{ Category Archives }
Wall Street Journal
The role of #votereport, iReport and other sites on Election Day
Ira Socol noticed election workers at his polling place in Holland, Mich., Tuesday telling voters the address on their ID card had to match the one on their voter registration. Otherwise, they couldn’t use the voting machines.
The 52-year-old doctoral student believed this discouraged some from his low-income district from voting.
In Birmingham, Ala., Joy Heard, a 42-year-old warehouse worker, and her 26 relatives displaced from their New Orleans home by Hurricane Katrina, weren’t able to obtain absentee ballots in time to vote.
Annie Taylor, a new mother who works in landscaping with her husband, noticed people in the parking lot of her polling place in Austin, Texas, giving prospective voters wrong information about how to cast their ballots.
Such Election Day incidents have happened for two centuries of presidential contests, but they typically remain among a few friends, family members and co-workers. In some rare instances a local media outlet might pick up a story.
Not this year: Everyone’s an election observer.
All three of these frustrated voters took their complaints straight to the Internet, recording their experiences, either by email, text or video, and posting them on one of more than a dozen Web sites that have set up pages to funnel stories from voters.
Read it: Voters Post Experiences Online
Game day
It’s gonna be a big night! For WSJ.com, I talked to people from HuffPo, Politico, LGF, Daily Kos, Townhall, Atlantic Monthly, RedState, Newsmax, Talking Points Memo and Instapundit about their Election Night plans. Check it out: Red Bull, Shift-Blogging and Basement Video Shoots: Politics Sites Prep For Game Day
Has it really been two months since I updated this thing?
They’ve been busy ones, with the economic downturn’s impact on telecoms and advertising, Internet-service lawsuits, why your phone rates may go up, the growing prepaid market and the Google phone.
And I started blogging a bit more — who knew this would get way more comments than this?
Obama texts, union talks, cheap global calls
On Obama’s text messaging announcement: the fake ones, what it all means, how it actually went.
My post about the fake SMSs got some pickup: see what the L.A. Times, Times of London and National Journal had to say.
On Qwest’s union talks: the lead-up, the late-night update, the results and DNC’s impact.
Last but not least, some perspectives on making cheaper international calls with your cellphone.
The telcos take a page from Geek Squad
A recent experience with his own parents — he gave them a digital photo frame, which his mother unplugged, then called to tell him it was broken — was a reminder that what might seem obvious to someone who understands the latest technology might need to be spelled out to a customer.