Live election night coverage online (Canadian Election)

Very sim­ilar to you, except I relied on Twit­ter Search instead of Tweet­Deck. I like hav­ing it all inside the browser.

No ques­tion, Twit­ter is revo­lu­tion­iz­ing polit­ical and news media.

Mack D. Males last blog post..Canada votes, noth­ing changes

@Mack D. Male — Thanks for the com­ment (Num­ber 1000 on the blog it seems!)

Agreed, though I think main­stream media has a way to go to catch up. Ormiston’s cov­er­age of Twit­ter on CBC needed some ser­i­ous work. But given the fre­quency of national elec­tions, they’ve got 18 months to review and improve.

I fol­lowed the elec­tion on Twit­ter as well (and then fol­lowed you!). I agree that it was the best part of the night.

The way to make elec­tions inter­est­ing is to think of them like any other sport­ing com­pet­i­tion (minus the span­dex; that would be wrong … just wrong). Every­one fights it out for a month, and then we declare a victor.

The news­casters should report the elec­tion res­ults with energy and enthu­si­asm. Some of them at the CBC were obvi­ously enthu­si­astic about the polit­ics behind the res­ults, but none of them com­mu­nic­ated it the same way they would if review­ing sports scores.

On Twit­ter, it’s like watch­ing a live hockey or bas­ket­ball game unfold. The seats won by each party are the scores, and you’ve got the fans of each party snip­ing at each other, polit­ical junkies mak­ing obser­va­tions of vari­ous witty degrees, and the odd per­son ques­tion­ing why the CBC insisted on that “#orm­is­ton­vote” hashtag and then only ref­er­enced Twit­ter three times.…

I don’t think we’ve quite reached the point where social net­work­ing media like Twit­ter and Face­book are hav­ing a huge impact on elec­tions. We’re get­ting there, as the num­ber of scan­dals over can­did­ates’ pasts and the act­iv­ism on Face­book groups attests. What remains to be done is for the news­casters to truly integ­rate social media into their broad­casts, and not just poke it with a stick like Susan Orm­is­ton did. I com­mend the CBC for try­ing, but there is room for improvement.

CNN actu­ally does a good job on integ­rat­ing Twit­ter, when they decide to do so. I saw a spe­cial on the fin­an­cial crisis a week or two ago where they actu­ally used Twit­ter to field ques­tions from the audi­ence (in addi­tion to the usual routes of tele­phone and email), and they should the actual Twit­ter stream, instead of the lame Power­Point slides that CBC used on elec­tion night.

I’d like to see more of that type of Twit­ter use in the main­stream media.

@Adam Snider — Yeah. Rather than co-opt the media (as Orm­is­ton was doing on CBC) they should rather embrace it. It’s an input source for pro­gram­ming, but they didn’t really use it other than to say “Hey, look what’s hap­pen­ing over here…now back to OUR coverage.”

How hard would it have been to Dir­ect Mes­sage some Twit­ter com­menter, get them on the phone and then dis­cuss the issues? That would have been great for Live TV. Heck, even get them using Skype. If Oprah can do it, oth­ers should be able to fig­ure it out

@Adam Snider — “fell short on elec­tion night.” no kidding!

Wow, if they had Skype avail­able, and didn’t use it, talk about a missed opportunity.

You know, given all that CBC is doing on new media, I won­der if they just ‘for­got’ to include any­thing in the elec­tion plans and cobbled some­thing on at the last minute.

They do quite well in other areas. I listen to Radio1 every morn­ing on my kit­chen Mac. News Head­lines and The National are streamed to my media centres, Radio3 is awe­some the new Digital Music chan­nels are cool, I’m not sure about Bold yet but they can do things well, which is why this cov­er­age was disappointing.