Election Night TV: Networks Aim to Dazzle With Gadgetry
It's election night, and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer is in New York talking to an Obama campaign strategist in Chicago.
But instead of the split screen or window TV viewers might typically see during live remote interviews, the Obama spokesperson will be projected as a three-dimensional hologram, making it appear as if he or she is in the Manhattan studio with Blitzer. The network plans to conduct similar holographic interviews with representatives from the McCain campaign in Phoenix.
"Everyone is doing something virtual this election year," says CNN Senior Vice President David Bohrman, the guy who pushed the technology. But Bohrman believes CNN is going where no network has gone before by employing Hollywood-style effects. "Virtual elements in a real set look so much better than a real person in a virtual set," he says.
Youth and the Web: The Political Campaign Game-Changer
It's hard to dismiss the role of the Internet in this year's elections. Both political parties are using online strategies to an extent never seen before in a political campaign. From daily candidate blogs with updates on issues, to made-for-YouTube commercials, to the use of technologies such as SMS to announce vice presidential selections, to -- perhaps most discussed -- the use of online tools for fundraising, the Internet has become a dominant force in this election.
In fact, young voters in particular have come to expect that they can gather information about candidates and issues online, and a failure by candidates to address this expectation may negatively impact their campaigns and their fundraising.
Results of a recent election survey indicate that while TV ads are still considered the most effective way to reach voters, e-mail and Web sites are now ranked higher than phone or radio campaigns. Furthermore, among young voters (18 to 24 years old) less than 5 percent say that direct mail is effective. (Visit the E-Voter Institute for more information.) Meanwhile, a recent Quibblo.com survey indicated that a full 36 percent of quiz takers didn't watch presidential candidates' acceptance speeches on TV during the recent conventions.
RealScoop Tells You When Politicians And Celebrities Are Lying
Have you ever wanted to know when politicians are lying? A startup called RealScoop thinks it can nail it down for you in real-time with the help of voice analysis technology that it claims, is used widely in law enforcement and fraud prevention.
Dubbed the Believability Meter, RealScoop's analysis technology analyzes over 100 vocal elements of the human voice and performs over 1,000 calculations per second to find out if a politician or celebrity is telling the truth.
The site itself features a bunch of videos collected from outside sources that are played in its own player. The player features a meter that changes dynamically as it analyzes what's being said. If it believes the person is lying, the meter turns red and moves towards the "highly questionable" area. If it believes the person is telling the truth, the meter stays green and in the "believable" section.
Politics Never Smelled So Tweet
If Senators John McCain and Barack Obama actually do debate Friday night, you will be able to watch what thousands of viewers think of their verbal sparring almost as they talk. Twitter, the service that lets techno-hipsters broadcast their thoughts in 140-character bursts, is setting up a special politics page to make it easy to tune into the chatter.
At midnight Thursday, the company is launching election.twitter.com, the first specialized section of its site. Like Twitter's main service, it is dominated by a big white box. But instead of typing an answer to What are you doing? the election site asks, What do you think?
The Race For Attention Tightens Online As McCain Gains On Obama
Now that convention season is over and the candidates have about eight weeks before they find out who will lead the United States for the next four years, it's time we compare each candidate's attention online as we head into the final stretch.
According to Google Trends data, Republican candidate John McCain is quickly gaining ground on Barack Obama and witnessed a spike in searches the day he announced Sarah Palin as his running mate. However, Obama witnessed an even greater spike at the same time, perhaps due to his convention speech the night before and some comparative searches pertaining to Palin.
Can We Predict The Outcome of The Presidential Election With Each Candidate’s Traffic Data?
Can traffic to a Presidential Candidate's homepage be used to gauge who will win this year's election? Hitwise has published recent data on the traffic both American presidential candidates have seen in the last month (ending 8/23), and while the results don't seem to shed much light on the forthcoming election's outcome, they reveal a few interesting trends.
Hitwise has ranked each state by two criteria: its contribution to each site's total traffic, and the the overall likelihood that a user in the state will visit the candidate's site (called the Representation index). If either metric is applicable to the election, it will be Representation Index, which indicates the candidate's popularity on a per-state basis and isn't affected by the state's population.
The Democrats Lose: Comparing the Convention Web Sites
I've been fighting this sinking feeling that we're headed for another four years (or eight) of a Republican President. Not that I have anything against John McCain except that I'll never vote for him. But I'm a pretty staunch Democrat, and it'd be nice to blame my own party for the world's problems for a change.
In the last presidential election, I formulated a theory that the most social media-savvy party would win. John Kerry and the DNC pretty much screwed the pooch every chance they got. Bush, on the other hand, had some remarkably media-savvy folks doing everything from real-time blogging and spin of debates to carrying their Swift Boat campaign to YouTube.
Kerry, of course, went on to lose by 3 million popular votes and a lot more states.
Could John Kerry have reached another 3 million people online? Dunno. But surely a few smart moves online could've helped when his image started to crumble.
Fast forward. It's 2008. The Democratic National Convention is going on now, and the Republicans start theirs in a week or so. So I decided to compare their respective convention sites based on simple stuff.
I may just have to change my party affiliation.
Broken Links: Democrats Lose
I checked the Republican National Convention site using Integrity. 1000 pages, no broken links. A few timeouts, but that was it.
I checked the Democratic Convention site. 2000 pages, 200+ broken links. Ouch.
Democrats lose.
Social Media Hooks
Then I checked each site for social media 'hooks': Ways to easily follow each party on Digg, Twitter, etc.
The Republicans seem to have their act together:
The Democrats don't. They opted for 'gavel to gavel' hidef video. Which is neato, but not quite as helpful. Plus they made a totally unexplainable technology choice. But I'll get there in a second.
Brand
The Democrats have billed their convention as open to all. Their home page, though, looks more like a Nike commercial:
It's pretty. It's also utterly devoid of any updates, any text, or any call to action for me, a long-suffering Democrat. Oh, yeah, and given how many e-mails and phone calls I've gotten from the party asking for unity, don't you think the home page should, I dunno, ask for unity?!
Oh, yeah, and the DNC home page still shows 'one hour to go' as one of the blog headlines, 24 hours later. Way to stay up to date, guys.
The Republicans' home page, on the other hand, is kind of folksy, like you're going to a county fair:
Not my style, but I'm not their audience. And their page has several calls to action: Form a local 'watch party' (which somehow makes me think of the McCarthy era, but no one's perfect) or sign up for e-mail updates. The DNC site has the e-mail signup too. But I could actually find it on the Republican site.
Video: PHAIL
I'm old, so I'm not sure I used 'Phail' right. But the Democratic National Convention site uses Silverlight for all video:
Huh?
Why on earth wouldn't you use YouTube, or another video streaming service, or at least use Flash on your own server?
So, playing video on the DNC site required that I download not one, but two plugins. Not a major hardship for me. But kind of dumb if you're trying to spread the word to as many people as possible.
Oh, did I mention the dire warning message I got when I tried to install the plugins:
In 2012, when you're running to unseat John McCain, try using Flash, which has a ridiculously large user base. Or at least get up-to-date certificates for your plugins.
I know, Microsoft probably wrote them a big honking check to use Silverlight. But isn't "we're for sale" kind of the wrong message to send when you're trying to elect a President? Even if it's true?
To Be Fair
The Republican National Convention site has its problems, too: Two conflicting e-mail signup forms, a writing style that makes me cringe and a candidate that can't remember how many houses he owns.
It's About the Effort, Stupid
It cost about $15 million to prepare the Pepsi Center for the Democratic National Convention. Plus a whole lotta money for security.
I'd cheerfully have built their web site for, oh I dunno, $250,000. My therapy bills would probably top that by the time we were done.
For this tiny slice of the pie:
I would have cheerfully made the effort run a link checker on the damned site. I would've thrown in a few social media links for good measure, made sure their plugins worked properly, and hit them with furniture when they mentioned using Silverlight as their video platform.
I hope I'm wrong. At least a President from my party will take my money and give it to the poor, instead of taking it and giving it to Iraq. But if not, you guys know where to find me in 2012.
