The Evolving Newsroom

Here's something news sites in NZ might want to look at given we have an election coming up.

















Current, a peer-to-peer news aggregator and broadcaster, and Twitter, a popular social network/microblogging platform, have teamed up to cover the vice-presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden later today:

Current & Twitter have teamed up for the very first time to integrate real-time Twitter messages (aka "tweets") over major portions of a live television broadcast.

Hack the Debate by adding your Twitter posts to our live broadcast of the 2008 Presidential Debates.

We will broadcast as many of your debate tweets as possible right over the candidates, in real time, on our live broadcast.

In a nutshell, Twitter users comment on the debate as it happens and include the hashtag #current. (A hashtag - the # symbol followed by a keyword - is a way of tracking Twitter conversations about a particular topic.) Current TV will aggregate all those tweets tagged with #current and include them in its coverage of the debate.

This highlight package of the McCain/Obama debate run on Current gives you an idea of how it works.



Other tags to watch for on Twitter tonight are #dirtycoal | #dontgo | #notmygal | #pork | #suspend - check out Nancy Scola's post on techPresident to find out the relevance. (Thanks to Imogen for the link).

This is fun. Telegraph.co.uk has come up with an interactive political map of Britain.

Essentially it's a dot-map of Britain, with each dot representing an electorate (as defined by the new boundaries that became effective in June 2007). Click on the dot and you see the candidates for that electorate, voter turnout and data on health, crime and education.

Interested in three or four particular electorates? Stick a pin in them and you can track them more easily. Want to know what would happen if 4% of swing voters in a Tory-vs-Labour race opted for the Tories? Use the Swingometer to find out. Want to see Labour's 20 most vulnerable seats, the Lib Dem's top 25 target seats or the electorates created under the new boundaries? Hit the predefined searches and there they are.

The map took a short while to load for me (no surprise, really, given download speeds etc) and a couple of times it came up blank after I'd clicked through and was trying to come back. But I like it and I expect many tcuk users will too.