Alex Reid

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.

I’ve been playing a lot with Word Clouds. It has many great uses. One radio host maintains a Word Cloud to track popular artists at that time.

Here’s the word cloud for this website, for the past year:

This website has brilliantly put together a tag cloud representing the popularity and frequency in the usages of words of all speeches, official documents and declarations written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 – 2006 AD. The slider tool moves you from moment to moment in US presidential policy.

Reading up on interesting domain name semantic stats.

The most popular registered domain name length is 11 characters long. Hmm.. like NewWinnipeg.

Yesterday, AOL announced they had purchased Truveo, a two-year-old video search startup company. While AOL is not releasing it’s price value, the word on the net is that the price was $50 million. Not bad for a company that was started in January 2004. But it doesn’t matter how much money this company made, it’s what they actually made to get there.

Truveo is a video search website. They read “meta-data” about a video, similiar to how Flash 8 now includes meta-data. They do not search the closed caption transcripts, but do search the blurbs and rss feeds about the video and relate keywords to that video.

From the Truveo Website:

We felt that if we could build a crawler that could identify the visual characteristics of a typical web application in the same way that a person could, then it would be possible to find and index all of the web video that other crawlers miss. We call this new approach “visual crawling”.

Here’s the video search for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.

While it seems interesting, I would think to go one more and invent an auto-transcribing software. If you can pull the transcript, even only from a closed-caption transcript, and rid of the noise words like “the”, “next up” & “after these commercials”, then researching mentions of “Manitoba+pollution” or “alex+reid+winnipeg” within video content would be easier.. or rather, it would be possible for the first time.

Producing media is getting cheaper, video cameras and computers are costing less and less every season. Distributing media is incredibly easy with the Internet, using BitTorrent or a simple website. But being found by the masses who don’t have the patience for research is the next step.