Predict Election Winners Online

Newsassignment.net has a great list of nine ways citizen journalists can cover the election. The piece points to two sites that let users predict the results of the elections, “Midterm Madness” at The Washington Post and Predict06.

Interestingly, Predict06 goes so far as to aggregate the picks of all user to see if the crowd can pick races better than the pundits....

Using Crowdsourcing to Get Out the Vote

Crowdsourcing has been all the rage in the tech community the last few months. The term was coined in a June 2006 Wired Magazine article and describes a circumstance where “volunteers and/or low-paid amateurs use their spare time to create content, solve problems or even do corporate R&D.”

Following are some notable examples companies using crowdsourcing:

• Google Image Labeler allows users to help Google improve their image search results by labeling pictures with appropriate tags.
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New Additions to Candidate Blogroll

After revisiting some of our data from the political campaign study we conducted earlier this summer, I realized that many candidates have added blogs to their websites since our original research. Here is a list of all of the Senate candidate blogs (the italicized blogs did not appear in our original research)....

Is There Still a Place for Discretion?

So this is kind of weird.

There has been a big flap over at Techcrunch regarding how they select the hot start up companies they cover. Basically, Techcrunch wrote an article about a company called Maya’s Mom and did not cover one of its competitors, Mother’s Click. The folks at Mother’s Milk got angry and accused Techcrunch of writing about Maya’s Mom due solely to a personal relationship Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington has with the founder of the company....

Exploring Enron’s Emails

After 200 of Enron's internal emails were placed in the public domain by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioned (FERC) back in 2003, innovative software company Trampoline Systems created the Enron Explorer based on their own SONAR platform. In the Enron case, SONAR was able to illustrate existing social networks and information by analyzing email content from the entire organization during the 1999-2003 time period....