With Canada a few weeks from its 14 October 2008 general election, the UBC School of Journalism looked for something to contribute that the national press was not already doing. The Globe and Mail, the National Post and CBC News all had extensive in-depth election sections online, so the school took a different tack and built NetPrimeMinister.ca.
The site did one thing: it scoured social media and posted continual updates on the online buzz around the campaign, tracking how the candidates for prime minister were being talked about across blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. Rather than reporting the campaign, it measured the conversation about it.
The idea drew partly on techPresident and its Politickr site, which combined official blog posts, news feeds, photo streams and video posts from the 2008 US presidential candidates. Closer to home, the Vancouver-based NowPublic.com ran a Canada election channel pulling together citizen content on the vote.
What the three had in common was the method rather than the subject: all of them demonstrated ways information could be accessed and aggregated with digital tools that had only recently become available, and all of them treated the audience’s own output as election data.