Election Day Slideshow

Reporting for The UpTake: Massachusetts Primary

Here's a 23:41 video of my LIVE broadcast from Boston Beer Works on Primary night 2/5/08.

It was the first integrated LIVE broadcast between Qik and Mogulus. I was excited to be able to work with both companies to make this happen. Thanks a lot. It gives us a glimpse of the future.

You can go to the page on Qik for this video and see all the comments I was getting while broadcasting live from my Nokia N95-3 cellphone over the 3G network to Qik. Comments people make while I am online get streamed to the phone where I can read them while shooting the video.

The stream was then directed to Mogulus which broadcast my stream live to The UpTake viewers.

After I ended the stream the video was posted to Seesmic, where people could post video replies around the video and have a conversation about it.

Featured:
Qik Blog: Super Tuesday with Steve Garfield

The UpTake: Massachusetts Primary Qik Cam Coverage

Mashable: Mogulus Integrates Qik Mobile Streaming–Super Tueesday Coverage

Why didn't I know about the other races on the Suffolk County ballot?

Here's a video from my polling place. It shows you the four Massachusetts ballots, Democratic, Republican, Green-Rainbow, and Working party.

There are three other races going on in Suffolk county. The first time I heard about them was when I stepped into the polling place. This is outrageous.

I've been asking to see a copy of the ballot for over a week, and all I could fund were presidential candidates.

Here are the other races:

State Committee Man
State Committee Woman
Ward Committee

I left them all blank.

I feel that the electoral process has failed me.

Talking Politics with Jesus

Cup O Politics' Phil Johnson has a chat with Jesus about the 2008 Presidential Primary election. Who is Jesus supporting? Huckabee, Romney, someone else? Watch 'Talking Politics with Jesus' to find out.

Recover from Bush with Hope

Dave Winer writes, Find a shared vision, v2.0 (Scripting News):

"What a fantastic way to recover from Bush, who so completely represented the greed and arrogance and uglyness of America, to reinvent ourselves in the image of our best, in the image of hope."

Follow the link to read Dave's whole post.

Journalism by Wandering Around

Jackson West writes for NewTeeVee, Online Political Video a Winner in 2008:

Steve Garfield, who scooped CNN on Duncan Hunter’s announcement that he’s still in the race with a live video feed to Qik from his Nokia-sponsored phone over an AT&T-sponsored connection, didn’t bother to get any credentials at all. “Journalism by wandering around,” he called it in a phone chat.

His live video, in turn, got edited into a piece The UpTake and pushed as a Veracifier Ground Hound segment, with the two outlets partnering to provide more coverage.

Thanks Jackson, nice report.

On election night I was watching WBZTV.com in Boston. They were broadcasting on TV38 throughout the night, with a live text chat for viewers to talk with the anchors. First time I've ever seen this in Boston. It was groundbreaking for Boston TV to have on air anchors text chatting with viewers. BZ even had a segment where the anchors read some of hte chat comments on the air.

It took a while for them to stop calling the chat room blogging, but they soon stopped, because each time they said they were blogging, the chat room corrected them.

A few improvements could be made to the BZ chat room. It could only hold about 35 people, so new rooms were created as each chat room filed up. The explanation given was that the text would scroll too fast with too many people in the chat. They actually need a longer chat window, so you can more easily scroll back to see the history.

Automatic warnings to refrain from personal comments against the anchors or candidates disturbed chat room participants since no one was attacking any one.

It was a fun and intelligent crowd.

Finally, the chat room shut down in the middle of Clinton's speech, leaving me upset that it was gone and desiring chat rooms on WBZ for all live broadcasts.

I hope WBZ found it successful. I know I did. I stayed with WBZ all night on TV and online. That's probably what they wanted.