Alex Reid

The Federal government via MP Shelly Glover and the Province of Manitoba via Trade Minister Peter Bjornson have announced a shared funding boost of $1.8 million to Manitoba Music (which New Winnipeg Media is a corporate sponsor of) – a not-for-profit industry association designed to help local artists and companies market their music beyond Manitoba’s borders.

The money is part of a four-year plan under the Canada-Manitoba Western Economic Partnership Agreement (WEPA), in which both the Province of Manitoba and the Government of Canada are contributing $25 million each over four years to “to strengthen economic activity and improve the quality of life in western Canadian communities.”

The people over at How’d They Vote have included a postal code look up in their API.

“How’d They Vote?” aims to be a non-partisan website which provides a variety of in-depth information on the operations of the Canadian Parliament, specifically, how our politicians vote and what they’ve said. We take Hansard and extract information on bills, members of parliament, votes, and speeches. Hansard is an excellent resource, but it is not the mandate of the parliament website to fully index and extract every nugget of interesting information from it.

A worthy project indeed.

Great job Chuck Dillon.

There is no doubt the American Presidential election is the most historic since perhaps the Kennedy/Nixon race. It’s the election that will see America’s first black President or America’s first female Vice President. Both candidates are Senators and are neither are incumbent to the office they are running for.

It’s also historic because finally the Internet has evolved – including the public in the democratic process with creativity and interactivity – from the debates to the vote.

YouTube has been on top of the game by partnering with the cable networks to give the microphone to the public allowing them to ask questions to the Presidential candidates. Even now on election day they are highlighting videos from people as or after they vote looking for any problems voters experience.

The instantaneous Twitter was utilized by Current TV when they fused spontaneous Twitter reactions with the broadcast of the first US Presidential Debate. Here’s what it looked like:

(VIDEO REMOVED)

Twitter even produced a keyword graph tallying up the response language. CBC News used Twitter a couple weeks ago using PowerPoint (groan) the CBC reporter pointed out Twitter keywords as the election wore on. Not live reporting, just a gathering of the past on.. PowerPoint? It was truly sad to watch.

Even the email address to contact CBC was confusing (ormistononline@) as the CBC named the contact after the presenter Susan Ormiston. Why not keep it simple and consistent like elections@cbc.ca?

Witnessing the CBC’s use pale use of technology (and/or lack of creativity) got under my skin. What the Americans have done in the run-up to their federal election is what we should be doing for our civic, provincial and federal elections.