The Mainichi Daily News is reporting that Japan’s cabinet has placed a ban on candidates using Twitter for the country’s upcoming House of Representatives election campaign.
Citing the Public Offices Election Law, the government has deemed Twitter content to fall under the “literature and images” clause within the law. [Read more…]
With the U.S. presidential election hours away, we’re a blink-of-an-eye away from putting this one in the books. The 2008 race for the White House spawned a record number of new political blogs, and in turn, a record number of readers.
My question is this: Will these blogs have legs after the race is over?
I realize this is a general question, and that will be dictated by the bloggers ability to captivate/maintain their audience. But it seems like things will come to a climax tomorrow night as people live-blog coverage.
Will blog readers then roll over and light a cigarette?
I’d love to hear if the election cycle turned you on to any new blogs. If so, feel free to share them in the comments section below and let us know if you’ll still continue to read once a new president is selected.
Update 1 Nov 2008: We’ve added several links. Thanks to Jackie Sheeler for making the first suggestion. Feel free to add more in the comments!
The 2008 US presidential election will be over in about 100 hours (unless Florida can’t make up its mind again).
There are, in fact, other elections as well next Tuesday. But of course we all know the real battle is Obama vs. Palin – er, McCain.
Without further ado (and before the comment firestorm begins below), The Blog Herald presents the best blogosphere and social media destinations to track Election Day 2008, in no particular order:
1. CNN Political Ticker – Yes, it’s a mainstream media site. But it’s also a blog. The differences are so blurry now in 2008 anyway. :) It’s common to see hundreds of comments on a post here as Election Day approaches. You can subscribe to twice-daily email alerts if you don’t want the barrage of zero-hour coverage to disturb your day off from work. Bias: Obama. [Read more…]
No surprise here, but the recent debate means more Twitter activity. Twitter reports that they had a 160% tweet increase compared to the same time the previous week, and that the daily update was up 18.5%. More stats in the Twitter blog post. The same also tells us that they’re polishing the Election page we’ve mentioned previously.
Wired’s Epicenter blog gets to wrap this up:
Predictions for Thursday’s VP debate? Sarah Palin tweets crash the site in record time.
This is pretty cool. Twitter has launched a mashup page that crawls people’s tweets, and pushes out the ones relevant to the election. I especially like the auto update feature, something that really should be on every user’s page as well. Check out the Election on Twitter page, and read more about it on the Twitter Blog.
