J-school tracks social media buzz on Canada's elections

Alfred Hermida — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:57:36 +0000

Canada is in the throes of a general election, with just a few weeks of campaigning before voting on October 14th.

Here at the UBC School of Journalism, we spent some time discussing what we could contribute to the media coverage.

The big national papers, The Globe and Mail and The National Post both have extensive in-depth sections online, as does CBC News.

We decided to take different tack and instead created NetPrimeMinister.ca. The site scours social media to provide continual updates on the online buzz about the election.

It shows how the candidates vying to be Canada’s next prime minister are being talked about in social media from blogs to Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

The idea was partly inspired by the US site techPresident and its Politickr site that combines official blog posts, news feeds, photo streams, and video posts from 2008 presidential candidates.

Vancouver-based NowPublic.com incorporates some of these features in its Canada election channel, pulling together citizen content on the vote. (Disclosure: My wife is NowPublic’s news director).

Both Politickr and NowPublic, as well as our j-school’s humble offering, NetPrimeMinister.ca, show some of the ways that information can be accessed and aggregated using new digital tools and platforms.

(Via Newslab.ca)

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J-school tracks social media buzz on Canada's elections