Canada is in the throes of a general election, with just a few weeks of campaigning before voting on October 14th.
Here at the UBC School of Journalism, we spent some time discussing what we could contribute to the media coverage.
The big national papers, The Globe and Mail and The National Post both have extensive in-depth sections online, as does CBC News.
We decided to take different tack and instead created NetPrimeMinister.ca. The site scours social media to provide continual updates on the online buzz about the election.
It shows how the candidates vying to be Canada’s next prime minister are being talked about in social media from blogs to Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.
The idea was partly inspired by the US site techPresident and its Politickr site that combines official blog posts, news feeds, photo streams, and video posts from 2008 presidential candidates.
Vancouver-based NowPublic.com incorporates some of these features in its Canada election channel, pulling together citizen content on the vote. (Disclosure: My wife is NowPublic’s news director).
Both Politickr and NowPublic, as well as our j-school’s humble offering, NetPrimeMinister.ca, show some of the ways that information can be accessed and aggregated using new digital tools and platforms.
(Via Newslab.ca)
Filed under: Canada, journalism, social media , Dion, Duceppe, Harper, Layton, May, NowPublic, Politickr, techPresident
http://everymomentnow.com/
an interesting site that uses a similar idea for the US election.
This is a really great idea!
[...] Read the story at reportr.net. [...]
This is a wise initiative as the blogosphere is where lots of Canadians will be heading for “alternative” news reports, views and analysis.
Since there’s also a lot of federal election action going on in Quebec, I was wondering if you’d be adding a French counterpart.
free / open tool that may help you in your effort
tracks social media – and mashes it up if need be
http://trendrr.com
free / open tool that may help you inyour effort
tracks social media – and mashes it up if need be
http://trendrr.com
[...] J-school tracks social media buzz on Canada’s elections. The always inventive and keenly intelligent Alfred Hermida announces the launch of NetPrimeMinister.ca. The site, an initiative of the journalism department at the University of B.C., “scours social media to provide continual updates on the online buzz about the election.” It’s a NetVibes aggregator site, with separate tabs for blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Digg, tracking the leaders of each of the five federal parties. [...]