I was primarily on p.ie for the day and while I had attempted in advance to get people to tag threads in order that they would be easier to people find I pretty well knew it was a forlorn hope that they would do so. It didn’t work and people all gravitated to lumping stuff into the one place. It was in the words of a mate of mine a frakking zoo.

I would agree that if you not following the liveblog 100% that stuff can zip past you and be gone. The marking of some stuff as sticky was useful, but too much of that and the live aspect disappears. But I also think there was a lack of extrapolating going on, which for the Sinnott count was better done on p.ie with some people who understood the likely extent of non-transferable votes and so more. I lost count of the number of people who were insisting via twitter and the liveblog that Ferris would be elected because of the Kerry votes despite the fact that Kelly’s surplus was coming from Colm Burke and so too would the distributed surplus. A lot of the content for the live blog originated from twitter and the 140 character limit really hurt that for factual info.

The various local authorities took varying approaches and had varying degrees of follow-through and success. Kerry count council had a live video feed from the count centres but the Killarney count centre said at 9.40pm that they would be announcing the results of the 1st count in about 20 minutes at 10pm and it ended up closer to 11pm. They also promised full details of each count as they happened but didn’t post them until they were all done. Limerick City council too posted PDFs of the counts but again this was up later only the following day. And they skipped nearly ten counts!

does liveblog allow you to approve all of one users post while premodding others?

its was 3:30 then at similar time to 5am when counts were called here do you want to stay up premodding at that time?

For an example of what happens to a mass traffic liveblog without strong moderation see the collapse into incoherance of the US election liveblog from last year.

http://www.scribblelive.com/Event/US_Election_Night_2008?Page=48

That was a great learning moment for us.

did the liveblog.ie and irishelection.com split the brand and the info?

ps fingal had webcam stream but little coverage otherwise, near fm that supposed to cover dublin north east only covered dublin council.

I spent the days before the count contacting other bloggers/tweeters I knew were going to the count or who contacted me after we posted asking how they could help and I suggested ways that they could contribute.

Which brings me to my main response to this post lads. The live blog was a tiny part of the online coverage of the elections. Twitter was huge and we harnessed it into the liveblog – the local radio and newspapers who reported on counts by using twitter were a revelation to me on the day as I was searching twitter. I subbed them into the blog. The tag we let people know about was only a small part of the picture. During the day other people found us and joined in and we cound tweeters and bloggers that we never knew existed.

And back to the liveblog not being the main game notion – it was the place to gather info from other bloggers and tweeters and send people back out again to other blogs to get their information – whether it was to Limerickblogger.ie or corkpolitics.ie or info we got from Google talk or a Twitter DM or to Flickr or electionsireland.org or even to this blog. The liveblog also served as a place to point people to places to find out info on their count of interest.

The liveblog as jumping point (Curation central!) came into it’s own particularly when the MSM closed up for night or even large parts of the day on Sunday. Counts and eliminations continued and we also got the blogger created content in the forms of video and blogposts we could point people to. Alexia in particular demonstrated the possibilities for user created content by walking quickly round the RDS qiking counts of interest and the arrivals and pressers of candidates and Government ministers who dropped in and jumping on interview opportunities as they arose.

There are lots of things I would do to change and improve what we did and planning for GE09/10 has begun. 43 counts to be covered and lots of subplots inbetween. For GE07 hardly anyone used twitter – now it’s used by lots of people and we have iphones and smart phones. For #le09 we had twitter and Qik . Who knows what tools we’ll have available to us next time. I know I’ll be looking to restrict and redirect chatter/commentary even further from people watching – we worked as hard as we could on that – we every had spam comments left claiming poll topping performances from those who did not keep their seat. I caught that and many more in over 30 hours online on Saturday and Sunday.

I’m also wondering can you plan too much for something… and if the thing about covering the count was that it happened with a little bit of planning but we took what we got and did what we did with the data found and efforts that were there. We also don’t need to duplicate what exists already or compete to get there first – it’s the curating and the support of what isn’t there and what can be that is special about the online medium for me.

That said, it would have been great to have someone in every count centre. Maybe next time you can text in info from where ever you are? We’d be more than happy to add it to the stream.

PS I was talking to Howard Mahony on Friday, I hear the Fingal Count Centre doesnt even have seats, let alone Wifi/broadband!

I was based in the count centre in Fingal – and there was no sign of online activity there – maybe next time, one person could be dispatched to the rest of county Dublin centres – and perhaps to a couple of the other major count centres around the country? It would really add to what seems to have been great coverage.

At the same time, it was also important to have RTE.ie’s up to date figures for count results across the country. This was comprehensive information that a live-blog won’t provide. Also, as is noted, the live-blog gives a good sense of the current feeling of the crowd, but the short-form is at the cost of the analysis you might get occasionally elsewhere. I’m also coming into this as someone who, as a community radio activist, is interested in how the crowd-sourcing potential of the internet can be used to the advantage of existing alternative and volunteer media structures.

I’m reminded of a description from elsewhere of radio’s traditional role as a curator of content. That was originally intended in the context of music, but it also applies to the highlighting of insightful and thoughtful analysis. The features column of the site could play a role in pulling out such long-form thoughtful analysis, and some of this was done, but there’s potential for more. There’s also the possibility of more formal arrangements between the site, which provides a good tool for drawing in content, and organizations with other strengths (be it organized volunteer pools, audio/video equipment and expertise, or skills at providing the ‘curating’ role).

I’d also note that I really appreciated the Qik content from Alexia, but it suffers from a shortcoming: the sound quality, particularly when retransmitting the live announcement of the count results, was indistinct, as a result of limitations in the hardware (and because it was pulling audio indirectly through the speakers, not from a mic on the returning officer’s podium). On some occasions I was unable to make out the figures being called, so if there was anyone with an audio feed direct from the podium that they could make available online (and point to from the live-blog) that would have been helpful.

May I suggest the following as possible spaces for development of this type of activity:
1 Structured space for uploading of tally and count results from individual count centres. Some form of moderation may be useful here – it may be helpful to solicit individuals in advance, so it’s known where there could/will be gaps. With some planning the information available could be much more useful than that provided at present by RTE (who only included elect/elim figures for candidates in the locals, not the count-by-count changes).
2 Encourage creation of various front-ends for presentation and manipulation of this data.
3 Reach out to/partner with smaller media outlets, such as community radio stations, which are likely to have individuals on the ground in different venues, as well as other important resources (see below) but cannot hope to compete with RTE or similar by themselves.
4 Go a step beyond cell phone audio/video for ‘official’ results. Get patched into the audio from the podium. Partnerships with community radio stations could help here.
5 Conduct sit-down interviews with candidates and others. There’s a lot of down-time at counts, so lots of time to get reflective commentary from thoughtful individuals.

I’d also encourage that content be made available in formats that encourage ‘remixing’ by others. In particular, I can imagine interview and audio/video highlights being pulled together into compendium pieces, or more playing around with the numerical data – I’m reminded of that cute graphical representation of the transfer process.

Over all though – thanks to everyone who made this possible. A great resource. [And some great results to follow too!]