2010 Election Roundup: Video updates from the newsroom, NYT's mobile results, fast results on Twitter, and WSJ flash-less map.

Politico, NYT provide regular video updates Cable and broadcast anchors weren't the only ones giving on-camera commentary on the 2010 midterm elections on Tuesday night. You can addÂ Politico andÂ The New York Times to the list of traditionally non-broadcast news outlets providing live commentary and updates. Politico had hourly video updates starting at 8 p.m., as well as pre-election feeds and clips of various concession and victory speeches. The New York Times, on the other hand, had a new video up every 30 minutes, starting at 5:45 p.m. EST until 12:15 a.m. For each video, a pair of Times staffers offered commentary and analysis while overlooking the newsroom. Filming, editing and producing regular videos throughout the night -- that's no easy task, especially considering the inherent stress of Election Day. Plus, commentary was already rolling on all cable and broadcast channels. What do you think? Is adding more talking heads to Election Day coverage something news outlets like Politico and The New York Times should continue? --Â Chris Dunn Mobile: NYT brings video, graphics to election dashboard If you weren't near a computer on Tuesday night, The New York Times' election results dashboard was the place to go for results. The site presented mobile-friendly versions of its maps. Individual races were easy to find. The graphics were very well done, and were easy to read on a mobile device. Clicking the Senate, House or governor tabs showed the user a list of each race in that category, with vote tabulations (and varying shades of red and blue) for each race on different rows. But what set the Times' effort apart was the availability of those video updates (that Chris wrote about above) on mobile devices. Not only were taped updates available on mobile, but so was the election night live stream. Unfortunately, these video updates were only available in Adobe Flash. While I was able to enjoy the updates on my Droid, which runs Android 2.2 and has Flash installed, users of the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad were not able to watch the videos, since they were unavailable in HTML5. But instead of serving the Apple device users with an error message, the Times smartly removed the video tab for users on these devices. -- Ethan Klapper WaPo's #votemonitor crowdsources Election Day, TBD tries Foursquare The Washington Post actively turned to Twitter this Election Day, in search of tweets from voters. By using the #votemonitor hashtag, The Post curated tweets and brought them into a running liveblog, powered by Storify. (Read more about Storify here.) The liveblog had a national focus, and excerpted news coverage from local news outlets nationwide. The Post also did a live Twitter videocast on Tuesday afternoon. Meanwhile, TBD.com encouraged its readers to check in to Foursquare and share tips. Over 100 people participated in their experiment. Foursquare was tracking Election Day check-ins on a special map, and was awarding voters the iVOTED badge. The methodology for the badge did confuse some, including my colleague Kevin Loker: .bbpBox29531754449 {background:url(http://a1.twimg.com/profile_background_images/25438588/2009-07-25_13-04-15_205.241.135.200.jpg) #131516;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block} Just got the #ivoted badge on @Foursquare after checking into the metro station? Hmm.Nov. 2 via Seesmic for AndroidKevin LokerKevinLoker CNN.com also used Twitter, and set up a neat map in an effort to track voter attitudes. If you consider Twitter to be a main source of news (as I do), the speed at which election returns were coming in did not disappoint. Twitter was a fast way to monitor election returns and calls. And, tweeple noticed the speed, too: .bbpBox29523038807 {background:url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1286916367/images/themes/theme8/bg.gif) #8B542B;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block} Counted about a 5 minute time delay between Twitter results and CNN announcing results.Nov. 2 via webNicole Mannnikkimann17 And finally, some interesting news on the Facebook front. Over 12 million people clicked the "I Voted" button that was presented to Facebook users over 18-years-old on Election Day. Facebook staff found that in 74 percent of House races, the candidate with the most fans won that that race. In 19 Senate races, that number was 81 percent, reports PCMag.com. --Â E.K. WSJ.com uses a flash-less results map Maps are always big during election season, but the Wall Street Journal's Results by State map caught my eye because it didn't use Flash. What does this mean? It's compatible across all browsers and devices. In fact, mobile compatibility was one of the big initial goals for the project. "Mobile support was something we knew we wanted right out the gate," said Albert Sun, one of the creators of the map, via an IM interview. "From the very beginning wanted it to be a single map that would work across as many platforms as possible." In addition to Sun, Jon Keegan, Susan McGregor, Mike Sullivan, Alex Lowe, Kate Ortega, Jovi Juan of the WSJ.com News Graphics team spent many long nights together to pull it off. They began planning two months prior to the election and implementation one month prior. The map lets you filter down to Senate, House or Governor races and zoom into states and districts for detailed results. You can highlight called races and identify changes of control. The map also features visualizations for seat net changes and vote percentages. "Stylistically we wanted to be able to use the same Albers Equal Area projection that print side uses for their US maps and we thought it was really important that when zooming into the map people be able to recognize identifiable features other than the shapes of counties and districts," Sun said. (What he's talking about is the use of Google Maps in the background for users to more easily identify their distrcits). On the technical side -- The map uses the RaphaÃ«l JavaScript Library for vector drawing and it does the Google Map projection using a library called arcgislink. --Â Lauren M. Rabaino

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2010 Election Roundup: Video updates from the newsroom, NYT's mobile results, fast results on Twitter, and WSJ flash-less map.

Politico, NYT provide regular video updates

Chris Dunn

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