YouTube Wants You To "Video Your Vote"

By Chris Crum - Tue, 11/04/2008 - 12:50

Teams with PBS on Google Maps Mashup

YouTube is encouraging voters today to take their video cameras with them and document the scene at their polling place. The video site has teamed up with PBS and is including these videos on a Google Maps mash-up.

A post discussing this at the YouTube blog also talks about how YouTube has had a tremendous impact on the presidential race:

The influence you've had on this political season has been well noted in this blog and by most every major media outlet in the world. Your use of video to document and describe this Election on your own terms has created a new, more democratic political ecosystem and has caused many to call this the "YouTube Election." But while the profound increase in online activity has reshaped our national dialogue in so many new ways, today is where we see just how much it matters: the ultimate political action isn't to upload a video to YouTube or to watch "Yes We Can" or "We Need McCain" one more time; it's to GET OUT AND VOTE.

They also share the following video:

For more on how the Internet in general has helped shape the election, read this article. To see where the candidates stand on web issues, read this one.

News Tags: Politics, Elections, YouTube, Google Maps, online video, Voting

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003.

2 Comments

By Simon Owens (WPN reader) - Tue, 11/04/2008 - 18:19

Twitter

The Video Your Vote project is pretty cool, I heard that some of the videos are going to be played on PBS shows.

I've been working on an election project that utilizes Twitter: <a href="http://anorangeamerica.com/">Freshly Squeezed Tweets</a>. It aggregates tweets like Twitter Vote Report, but it creates a more abstract visualization of the aggregate conversation on Twitter showing frequency and context of election-related words. The site will pull a continuous stream of tweets mentioning Obama and McCain, representing the most-used terms as a series of bubbles. The bigger the "bubble" the more frequently the term is being used. You can hover over each word to see a graphical breakdown of each word's use.

By Chris Crum - Tue, 11/04/2008 - 18:22