Culturite

The internet is playing a huge role in today’s historic — and highly technologized — U.S. Presidential Election.

You know that every news organization in the world is covering every conceivable angle of the election so there’s no shortage of available information.

But how are netizens and the web 2.0 community engaging with politics through social media? 

Let’s go through some of your available options to get out the vote, talk about voting, tracking voting patterns, map the results, and participate in the process.

FACEBOOK: If you’ve logged onto the site today, you will likely see everyone that you know posting a status update about going to vote, having voted, wishing they could vote. But if you’d like a simple way to get out the vote, you can “Donate Your Facebook Status” to get out the vote — either in support of a specific candidate or simply to encourage voting.

As of 11:45am PST, more than 1.5 million people have donated their status here: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/election

TWITTER: The heavy artillery of the microblogosphere’s election coverage. Not only is every user on the planet tweeting about voting and the election, Twitter has set up a separate live-updated elections page tracking every tweet that mentions election issues: http://election.twitter.com

Some of the hottest Twitter topics today include: #votereport, Happy Obama day, Gobama, Prop 8, #good, Chicago, Karl Rove, Grant Park, Voted Obama

In addition, TwitVote is a mock opinion-poll voting site for Election2008 in which Twitter users can cast a vote for either Obama or McCain. As of 11:45am PST, Obama is up 18,624 votes over 3,150 for McCain.

You can also track where and when Twitter users have voted (along with current voting wait times!), by checking out live updates at Twitter Vote Reports: http://blog.twittervotereport.com

YOUTUBE: The world’s biggest video-sharing site is jumping in on the political action by partnering with PBS to get users to submit videos of their voting experiences to http://www.youtube.com/videoyourvote

The videos are conveniently colour-coded and mapped (natch) and as of 12:00pm PST there are already 554 videos uploaded.   

NowPublic

Tags: Culture | Politics | internet | United States | World | Web 2.0 | McCain | Obama | YouTube | facebook | social media | twitter | US Election