I know all of us are furiously pounding the pavement for Barack Obama. Whether you're registering voters, raising money, making phone calls, or blogging away to expose McCain's lies, we're all doing our part to turn the country blue come November 4th.
But what happens on November 4th after the polls have closed and our job is done? Why, we tune in to the TV and to watch for results with a white-knuckled grip around our beverage of choice.
There's just one problem. Cable news sucks.
Tune in to CNN, and you have to deal with buffoons like Wolf Blizter. Even MSNBC will occassionally throw up hacks like David Gregory or Pat Buchanan. Regardless of which talking head is spewing the crap, you know it's going to be about things like PUMAs or mooseburgers, and not the meaningful facets of the story like Obama's ground game or the historical factors at play.
Thankfully, there's now an alternative. Allow me to introduce the Pilsen Interactive Media Project.
What exactly is this?
The Pilsen Interactive Media Project is the brain child of myself, John Greenberg, and a good friend of mine from college, Sandy Witkow. Using readily available technology, we plan to broadcast to the entire world our coverage of the 2008 election. Both Sandy and I are progressive and extremely knowledgeable about politics, so we will be able to provide our viewership with informative, up-to-date information on election night from a progressive slant.
How exactly can two random guys pull off a live broadcast?
Creatively! The technology we're using is readily available and predominantly open-source, but when combined allows us to do everything the traditional media can do. Before I explain it, let me show it to you so we're on the same page:
In Sandy's living room, we have a high definition projector hooked up to a mac. The mac is connected to the net and currently displaying our personal wiki from zoho. This wiki contains tons of information we're going to use to properly analyze the election, such as polls, demographical information, key video clips, and more. More importantly, with the aid of the DailyKos Scoreboard we'll be able to know exactly what the numbers are like at any given point.
Meanwhile, we have a camcorder hooked up to another laptop, broadcasting the whole shebang via Ustream. For those of you not familiar with UStream, it's basically like youtube except all of its content is live and streaming.
The final piece of our setup is a wiimote and an LED infrared pen. The mechanics of this are a bit too detailed to explain, but we can manipulate the projected image behind us with a pen as if we were setting behind the laptop with a mouse. In the video above, note how Sandy can change states on 270towin.com to different colors just by touching them. The ability to manipulate the projected image to access information on our wiki and elsewhere on the net means there's no drop of election night news that we'll miss.
Well, why should I watch you guys over CNN?
Admittedly, CNN or MSNBC will have flashier bells and whistles and might have access to exclusive news that we'll only be able to report after it percolates through the blogosphere. So why do you want to watch us? You want to watch us because we're not the Pilsen Media Project, We're the Pilsen Interactive Media Project baby. Allow this second video to explain:
While we're going to be covering the numbers and analyzing it, we hope that the bulk of the show will be come from you guys. With a webcam, a microphone, and a Skype account, anyone on God's green Earth watching our show will be able to contact our producer via gmail or gmail chat, request to speak with us live on the air, and we'll talk with you as the video above demonstrates.
We are to cable news what blogs are to newspapers. This is not going to be top down coverage. We want Kossacks and liberals in general to be calling in and telling us what they're seeing on the ground, what their precinct was like, and providing the human story that the traditional media glosses over. This is the future. We don't beat Fox news by beating it at its own game. We beat it by making it obsolete.
So what do I need to do?
Nothing! Or very close to nothing.
First, please bookmark our main site, which you can find right HERE. On the night of the election, you'll be able to access our live Ustream by clicking on the top right.
Next, buy yourself a webcam, ideally one with a microphone built in. They're really cheap these days and if you have one you'll be a click away from sharing your thoughts on election night with us and the entire world.
You'll also need to get a Skype account to talk to us, but really everyone should have one anyway. To learn more about skype, mosey on over to www.skype.com
On the day of the election, just fire off an e-mail or a gmail chat message to PilsenInteractiveMediaProject@gmail.com. From there, we'll Skype you and you can share your mind with everyone.
We'll be in the comments section answering questions. Feel free to ask anything and we hope to see you 5:30 CST on November 4!
If you like what you see, please rec up!