I don’t know how to explain what I felt yesterday when I saw many students crying and shaking.  It was around 1:00 PM and I was taking pictures of two congresswomen from Chile that were meeting with professor Kathy Gill about social media tools for campaign purposes. At first I thought that it was a shooting and my legs felt weak!  Then I saw a UW police car and a fire truck.

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There’s a widespread clamor for crowdsourced documentation at the polls this election: the NY Times “polling place photo project” … the PBS/YouTube “Video Your Vote” campaign … and the techPresident Twitter #VoteReport. Each project relies on the distributed network of connected and engaged voters.

Not one of these efforts would have been feasible in 2004 — that’s how much technology (ease of use, access) has changed in four short years. Remember, in 2004 there was no YouTube!

Students in the MCDM Digital Democracy class are developing an archive of digital media used on election day; some are also making a video. Feel free to join them!

Have you seen the television ads or yard signs asking you to vote yes or no on the ballot for Initiative 985, 1000, and 1029? Its hard to know who is telling the whole story when claims are made in 30 second ad spots and yard signs only ask you to vote for or against an initiative.

Fact Check WA, developed by MCDM’ers in the Digital Democracy seminar, will compare the claims made in campaign ads with the facts–as we know them.

New ads will be analyzed weekly until Election Day. Be informed when you head to the polls on November 4th!

In my first MCDM class at the University of Washington, my professor Hanson Hosein mentioned a website called Hulu that offers free streaming videos of TV sitcoms from NBC, FOX and other stations.  This is a interesting “business model” that Hulu uses to distribute the episodes in a high resolution format that can be syndicated to other sites like Comedy Central, PBS, USA Networks, and motion pictures.  Now MTV is joining the market with a vast archive of music videos from most of the top record labels into a new website called MTVmusic.  The videos like Hulu will be ad-supported and free with interactive options like embedding onto blogs.

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Wired currently has an amazing article in the November issue on how some young Egyptian activists are utilizing Facebook as a means of organizing political protests. David Wolman tells the story of Ahmed Maher, from the beginning and explosion of his Facebook group, to his arrest by Cairo police and his continual commitment to the “April 6″ group. While bloggers have been facing intimidation Facebook created an alternative outlet and, “State security was aware of online dissidents but was completely caught off guard by the popularity of the Facebook group.” Ahmed Maher was eventually taken into custody and tortured until he agreed to handover his password to the Cairo police. I highly suggest you read the article in its entirety (link at the top) to get the full story and to understand the political implications of sites like Facebook.

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I like to keep a politically neutral stance in public, despite my historic “cowboy conservatism.”  And as a Canadian, I can’t even vote in next week’s election.  However, as MCDM Director, and social media/storytelling Proponent-in-Chief, I agree with FTM’s own Adriana Gil Miner (another non-citizen for now) that all that we cherish here will thrive, or potentially dive depending on Barack Obama’s fortunes next Tuesday.

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My level of engagement with my linkedin profile and network is marked by long periods of inactivity punctuated by sharp spikes of updates over very short periods of time. This is not an uncommon pattern. I see this behaviour of engagement with linkedin throughout my network.  I update my linkedin profile after each assignment to ask for recommendations or when I am looking for a new contract.

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The Advertising Age article that was required reading for this week’s COM 529 class talked about the Cinematch application in Netflix. Netflix tracks your rental history and allows you to rate movies, then Cinematch analyzes your data and the data of others similar to you to make recommendations of “movies you’ll love.” The Advertising Age article cites the Cinematch application as drawing millions of users to Netflix. I doubt this very much. I think Netflix was the right idea at the right time, and that alone garnered it millions of users. I personally think Cinematch is terrible at predicting movies I’ll love, and I prefer to base my picks on either Rotten Tomatoes or my favorite critic, Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune.

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