Election 2008: graphs, charts, widgets & holograms

What an election, not just for it's historic & political significance but how the internet took on such an importance in terms of canvassing for support, raising profile, raising funds and reaching out to millions of people of all demographics. We had a delightful selection of blogs, widgets, feeds, charts, newsletters, tweets, desktop & smartphone apps, etc to chose from to keep in the know on all things election. The Yahoo! election dashboard remained a strong favourite throughout both the campaign for the Democratic nomination and the Presidential race itself. CNN's offering was also quite tasty and likewise the offerings on Newstalk and RTE (same provider NPR), not forgetting the Irish Times offering (not so tasty).

The absolute icing on the tech-widgetry-chartilicious election had to be the delightful CNN 'hologram' news reporter, that even CNN themselves got excited about despite it looking completely ridiculous. But the fact that they had to update their website to explain to people that it wasn't "actual" holography used goes to show it's probably blown some minds while tickling others.

I hope Mr.Obama keeps his rather sexy website up and running into the future, it's too lovely to leave the internet & it would be a shame to see all that fab branding, marketing & design workmanship disappear into the mist.

The huge increase in the number of people registering to vote & actually voting on the day was not just some co-incidence but the results of some seriously effective campaign work that I've no doubt had a massive influence from online channels used by Obama & his opponents - time for the Irish parties to take a good look at how they could learn from this & at the very least attempt to inspire younger voters to have at least an awareness next year's local & European (and how knows maybe general) elections. Once that's achieved then they can work on getting them interested in their policies, if that's possible :)