Live election night coverage online (Canadian Election)

Another Canadian election has come and gone. Programmed mainstream media coverage was again, less than inspiring. I found that to truly enjoy this national exercise, you have to watch it in the company of friends, as you would a Saturday afternoon hockey game.

I spent election night online. Using a variety of free sources, I was able to watch the results as they came in. Using Twitter, it was possible to know results in eastern Canada before the blackout lifted here in Alberta.

Here are some of the tools I used to monitor the 40th Canadian Election:

• Twitter — dedicated default communication channel. CB Radio. Fun. By using Hashtags, you can focus your discussion to others who monitor the same Hashtag (Channel). The best election Hashtag was #CanadaVotes. Oh, and yes, please do follow me on Twitter 🙂
• TweetDeck — Twitter application that allows you to group, sort, filter, slice and dice your incoming Twitter flow. In the screenshot of my election night desktop, it took up my left-hand 22″ monitor.
• Google Chrome — having multiple browser windows open at once would prove challenging to Firefox. I have 20+ plugins so I run a Fat Firefox. Chrome is lightweight and each instance runs independently; if one window crashes, the others stay running. I had four instances of Google Chrome running in my second monitor (17″) on the right.

Ok, that’s the tools, now what was I doing with them?
I’ve already mentioned that TweetDeck was my main communications medium for the evening. The back-and-forth discussion amongst people monitoring the #CanadaVotes channel was insiteful and entertaining. It was great engaging with other Canadians in a national discussion.

On my other monitor, I had Google Chrome running (in clockwise order):

• CBC Website – live results map of my ridings of interest
• CBC Website – live national results map
• CBC Website – live streaming TV coverage (sorry, it doesn’t show)
• Globe & Mail website – Live national results chart broken down by party

At one point, I did have another two windows onscreen containing Global and CTV coverage, but frankly, there wasn not enough new or insiteful commentary, so I reduced the redundancy and dumped them.

Overall, watching the various media sources and participating in the Twitter traffic was the best way to engage in, what many believe to be, a somewhat mundane national exercise.

Your turn, what did you use to monitor the results? Traditional media? New media? Comments are open!

Technorati Tags: Canada, Election, 2008, Canadian, PC, Liberal, Twitter, Social Media, Monitoring, Results, Election Results

3 Top Tools To Tame Twitter

 

photo credit: Thomas Hawk

As Twitter moves into its more mature phase, a number of Twitter utilities have emerged, some good, some not so good. I’m an early adopter and a daily Twitter user and have experimented with many Twitter tools over time. Please feel free to follow me but without further blather, here’s my top 3, must have, twitter tools:

• TwitThis.com — Though showing its age, TwitThis is a very cool tool. In a nutshell, simply browse to a web page that you want to share. Click the TwitThis bookmarklet (that you’ve previously installed). If you’re not logged in to Twitter, you’ll be prompted to do so.  A window pops up, and you can edit your Tweet and then send it to your Twitter stream. I like it because for quick Tweets, I don’t have to jump to another application, load a Twitter tab in my browser, etc.
• Twitter Twerp Scan — If you care about managing your Twitter Followers, then you need to run the Twitter Twerp Scan from time to time. Basically, Twerp Scan checks your Twitter account for people with extremely high following to follower ratios. These are most likely ‘bots or marketing drones — who could be potentially bringing down the value of your ‘Twitter Juice’ (is there such a thing? I’m thinking of Google Juice here, that mythical elixer that adds Page Rank to your website based on the power of incoming links). You can customize your Twerp ratio but if you have a high number of Twerps, the block/removal process is a bit tedious. Id’ love to see a ‘batch un-follow’.
• TweetLater.com — Ok, you’ve used Twitter for a while, are used to updating your followers, and have a good social network online that notices when you’re not there. Or you’re the Communications specialist for an organization that uses Twitter to keep your audience informed. Regardless, you also have a need to publish Tweets on a regular basis, then TweetLater is for you.  Simply, it’s a hand site that allows you to queue-up Tweets, to be published at a specific time.  One very cool and not-so-obvious feature: you can also set TweetLater up to autofollow people who follow you. Reducing your Twitter maintenance chores, though I’d remember to run TwerpScan from time to time 🙂 Just to nuke the Twerps.

Google Chrome: a quick look and how to block ads with Privoxy

photo credit: Randy Zhang

Google Chrome is no Firefox (yet).

For the last week and a bit, off and on,  I’ve been using Google Chrome (Google’s new entry into the browser wars). On the 3 XP-based systems I’ve used it on, I’ve found it to be very fast, very efficient, and stable. Pretty good performance for a ‘beta’.

I do have concerns about the way Chrome appears to ‘monitor’ my surfing activity (by using Google Gears functionality), but then again, I use Gmail and other Google Apps so I’m sure the Big G knows all about me at this point.

But, without plugin extensibility, Chrome is currently a curiosity. I won’t be using it for my daily work.

One major annoyance is the lack of Adblock. The web is a very marketing-heavy place, and I prefer to selectively view my advertising. The Adblock extension for Firefox allows this.

To achieve an advertising-reduced surfing experience with Chrome, I need to use Privoxy, a local privacy managing Proxy server. It’s a quick install and seems to work flawlessly.

A solution to this for now is http://www.privoxy.org/

1.) Install Privoxy
2.) Click on the Wrench icon in Chrome in the upper right corner
3.) Choose options>Under The Hood>Change proxy settings
4.) A windows box pops up, choose LAN settings (at least this is what it’s called in Vista)
5.) Check off “Proxy settings” and in the address setting add127.0.0.1 and in the port 8118
6.) If you have the option, you can also check off “Bypass proxy for local settings”
7.) Click “Ok”, close chrome and restart it. 

Tada. Enjoy.

Geekzone provided the process (thanks guys!)

Lesson learned: Relying on one of anything is bad (Gmail Down)

The online world was in a tizzy this afternoon as Google’s Gmail application crashed and burned.

Gmail and Google Apps for domains all seem impacted.

This is a breaking event so I’ll update this post when more is known. Gmail’s Blog has nothing on it, currently.

*** UPDATE ***
It looks like the big brains at Gmail have fixed the issue.

The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

And indeed it does seem to be back to normal. Excellent.

WordPress 2.6 is out — and you’re using it now.

photo credit: purplelime

It was a fairly painless update (thanks to the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin), but there were a few quirks I’ve had to address:

• Avatars. WP 2.6 has much better support for Avatars (images used to identify authors of comments). But, my theme doesn’t natively support them so I’ve had to maintain use of the Easy Gravatars plugin.
• Turbo mode. This is an admin. function, but basically it lets you
  speed up some admin functions with Google Gears integration. Gears behind my firewall is messy, but I will be trying this from more open connections in the future.

If you’re interested in seeing more of the WordPress 2.6 features in action, check out this video.

Technorati Tags: WordPress, blogging, blog, blogger, upgrade, easy