Twitter commentary on Birmingham City Council Live election results streaming

Twitter Birmingham Election Streaming 2008

To read more twitter responses to the very enjoyable and very local live streaming of the election results in Birmingham please look here. I enjoyed the streaming (hosted by Adrian Goldberg) but the text service (link here) was clumsy and the media pack only available as a pdf – which is bonkers ‘cos it should also have been full web pages (a culture that thinks in print/document terms?).

Election Bloggers Elsewhere:

Getting on the telly does help bloggers get comments – have a gander at Alix from the Lib Dems, Luke for Labour and Iain Dale for the Tories who were the BBC’s election bloggers. Even Ewan Spence managed a bit of the action. The BBC’s Emily Maitlis kept updating reports but no comments function and no trackback means that wasn’t my idea of blogging.

Other Links:

Birmingham 2008 Election results here.

Upyerbrum.

Vale Mail.

West Brom Blog.

At 3 am May 2nd Wikipedia was not updated.

Yahoo Pipe bashed together by Paul Bradshaw.

and a Journalist asks for sympathy!

Major thanks to Jon Bounds for starting and encouraging the shared election twitter. Update The morning after, this is he how he summed up the experience:

The actual conversation bounced between pub-style debate, willful surrealism, and the kind of listening and reacting to the actual words that microblogging really helps — collating the “did he really just say that?” factor between other viewers rather than waiting for the host to pick the politician up.

Four hours of it made us all flag, but it really was a worthwhile experience and in two years (when the local elections come around again) I really hope the council harness the conversation in some way too. It doesn’t have to be twitter (which, considering the UK local elections borked it, may not be around) but it was really powerful – and if publicised widely could be really useful.

Whilst Pete Ashton describes the evening here on the Birmingham Post blogs