By David Chartier | Published: December 30, 2008 – 11:40AM CT

Ubiquitous microblogging service Twitter is once again making political news today with the announcement that the Consulate General of Israel in New York will hold a “Citizen’s Press Conference” today. David Saranga, Consul of Media and Public Affairs, will be taking questions about the situation in Israel and Gaza via Twitter, and anything that requires more than Twitter’s 140 SMS-friendly characters will be posted to the Israel Consulate’s blog.The conference is set to run from 1-3pm EST, but the consulate’s Twitter account, twitter.com/IsraelConsulate, is already active and responding to questions.

If you aren’t familiar with how this “tweet and reply” system works, here’s a quick primer: On Twitter, users can direct public “tweets” (basic Twitter posts that are 140 characters or less) to other users by prefixing the message with an @ symbol and a username.

For example, if you want to ask the Israel Consulate a question for today’s conference, either log in or sign up and type a message like “@IsraelConsulate Can bombs really root out Hamas?” This will allow the people running the Consulate’s account to see your question and, ideally, reply back to you with a public message that (barring any custom preferences) all other users can see.

A screenshot of the Israel Consulate’s Twitter page with tweets and replies. Click for a larger view

Twitter can be used with a desktop browser, mobile applications, or even via SMS, allowing virtually anyone with some kind of an Internet-connect device to participate and as questions at this “Citizen Press Conference.”

A few drawbacks to this approach, however, could cause trouble for the Israel Consulate and Twitter’s participants. Opening the doors this wide to a global audience could very well overwhelm the Consulate’s team with question, many of which will undoubtedly be duplicates. Twitter’s focus on absolute simplicity may also make some Q&A conversations difficult to follow, as one of the most useful tools that could visualize threaded conversations, Quotably, has closed up shop; Twitter offers no comparable alternative.

Plus, Twitter offers a preference to only display replies to users that you follow, which will effectively hide any replies that @IsraelConsulate sends to most participants. Depending on the Twitter circle that you choose to follow, disabling this preference could result in a flood of @replies that drown out the Consulate’s conference.

Still, the adoption of Twitter for larger social and political exchanges will only be a boon for the service, even if this latest experiment encounters some turbulence. Other, more ambitious experiments, such as the dual-party presidential debate conducted over Twitter, may have had more trouble, but we have seen everything from C-SPAN, CNN, Shaquille O’Neill, school classrooms, Comcast, JetBlue, and even law enforcement agencies adopt the service to communicate in more personal, professional, and accessible ways with audiences.

Twitter, a micro-blogging venture in which users post views, or “tweets”, to a maximum of 140 characters, is still tiny.

But numbers are up more than 500 per cent this year in Australia, says Hitwise. And the time Twitterites spend with the application is greater than MySpace, Facebook and any of the big five online publishers, including ninemsn and Yahoo!7.

Twitter is just one emerging social media application, but combined with others (and there are hundreds) it is creating a boom for the PR industry because someone’s got to interpret what’s being said about companies and brands online. Most critically, they’ve got to figure out the tone – and algorithms can’t do that yet.

Technology may be helping media audiences swim in more ponds outside the mainstream – blogs, social networks, podcasting, vodcasting, video-sharing sites and the like – but it can’t deliver what companies need: automated insight about consumers. Statistics, yes, but good thinking is a different beast.

Companies the world over are starting to dabble with social media – and they have to.

Universal McCann’s latest global round of research on the media, derived from interviews with 17,000 active online users in 29 countries, hammers home the booming participation in this arena. Here are some of its statistics on online users gathered this year:

* Bloggers globally: 184 million;

* Those who watch video clips online: 82.9 per cent;

* Those who say they have joined a social network: 57 per cent;

* Those who have uploaded photos to a network: 55 per cent;

* Those who have uploaded videos to a network: 22 per cent;

* Those who have uploaded a video clip to a video sharing website: 8.5 per cent.

These are global figures, but UM breaks out some numbers for Australian users: 62 per cent say they have read a blog, up from 21 per cent in 2006 and 55 per cent last year.

But here’s the critical point for companies: 34 per cent of bloggers say they post opinions about products or brands.

This underlines the rush by PR firms to figure out how to use social media for commercial gain, or at least damage control. The first step is usually monitoring online conversations, but the real action is how to participate in them.

There are pitfalls – just ask National Australia Bank and one of its PR outfits, Cox Inall, about the drama of overtly “seeding” commercial messages on Twitter without following the right protocols or tone.

In contrast, Launch Group quietly introduced clients such as Lovells Lager to pub gatherings of Twitter freaks with sponsorship deals so low-key many at the bar were not aware the beer was free.

“The demand is growing very, very fast for specialised services in social media,” a Bendalls Group director, Fi Bendall, says. “We’re looking not at influencers, which might be a blogger with a big following, but more the propensity of those influencers to actually advocate and spread the word with an independent passion.

“It is about very different engagement tactics … To sense the emotion people are feeling online about brands, issues or whatever it may be you need to have human analysis attached to it.”

Tricky stuff, but it is a grand irony that with all the latest online technology, humans are still needed to decode other humans. For the digerati, it must be so uncool.

Thanks for the tweet hollib

Some signs of how President-elect Barack Obama will use his massive Internet following are starting to surface. The President’s weekly radio address, a staple of American politics since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, will be posted to YouTube, starting this week with the Democratic address (the party not in power has also traditionally broadcast a weekly radio soundbite). The videos will also be posted to Change.gov, the President-elect’s transition site that launched last week.

According to The Washington Post, the Obama administration is also likely to launch a YouTube Channel for The White House after taking power. As a candidate, Obama (and rival John McCain) made heavy use of YouTube, utilizing the service for broadcasting speeches, campaign rallies, and political commercials. While placing the weekly radio addresses online in video will be a first, the current administration offers a full archive of all of President Bush’s weekly radio addresses as sound files at WhiteHouse.gov.

While this is certainly another sign that the Obama administration will continue to make social media and transparency an important piece of his Presidency, critics are quick to point out that he still has not updated his Twitter account since November 5th after winning the election. Presumably, we’ll continue to see new tools come out piecemeal as the transition team decides how to best utilize the Web.

By DAVID CARR
Published: November 9, 2008

In February 2007, a friend called Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook, and asked if he wanted to meet with a man with an idea that sounded preposterous on its face.

Always game for something new, Mr. Andreessen headed to the San Francisco airport late one night to hear the guy out. A junior member of a large and powerful organization with a thin, but impressive, résumé, he was about to take on far more powerful forces in a battle for leadership.

He wondered if social networking, with its tremendous communication capabilities and aggressive database development, might help him beat the overwhelming odds facing him.

“It was like a guy in a garage who was thinking of taking on the biggest names in the business,” Mr. Andreessen recalled. “What he was doing shouldn’t have been possible, but we see a lot of that out here and then something clicks. He was clearly supersmart and very entrepreneurial, a person who saw the world and the status quo as malleable.”

And as it turned out, President-elect Barack Obama was right.

Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans.

As a result, when he arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern. His e-mail message to supporters on Tuesday night included the line, “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.” The incoming administration is already open for business on the Web at Change.gov, a digital gateway for the transition.

The Bush campaign arrived at the White House with a conviction that it would continue a conservative revolution with the help of Karl Rove’s voter lists, phone banks and direct mail. But those tools were crude and expensive compared with what the Obama camp is bringing to the Oval Office.

“I think it is very significant that he was the first post-boomer candidate for president,” Mr. Andreessen said. “Other politicians I have met with are always impressed by the Web and surprised by what it could do, but their interest sort of ended in how much money you could raise. He was the first politician I dealt with who understood that the technology was a given and that it could be used in new ways.”

The juxtaposition of a networked, open-source campaign and a historically imperial office will have profound implications and raise significant questions. Special-interest groups and lobbyists will now contend with an environment of transparency and a president who owes them nothing. The news media will now contend with an administration that can take its case directly to its base without even booking time on the networks.

More profoundly, while many people think that President-elect Obama is a gift to the Democratic Party, he could actually hasten its demise. Political parties supply brand, ground troops, money and relationships, all things that Mr. Obama already owns.

And his relationships are not the just traditional ties of Democrats – teachers’ unions, party faithful and Hollywood moneybags – but a network of supporters who used a distributed model of phone banking to organize and get out the vote, helped raise a record-breaking $600 million, and created all manner of media clips that were viewed millions of times. It was an online movement that begot offline behavior, including producing youth voter turnout that may have supplied the margin of victory.

“Thomas Jefferson used newspapers to win the presidency, F.D.R. used radio to change the way he governed, J.F.K. was the first president to understand television, and Howard Dean saw the value of the Web for raising money,” said Ranjit Mathoda, a lawyer and money manager who blogs at Mathoda.com. “But Senator Barack Obama understood that you could use the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement, and dispense with the command and control method of governing to allow people to self-organize to do the work.”

All of the Obama supporters who traded their personal information for a ticket to a rally or an e-mail alert about the vice presidential choice, or opted in on Facebook or MyBarackObama can now be mass e-mailed at a cost of close to zero. And instead of the constant polling that has been a motor of presidential governance, an Obama White House can use the Web to measure voter attitudes.

“When you think about it, a campaign is a start-up business,” Mr. Mathoda said. “Other than his speech in 2004 at the convention and his two books, Mr. Obama had very little in terms of brand to begin with, and he was up against Senator Clinton, who had all the traditional sources of power, and then Senator McCain. But he had the right people and the right idea to take them on. When you think about it, it was like he was going up against Google and Yahoo. And he won.”

There is tremendous power in opening citizen access to government – think of how much good will and support Mayor Michael Bloomberg garnered by coming up with 311, a one-stop phone number for New Yorkers who had a problem.

But now Senator Obama’s 20-month conversation with the electorate enters a new phase. There is sense of ownership, a kind of possessive entitlement, on the part of the people who worked to elect him. The shorthand for his organizing Web site, “MyBO,” says it all.

“People will continue to expect a conversation, a two-way relationship that is a give and take,” said Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, which helped conceive and put into effect Obama’s digital outreach. “People who were part of the campaign will opt in to political or governing tracks and those relationships will continue in some form.”

The founders of America wanted a government that reflected its citizens, but would be at remove from the baser impulses of the mob. The mob, flush with victory, is at hand, but instead of pitchforks and lanterns, they have broadband and YouTube. Like every other presidency, the Obama administration will have its battles with the media, but that may seem like patty-cake if it runs afoul of the self-publishing, self-organizing democracy it helped create – say, by delaying health care legislation or breaking a promise on taxes.

That’s the thing about pipes today: they run both ways.

“It’s clear there has been a dramatic shift,” said Andrew Rasiej, the founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference about the intersection of politics and technology. “Any politician who fails to recognize that we are in a post-party era with a new political ecology in which connecting like minds and forming a movement is so much easier will not be around long.

“Yes, we have met Big Brother, the one who is always watching. And Big Brother is us.”

BANGKOK — In what lawyers described as a landmark ruling, a court in Malaysia on Friday ordered the release of one of the country’s best known bloggers, ruling that the government acted beyond its authority in invoking a threat to national security.

The blogger, Raja Petra Kamarudin, who was arrested Sept. 12 and detained without trial, was expected to be released later Friday.

Lawyers have long complained that Malaysia’s mildly authoritarian government uses the Internal Security Act as a tool against the opposition. The act allows for indefinite detention without trial.

Mr. Raja Petra, one of the most vocal critics of the current government, was detained for comments posted on his Web site that the government said insulted Muslims and the Prophet Muhammad. He was also accused of posting articles that defamed the country’s leaders and incited hatred against the government.

The court ruled that these were not sufficient grounds for detention under the Internal Security Act. The government can appeal the decision but the judge, Syed Ahmad Helmy Syed Ahmad, ordered that Mr. Raja Petra be released without delay.

Mr. Raja Petra, 58, has been critical of Najib Razak, the deputy prime minister who is to become prime minister early next year. Among other accusations, Mr. Raja Petra issued a sworn statement that Mr. Najib’s wife was present at the killing of a Mongolian woman who was the mistress of one of Mr. Najib’s aides.

The Internal Security Act is one of more than a dozen laws that opposition politicians and lawyers in the country describe as draconian and anachronistic. When it was introduced in 1960, the government said it would be used to protect people “from communist subversion.”

Tommy Thomas, a prominent Malaysian human rights lawyer, estimates that more than 20,000 people have been detained under the act “for diverse reasons which have nothing to do with communist subversion.”

Hundreds if not thousands of observers have already noted the key role that the Internet and social media played in the successful campaign of Barack Obama. But when he’s President, how will he utilize the hundreds of thousands of MySpace friends, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, My.BarackObama.com members, and SMS opt-ins (just to name a few points of presence) to advance his policies and politics?

First off, Obama needs to decide that he wants to make social media tools a permanent part of his political strategy. This seems like a given – the tools he used (along with several new ones most likely) will certainly play a big part his 2012 re-election bid and that of whoever challenges him – but to-date, maintaining this massive social media program has been the role of volunteers and campaign staffers. MySpace and Facebook weren’t even a blip on the radar when Bush won re-election in 2004 – creating full-time positions within The White House to manage social media would be a first, but presumably, something we’ll soon see.

So far, Obama’s social media tools have been all about organizing campaigners and viral marketing. But now that he’s on his way to the presidency and no longer a campaigner, Tweets about upcoming rallies and embedding Obama speeches around the Web suddenly isn’t very useful. So how does he change the way he uses these tools once he’s in The White House? A few thoughts:

Calls to Service

Obama has often talked about a call to service during his campaign – things like expanding the Peace Corps and offering tax credits in exchange for public service. Why not allow users of MyBarackObama to utilize the platform to organize community service projects? Use Twitter and SMS to alert people to opportunities to give back in their own communities or when national tragedy strikes. Utilize Facebook to get the word out about charitable events. The tools and the users are already in place.

Rather than requiring people to be so proactive about doing good, Obama’s social media reach allows them to be reactive – staying informed of things going on in their communities, organizing people that can help, and then pitching in – all from the comfort of their personal computer.

Calls to Your Congressmen

With the shift of both The White House and Congress to a Democratic majority, you can expect to see lots of new legislation over the next four years. Obama’s social media platform offers an amazing opportunity to get people more involved in their government, by keeping them abreast of issues and urging them to contact their representatives to push policy forward.

After all – this is what representative government is supposed to be about – but, think about it, when was the last time you talked to your Congressman (or at least one of their handlers)? Obama can leverage social media to make people much more involved in the process of bills becoming laws, and encourage his supporters to pressure their representatives into supporting his policies.

Calls for Re-Election

Needless to say, Obama’s social media arsenal will soon need to be put to use for his 2012 re-election campaign. Campaigns for this past election started nearly two years ago, and that’s not likely to change in 2012 as Republicans look to gain back what they’ve lost. The key here is for Obama’s team to keep up with the new tools that will best drive enthusiasm and ultimately get people to the polls. Most of the tools that were so key in this year’s campaign didn’t even exist in 2004, and we’re likely to say the same in 2012 as we analyze the services the candidates are using to drive their online campaign efforts.

An Amazing Opportunity

In a quick poll of my Twitter followers, a few people immediately replied to my question of “how will Obama utilize Twitter?” with calls for more transparency in government. While I don’t expect to see tweets from @barackobama like “Reading the President’s daily briefing from CIA. Yikes!,” the opportunities outlined above would be game changing for America, and hopefully get us all – who are still clearly somewhat divided among party lines (53 to 46 percent is no endearing sign of unity in my opinion) – a bit more involved in our democracy.

by Simon Owens, November 3, 2008

In a YouTube video uploaded on October 24, a husband and wife couple from Oregon sit at their kitchen table and fill out their mail-in voting ballots for the 2008 election. The wife explains to the camera that Oregon has had mail-in voting for “about the last 10 years,” and the two walk the viewer through the entire voting process, at one point announcing that Barack Obama was their “candidate of choice.”

The video was created for Video Your Vote, a joint project between PBS and YouTube that encourages citizens across the U.S. to document their own personal experiences at the voting booth by shooting and then uploading the video onto YouTube (not to be confused with Video the Vote, a similar project). The effort is just one of many examples of citizen journalists utilizing crowdsourcing and Web 2.0 tools to monitor the voting practices — and problems — from an on-the-ground perspective. The groups that are monitoring campaigns said they will help create a much more transparent voting process, and in doing so, hopefully target and solve any voting problems before it’s too late to fix them.

Laura Hertzfeld is the content manager for PBS’ Vote 2008 and has done much of the legwork behind the Video Your Vote project. She told me in a phone interview that it’s a collaboration across multiple PBS stations and shows and that some of the content will likely end up on air, possibly on “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.”

[Note: PBS produces this blog, and Hertzfeld has done guest blogging for MediaShift from the political conventions.]

“So basically YouTube and Newshour came to us and we started talking about how we could make it a system-wide project,” she said. “And it just kind of snowballed from there; we were all really excited about the idea, about getting user-generated content and then putting it through the PBS filter and possibly getting it on the air.”

In addition to encouraging participants to use their own cameras to video their vote, PBS has distributed hundreds of Flip cams that had been donated to Youtube to several of its local stations, which then redistributed them to people before their trek to the polling booths. Hertzfeld said PBS hopes to be able to return to those who have received these cams for future projects, in effect creating a vast network of citizen journalists that will be able to feed content for PBS’ newsgathering.

After issuing the caveat that those who intend to take part in Video Your Vote should adhere to any election laws pertaining to video recording near polling stations, Hertzfeld said PBS is open to various kinds of content.

“So you can take it at the polls, or you could interview someone on the street,” she explained. “You can talk on camera about what your day was like or you can interview friends.”

After shooting the video, you upload it under your own account name on YouTube, and then visit youtube.com/videoyourvote to submit the footage to the project. From there, it will go into a pool of other user-submitted videos, at which point human editors step in and choose which ones are appropriate for a PBS audience.

Hertzfeld told me that “Video Your Vote” isn’t necessarily a way of creating more user-generated content, but a better way to aggregate it. After all, if previous elections are an indicator, it’s not atypical for citizens to take cameras to the polls in order to try to catch instances of voting problems.

Laura Hertzfeld

“People are going to be doing this anyway,” she said. “They’re going to go out to the polls and everyone is on YouTube, everyone has a videocamera or a camera on their phone at this point. You don’t need a special camera to go do this. You don’t need any special equipment from PBS to go do this, and I think we really see it as creating a way so that people are more informed than they would be about election laws and about what’s going on, and to also give people [who are uploading video] a little higher profile.”

Twitter Vote Report

Nancy Scola, a Brooklyn-based journalist, first got the idea to aggregate election-related content after covering the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. She noticed that many of those who were protesting at the convention were using micro-blogging tool Twitter to organize, at some points even utilizing it in avoiding police or to reach out to the press.

“There was one person in particular that was tweeting where the police were, giving out information on how to get legal aid, directing press to different places, which is certainly a particularly good use,” Scola told me. “There were some people who were being arrested and he tweeted that something is going down on this street corner, and Jim Lehrer’s producers tweeted back ‘OK what’s the exact address we’re sending a crew there.’ And I thought that was kind of cool.”

After the convention, Scola tried to track the person down and found out that he had been in Arizona, far away from where the protests were taking place. This fact helped her realize that Twitter may be an effective tool for “streamlining projects in such a chaotic situation.” It was this concept that led to her and others collaborating to create Twitter Vote Report.

Given that Twitter has seen some of its most vibrant activity during widely covered events — the presidential debates being a good example — it goes without saying that thousands of users will be using their mobile devices to live-tweet their experiences at the polls. And like Video Your Vote, Twitter Vote Report will offer a way to aggregate and efficiently organize that data so that it can be analyzed and widely distributed in real time.

A few weeks ago, Scola started reaching out to those who were interested in collaborating on the project, and in the process teamed up with a few election watchdog organizations and programming gurus who would help in creating the site. In addition to streaming tweets that use the hashtag “#votereport,” the programmers have developed a number of data-visualization tools to find order in the chaos.

“The common denominator in all the reports ties back to the #votereport hashtag,” she said. “We also want people to include more data and we make suggestions for what that data might be. We ask for their ZIP code. If you have a machine problem, we ask that they use the hashtag #machine. If there’s a long line, rather than just saying there’s a long line …just tweet ‘wait’ and then the number of minutes.”

Twitter Vote Report will then be able to take this data and feed it into tools like Google Maps, making it so that users can measure wait times by region and location.

“And then the other thing we’re doing is partnering with the Election Protection Coalition,” Scola said. “We’re using the hashtag #EP, and then your two character state code. And they’re having volunteers monitor those and respond to them.”

Voter Suppression Wiki

Though many of these tools will be utilized in locating instances of election problems, Voter Suppression Wiki was created almost exclusively for that purpose. Baratunde Thurston, co-founder of the blog Jack and Jill Politics, came up with the idea after brainstorming with a number of bloggers and activists. (Another wiki, Election Protection, employs similar tools). Using the Wetpaint platform, Thurston hopes to tackle voter suppression in three parts.

“One is to define what voter suppression is,” he said. “Whether it’s false information, voter ID intimidation, allegations of fraud. And then we want to start tracking and reporting incidents of voter suppression; we have this form we put up where you enter where this happened, how many voters were affected, in what county did it occur. But most importantly was action. How to actually prevent or limit the amount of suppression.”

Most of the battle in fighting voter suppression, Thurston argued, is empowering the voter before he or she heads to the polls. To that effect he’s using the website to help promote a number of election protection phone numbers and resources. Thurston said that he hopes that the wiki can be used in real time; analyzing the data after the election can be useful in record keeping, but without quick and efficient action it will do little to protect the integrity of the election.

I asked Thurston about the nature of these election tools and whether they represent a new step in the utilization of online media in politics. In an election year when Barack Obama has been labeled by some to potentially be the “first Internet president” (much in the same way that FDR was the first radio president, and JFK was the first television president), have citizens created a new level of interactive politics?

“The long answer is that this effort, this project — the Twitter project, the video project, and more — are a kind of a next step in the evolution of online political participation,” he replied. “Initially what you’d see on the web is a lot of opinion. ‘I have a thought, I have an idea.’ ‘I disagree strongly with this policy.’ Then you saw Howard Dean tap into donations, and now with Obama tapping into that as well — the concept of the web as being a kind of ATM machine. But what we see now is collaboration and constructive confrontation.”

How quickly these organizers are able to channel that “constructive confrontation” will determine how effective these election monitoring tools are in creating a more transparent and, ultimately, fair election. Because of potentially massive participation in such efforts, the main challenge will be to find a consistent, clear message in a web full of noise. And that’s perhaps where filters or editors might aid us in unearthing the serious problems from the minor complaints.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate blogger for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

I’ve said it twice before already, but I’ll reiterate: This is the YouTube election. Yes, Twitter has played some part. Reputable bloggers on all sides of the fence, too. But YouTube has been the glue that’s bound this big beautiful mess of a social media space together.

The class of political watchdogs that inhabit the space have given the presidential candidates, as well as the mainstream media, a real qualitative sense of what viral video is all about.  That goes as much for the ups as it does the downs. It’s all part of the puzzle, and plenty of us can delight in the fact that the people have influenced things more than they ever have before, either through sheer vigilance or vocal responsiveness to events on the campaign trail. Still, it’s not over. There’s November 4 to consider – and the many minutes of citizen journalism that will presumably be recorded that day.

Indeed, if there’s anything that can bring more noisemakers to the fore in the land where user-generated content remains supreme – quantitatively, at least – it is the method of granting a single day of voting in order to elect a new leader of a nation of 300,000,000-plus people. (Not counting the many preceding days for so-called absentee ballots that one-quarter to one-third of the voting public has chosen to deliver to Uncle Sam, of course.)

It’s bound to get ugly. Somewhat, anyway. From touchscreen mishaps to entirely dysfunctional or broken machines to challenges over valid and invalid registrations, the battle for a majority result one way or another is never clean-cut and never above-board 100% of the way through.

In light of this expectation, the reality of the ever-present “citizencam” makes for one such national situation that gives the public at large a teensy bit more powerful a role than it had on its person for elections past. Okay, not a teensy bit. A major leg up, you might say.

I’ll certainly leave it up to others to determine the who-what-when-where-and-how of the events which are to occur on Election Day, but suffice it to say that them handicams Mr. and Ms. America will inevitably have on their possession outside the voting booth and station will go far in exposing that which may not have received just attention 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, or 20 years ago.

Now, putting aside the political leanings of the man for a moment, the actor and and director Tim Robbins made it a point to mention on a recent edition of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” to urge citizens to keep the cameras rolling, as it were, throughout the day, as often as possible. Good advice, for sure, but whether that advice reached the right ears that evening last month is hardly of much pertinence here, of course, since it is undoubtedly going to happen anyway. I dare say people would have a harder time doing their due diligence in gathering the appropriate identification than they would their digital recorders.

So the only thing left to question is: Will you be ready on Election Day?

Imagery provided by iStockPhoto/3dbrained