Election 2006 and Social Media

Things have been quiet here lately, a bit too quiet ...

Oh, that's right, it's because all my non-work energy has been put into a 5-part series that's running over at One Degree - Elections 2006 and Social Media. In the series I look at each major party in the current Canadian national election (Conservatives, Bloc, NDP, Liberals and Green Party) and evaulate their use of social media. The Conservatives are the first article; the rest of the parties will follow this week and early next. Check it out. Some interesting things going on.

One thing I discovered while writing it, is Stowe Boyd's definition of Social Media:

Social Media are those forms of publishing that are based on a dynamic interaction, a conversation, between the author and active readers, in contrast with traditional broadcast media where the 'audience' is a passive 'consumer' of 'content'. The annotations or social gestures left behind by active readers, such as comments, tags, bookmarks, and trackbacks, create an elaborate topology resting on the foundational blog posts, and this enhanced meta-environment, the blogosphere, is the context for and the realization of a global collaboration to make sense of the world and our place in it.

And something else .. I'm wondering if the election can be predicted by who's using favicons on their sites. Look at a snap shot of my Firefox tab bar: