UBC’s School of Journalism tracks the social media buzz

We’re having a federal election up here in Canada as well, set for October 14. I guess I shouldn’t be shocked to see that the Work Less Party hasn’t quite gotten around to nominating candidates. In the run-up, UBC’s School of Journalism (one of the University’s most web-savvy pockets, always good for new surprises) has set up a nifty resource: NetPrimeMinister.ca

As Professor Alfred Hermida puts it:

It shows how the candidates vying to be Canada’s next prime minister are being talked about in social media from blogs to Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

The idea was partly inspired by the US site techPresident and its Politickr site that combines official blog posts, news feeds, photo streams, and video posts from 2008 presidential candidates.

The techie in me can’t help but note that the portal is built on a straight-forward application of the Netvibes platform, so presumably the vast majority of the effort that went into this project was shaping the concept and finding the feeds — not on programming. Kudos all round!

Via Darren Barefoot.

About Brian

I am a Strategist and Discoordinator with UBC's Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. My main blogging space is Abject Learning, and I sporadically update a short bio with publications and presentations over there as well...
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