Content Wise

Crowdsourcing the Presidential Vote With Twitter

Among the coverage of yesterday's remarkable presidential election is yet another remarkable application of the microblogging platform Twitter: a sort of nationwide team-based journalism exercise to report on potential problems at polling places.

The Twitter Vote Report project enlisted a slice of that very large crowd of folks who cast their ballots on Tuesday to monitor moods, wait times, irregularities, and many other indicators of how the voting process went.

Volunteers sent in field reports via their Twitter feeds or by texting on cellphones and other mobile applications. Vote Report invented a few "hash tags" for the occasion to facilitate the concise updates: "#votereport" to tag the message as an official field report, "#good" for no problems, "#wait" to report delays in getting into a booth, "#machine" to signal trouble with voting machines, and so on. (For more details on the hash tags, see Vote Report's explanation of how to participate.)

Various Web-based tools, some pre-existing and some created just for this project, enabled viewers to tune in to and follow the ups and downs all over the country. It was pretty amazing to watch the national flood of "tweets" in real time.

At a more local level, here, at right, is what a query for our neighborhood zip code turned up on Twitter Search. (How'd we miss the bake sale?)

Sporadic peeks at Twitter Vote Report yesterday suggested that despite isolated missteps, for the most part the voting went smoothly. We may hear more as folks pore over the streams.

But regardless of what the effort turned up, it's how the project tackled this reporting job that should interest Web publishers. Once again, social media and crowdsourcing point in some tantalizing directions.

What can your crowd help you report on?

Smart Strategy: Send Visitors Away From Your Site

Nice to see The New York Times gave some ink this morning to our colleague Scott Karp and his crusade for "link journalism," a strategy designed to send Web visitors away from your  site.

The Times reports that mainstream media sites—including those of the Times itself, The Washington Post, and NBC TV—are starting to embrace the idea.

Scott has long championed link journalism through regular postings on his incisive blog, Publishing 2.0. The basic idea is that you can provide a great service to your audience by filtering and aggregating links to the most interesting and relevant content that is scattered across other sites around the Web.

Many magazines, newspapers, and other nervous Web publishers still question the wisdom of pushing visitors away. Scott offers this one-word rebuttal: Google.

“It’s all about sending people away," he told the Times, "and it does such a good job of it that people keep coming back for more.”

Twitter Stars on TV News

The microblogging tool Twitter now has its own television show, sort of.

CNN's wired anchor guy Rick Sanchez is doing a daily newscast (3 p.m. Eastern time, noon Pacific) that features tidbits generated by his audience via Twitter and other social and mobile media. Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion and Craig Stoltz at Web 2.Oh Really? have the details.

Personally, we've got a love/hate thing going with Twitter. By getting users to answer the question "What are you doing," it pumps more personal grunts and groans into the ever-raging mudslide of mundane musings on the Web. And yet, we've found it can be a handy way of glimpsing the activities of family, friends, and colleagues. (Michael's feed is at http://twitter.com/mgoldsf. Susan's is dormant at the moment.)

Perhaps more intriguing, people keep trying to use Twitter to commit actual journalism and online marketing, something that all publishers should be exploring. We did a tiny experiment in team Twitter coverage of Stanford's magazine and book publishing course in June; we'll try it again more seriously for the upcoming workshop on Web publishing.

Checking Sanchez's Twitter feed just now we see he has more than 15,000 "followers" and is tracking 13,000 feeds. Say what you will about the quality of his show. It looks like he claimed a big-time presence for CNN in the "Twittersphere" and found a promising new conduit to the audience.

Washington Post Explores New "Digital Avenues"

"If circulation is dropping," says Washington Post sports reporter Barry Svrluga, "and we're trying to figure out how people are going to get their news, who am I to say no to trying out new avenues?"

That sentiment is increasingly expressed by writers, editors, and publishers scrambling to move beyond their traditional print platforms--or at least it should be.

Svrluga's multi-platform activities (breaking news Web blurbs pounded out at the nearest Starbucks, online chats with readers, blogging, podcasts, and, oh yes, articles for the newspaper) are described in a terrific analysis by Fortune magazine writer Marc Gunther of the Post's aggressive exploration of digital avenues.

Anyone feeling the push to get beyond print--and who isn't?--will find the Post's "platform-agnostic" survival strategies useful.

How to Build an Audience for Your Blog

So you've talked a few staffers into blogging for your site, they've been cranking out their daily posts, and now you're pondering that familiar question: What if we blogged, but nobody noticed?

Search optimization expert Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz offers 21 very smart tactics to increase traffic to your blog. His advice ranges from technical nuts and bolts (tagging your posts) to content (what to cover and how to write it).