Science Addiction

As I had mentioned a few days ago in my round-up of citizen journalism efforts for the 2008 elections here in the United States, Twitter is proving to be ground-zero for the election zeitgeist.

Now we get the Twitter Vote Report project, which has introduced a few tags for election-day reporting about voting issues.

• #votereport- for reporting basic voting issues
• #machine- for reporting voting machine issues
• #registration- for registration problems
• #wait:time- for waiting time, where ‘time’ is number of minutes
• #EP[two letter state code]- for serious legal issues in that state (e.g. EPOH in Ohio)
• zipcode: to denote your exact location

A lot more is being planned to mine, use and act upon this information. There is a code jamming session on the 24th of October and guides are being developed for situations in which the above codes should be used.

techPresident highlights some of the issues that still need to be worked out:

• How do you get real people to use this, as opposed to the twitterati.
• Do we let the response be organic or organized?
• How to clarify the intent of this project (as opposed to the many others being organized)

And so forth. It’s all worth watching and participating in.