Loc:Hooyi

Following debates on TV used to be pretty “passive.” Well, not anymore! During the past two election debates, savvy web users are taking advantage of a new social media tool Twitter. (see my previous post on Twittering the debate.)

Want to make twittering the debate even more interesting? How about rating the candidates’ performance in real time? Try Plodting using twitter next time.

NPR started a new experiment for the debate tonight calling for Twitter users to rate the candidates’ performances live (much like CNN’s dial test). The ratings were then aggregated by Plodting.com (this is not exclusive to debate rating. you can plodt anything that you tweet by following these steps).

I think the experiment turned out pretty nicely, especially when it was only announced this morning. Great idea @acarvin and NPR!

Here is the link to the live Plodts chart of the debate. http://plodt.com/debate

Here’s what the Plodt chart looks like at one point tonight.

As of now (11:36PM), there are 821 submissions with Obama averaging 7.242 and McCain averaging 2.248.

Out of curiosity, I followed the CNN dial-test on TV at the same time. The live results seem quite similar to Plodt’s dial-test chart. What does that mean? I’ll leave that up to the spin doctors.

So, remember to try this next time! (if no new and more fun experiments come up between now and then.)

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• More about this experiment - Making Presidential Debates More Interesting With Twitter
• Check out NPR’s other crowd sourcing experiment, fact-checking the debate.
• My previous post on Twittering and Current TV.

The first Presidential debate is over. Watching it on TV was not the most exciting thing. Watching it while twittering, however, was a hoot. It was like being in a big debate party (the beer also helped).

There were lots of news organizations using twitter last Friday to present/cover the debate. The application I found most interesting was CurrenTV’s “Hack the Debate” - live streaming of (some) tweets from tweeps on its TV channels and online. (I suppose there’s a level of vanity to see my own tweets show up on TV.)

The tweets were from updates on Election.Twitter.com and updates with hash tags #current and #debate08. Of course, not all tweets were shown. Looked like some editorial judgments were used.
Really must know more? Hear from CurrentTV themselves.

I wonder what Current TV viewers thought about this?

Another channel that is doing extensive online debate coverage is C-Span with its Debate Hub. This C-Span mini site had live streaming of the debate (with embeddable video clips for anyone to use), twitter feeds and blogsphere coverage. One very useful tool is the live debate timeline that serves as a navigation tool to transcript texts and video clips.

Can’t wait for the VP debate - now, THAT will be entertainment.