During Tuesday evening’s election returns, Prof. Henry Jenkins of the MIT Media Lab and i had a brief exchange during a live chat on pbs.org’s MediaShift site about how the Obama team and its supporters will channel all the energy and passion from the presidential campaign — really, a political movement as much as a campaign — into executing real political reform. Now we see the beginning contours of a first move in this direction: Change.gov. Yesterday the site received so many visitors that the servers couldn’t handle the load.
Current affairs
Today’s front pages
For a sampling of front pages around the U.S. and the world, see here and here.
Election Day participatory media projects
2008 is a hallmark year in many ways, including participatory media projects that focus on coverage of the election process. So far 766 people nationwide have uploaded videos as part of the YouTube/PBS Video Your Vote project.
Other noteworthy citizen projects today:
Election Day live chat
Mark Glaser at PBS’s MediaShift blog is hosting a daylong live chat about the presidential election, and I’ll be taking part. Head over there today to chat about new media and the election, online coverage of the election in the U.S., interesting innovative approaches, mashups, maps, Twitter feeds, etc.
Twitter Vote Report
In addition to the Video Your Vote and Video the Vote projects cited yesterday, describing two of the better-known efforts to monitor examples of voter disenfranchisement on Tuesday, here’s another option that requires just a cell phone and Twitter account.
Twittervotereport,
which was built by volunteers in partnership with techPresident, turns your phone into an on-the-spot volunteer election reporting
mechanism. The aggregate effect will be to visualize reporting problems
around the nation in real time.