in case I need to quickly focus on one city or area? Basically, how would you configure all those gadgets?" This reader might find some guidance in what to focus on from a video produced by reader (and data modeler) Bruce Nash that lays out a predicted timeline for when the media will call each state, depending on when the polls close and how tight each race is expected to be.
How covered do you really have to be?
"What information sources and social networking sites will you be using to supplement the election coverage on TV next Tuesday? I am ready with a big HDTV with Comcast, a Mac mini, and and an Xbox 360. I also have two laptops (one good for websites and one for streaming video), an old-school Blackberry, a 'regular' cell phone, a Nokia N810, a Squeezebox, and finally Sirius Satellite Radio. Which websites should I watch for live county results? I already know about the Twitter Vote Report for tracking and reporting voting issues and I already watch 'CNN Reporters' on Friendfeed for the national flair. What other Twitter accounts should I follow? Which urgent ones should I send to my phones? Which YouTube accounts or keywords I should subscribe to in Miro? What are the most popular sites for posting 'on-scene' videos â" iReport, Flickr, something else? I know most local Fox affiliates are great about streaming, but is there a page that lists all of the streams, in case I need to quickly focus on one city or area? Basically, how would you configure all those gadgets?"
I voted a couple of weeks ago, so plan on biking to work as usual, working then coming home, eating dinner with my wife, watching a few minutes of election coverage, then am going to bed. When I wake up on Wednesday morning, my fervent hopes are that this election is a blowout and will not have to be decided again by the courts.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
"What other Twitter accounts should I follow?" Lol.... You actually want to hear what twitter has to say?
I'm going to need at least an eigthth.
Yes, get out of the house. How about going to a party, or hosting one? Instead of sitiing on your duff, you can drink, discuss, and celebrate/commiserate as the results come in. Much more interesting than trying to consume a dozen newsfeeds at the same time, whatever good that might do.
"I am ready with a big HDTV"
I dunno about you all but I am PSYCHED about seeing EVERY PORE on John McCain's face during his concession speech. I mean, election coverage without picture-perfect high definition quality is just not acceptable.
This article is the 4th in 5 days that has been posted purely as viral marketing for twitter. The jerks that own that site must be running out of cash (hopefully). Editors, please STOP the twitter slashvertisments.
Is the SCOTUS web site
You might also want to do your own exit polls. As long as you're on public property, no one has the right to keep you from shooting video.
This is very bad advice.
While a school may be public property, if it's being used as a polling place you most certainly do not have the right to shoot video or poll people inside. If you want to do either of these things in or near a polling place, please (please, please, please) check with the poll workers at the polling place first. They will know what rules there are and what limits there are to video and exit polling. (There are procedures for what the media can & can't do in a polling place, but the most important one is: if the chief judge says "no", then you're not filming...and you need to ask first.)
I have volunteered as a poll worker this cycle, and I'm really worried about getting into fights with people about the "Video the Vote" campaign. Video or photography inside the polling place is illegal in my state (I suspect it's illegal in all states, but I only know my state's law for sure). I don't want to get into these fights, but the Video the Vote folks have buried their CYA "please ask the poll workers" stuff in the middle of huge blocks of text that no one's likely to read, so I'm not optimistic.
(By the way, the whole soft-shoeing of the need to check with the election judges by "Video the Vote" really pisses me off...the poll workers are going to have a tough enough time this cycle with the expected huge turnout. The last thing we're going to need is some zealot screaming voter suppression when we try to enforce the "no filming" law in the polling area.)
</rant>
In short, if you want to be the media creator, that's fine...you just need to play by the rules.
Whoosh.
There are at least two contexts in which that is funny.
The idea of an "exit poll" is to talk to voters outside the polling place after they've voted, not to intrude on the sanctity of the polling place itself.
In other words, be on the sidewalk or other 100% public property.
My polling place in Bradenton, Florida, is in the rec room of a large mobile home park, which is private property. Many other polling places around here are on property that belongs to various churches.
As long as you stay on true public property -- that is, places to which the public has unimpeded access, you can film.
One way to tell if you're in a legal spot as opposed to intruding on a polling place is to look at the placement of candidates' signs. There is typically a minimum allowable distance from the polling place for them. Use them as your guide to the "safe" distance. Beyond that, as long as you are on public property and not impeding traffic, neither an election judge nor a police officer has the right to stop you from filming.
(I, too, have been an election judge.)
What better way to spend election night than to watch with elation as the Fox people have to call state after state for Obama? Grab a beer and tune in to Fox. Maybe every now and then tune in to another organization to see if they've already called states for Obama that Fox is waiting to call because they just can't stand it.
Miro? Laptops? Blackberry? Xbox? You probably have a bigger electromagnetic footprint than the power lines in my backyard...
Do you really need all that Inspector Gadget weaponry? Why don't you coze up with an old AM radio, a bottle of gin and a beat-up deck of cards which has the perfect texture to play Solitaire in a dimly lighted living room? And a simple sheet where you strike or circle states as they are being called officially?
Do you really see any value in being the first to send a twitter to your pals about such or such result, while everybody on Earth and beyond will be completely aware of the information in a matter of minutes or hours? There is no scoop on election night, only an annoying chase to be first to know.
You want a real scoop? Here is one: while Obama is way up in polls, McCain will be the next president. Because the people that were supposed to vote for Obama were too busy subscribing to RSS feeds and setting up gamma on their webcam so they would be ready to upload their comments on youtube, and they neglected to go on and vote. While the good ol' God fearing folks were first in line at the booth and spent the election night sipping gin and playing Solitaire. That's exactly how Le Pen got so far in the French elections a few years back - not enough people casting their vote because the polls were on their side.
There is just too much gadgets people. Time to pull a few plugs and get in touch with reality, where elections are won by people who get the most votes, not people who get the most Digg or website hits.
lucm, indeed.
Keep one window open to fivethirtyeight.com; one window for The Huffington Post, and one for Swampland. :)
For TV, I'd go with MSNBC (Chuck Todd ftw), CNN and Fox, just to watch and see if their heads asplode
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
Let the National Guard handle those... if they happen. *
Too bad they're all in Iraq.
* Please let no riots happen!
There shouldn't be riots if Obama wins, or if McCain wins fairly. If there's another 2000 situation and McCain wins a crooked election, then there probably SHOULD be riots. When you take away the fundamental right to vote then there aren't that many other alternatives.
Fire up your favorite porno and fire one off, seems appropriate for an instance where we will get screwed either way.
I'll admit I'm a bleeding heart liberal political junkie.
on TV I'll be mostly MSNBC & PBS along with Daily Show/Colbert Report, CNN, and Current ( Al Gore's news channel )
on the net:
try DIGG's US Elections 2008 tabs both popular and upcoming.
pollster.com - http://www.pollster.com/ - is a good aggregater of polls it's what the TV guys use
Hufington post updates/changes frequently and has lots of videos http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
a news tab on igoogle with lots of feeds is good to have in another of your firefox tabs ( BBC, newspapers, TV channel websites, tec. )
I like Salon http://www.salon.com/?source=refresh ( I have a long time premium account ) - it updates a lot, but not as fast as huffington
This is a major, important election, I'll be watching on the HD big screen with friends. laptop atop my lap. I'll probably redo my "favotires" settings for the night.
Then you have selective memory. I'm not blaming you, per se, nor am I saying that this is a right-wing phenomenon. People seem to have an inability to see their own faults, or those of those in their group, compared to faults of those who are less like them. To see right-wingers who consider themselves the only REAL patriots, the only REAL Christians, and the only REAL Republicans accuse others of smugness and hubris always serves to raise my eyebrows a bit. I see this stuff every single day, and I'm not all that leftish. If you don't think that Coulter and Limbaugh count as smug, you might want to have your meter re-calibrated.
The problem is, in any population of any size, you're going to have idiots, jerks, charlatans, attention whores, etc. This applies to all factions, groups, subcultures, religions, political groups, everything. Human frailty and evil runs pretty evenly across the gamut. But we have a tendency to take these normal outliers to be the norm when it comes to groups to which we don't belong, while we're blind to the same types of individuals in our own group. It's a pretty sad phenomenon.