Forget Anderson Cooper. The place to be on election night is the web.
For those of us who need the over-stimulation of a TV and a computer—or for those who think the TV is just so yesterday -- here are my top four places to tune in online:
1) Mememorandum is the political sister site of TechMeme, “the technology news site of record.” They will be tracking hot stories from online pundits in the blogosphere all night long. If you install a simple script, the links to the blogs will come up as red or blue, indicating stories from right or left-leaning bloggers.
----------------
2) YouTube is encouraging voters to “video your vote,” and create citizen journalist videos of their experiences at the polls. Who knows, maybe you’ll be the lucky one who catches something fishy going on and gets your video broadcast on every major media outlet! Just make sure to stay out of trouble – using cameras at polling places is illegal in some parts of our fair country.
--------------
3) If you have a lot to say, and can keep it to 140 characters or less, you’d probably be a great politician in the era of the all-important sound byte. You might also appreciate Twitter’s election area, elections.twitter.com, which is perfect for those who have “a lot of feelings,” and like to broadcast those feelings to the world every few minutes or so.
---------------
4) If you want fun facts and history to complement your election night information overload, you’ll find it at google.com/2008election, where you can see an interactive results map. You can play around with different data, compare county-by-county voting results since 1980, and see how the live results on election night ’08 measure up. Need even more random info? You can see what other voters are searching for on Google and take a look back at memorable quotes from the candidates while on the campaign trail.
Tracy Quan's latest novel is Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl, set in Provence and praised in The Nation as a "deft account of occupational rigors and anxieties before the crash." Tracy's debut, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, and the sequel, Diary of a Married Call Girl, are international bestsellers. A regular columnist for The Guardian, she has written for many publications including Cosmopolitan, The Financial Times, and The New York Times.
Joe Mathews is a journalist, an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and a contributing writer at the Los Angeles Times. He previously served as Justice Department reporter for the Wall Street Journal and as a city desk reporter at the Baltimore Sun. He is the author of The People’s Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy.
Gerald Posner is the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism (www.posner.com). Posner lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.
The Daily Beast is dedicated to news and commentary, culture, and entertainment. We carefully curate the web’s most essential stories and bring you original must-reads from our talented contributors.
Renata Espinosa is the New York editor of Fashion Wire Daily. She is also the co-founder of impressionistic fashion and art blog TheNuNu and a sometimes backup dancer for "The Anna Copa Cabanna Show."
Amanda Fortini has written for The New Yorker, Slate, Elle, and New York, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles.
Randi Zuckerberg works in marketing at Facebook, where she leads the company’s election strategy and has pioneered several large media partnerships. Included in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2008 Digital Power List, she is also a founder of The Dot Comix, an online video troupe that creates satirical videos about technology and geek culture.
Randi Zuckerberg works in marketing at Facebook, where she leads the company’s election strategy and has pioneered several large media partnerships. Included in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2008 Digital Power List, she is also a founder of The Dot Comix, an online video troupe that creates satirical videos about technology and geek culture.
Randi Zuckerberg works in marketing at Facebook, where she leads the company’s election strategy and has pioneered several large media partnerships. Included in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2008 Digital Power List, she is also a founder of The Dot Comix, an online video troupe that creates satirical videos about technology and geek culture.
Randi Zuckerberg works in marketing at Facebook, where she leads the company’s election strategy and has pioneered several large media partnerships. Included in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2008 Digital Power List, she is also a founder of The Dot Comix, an online video troupe that creates satirical videos about technology and geek culture.
Randi Zuckerberg works in marketing at Facebook, where she leads the company’s election strategy and has pioneered several large media partnerships. Included in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2008 Digital Power List, she is also a founder of The Dot Comix, an online video troupe that creates satirical videos about technology and geek culture.
Randi Zuckerberg works in marketing at Facebook, where she leads the company’s election strategy and has pioneered several large media partnerships. Included in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2008 Digital Power List, she is also a founder of The Dot Comix, an online video troupe that creates satirical videos about technology and geek culture.
Randi Zuckerberg works in marketing at Facebook, where she leads the company’s election strategy and has pioneered several large media partnerships. Included in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2008 Digital Power List, she is also a founder of The Dot Comix, an online video troupe that creates satirical videos about technology and geek culture.
Thank you.
As a first time user, your comment has been submitted for review. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or two for your comment to be reviewed, depending on the time of week and the volume of comments we receive.
Please log in to leave comments.