CSPAN’s Debate Coverage Puts Power Where It Belongs; In The Hands of Citizens

Posted by Myrna the Minx on September 25, 2008 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

CSPAN’s new media style convention coverage was a big hit, so it makes sense that CSPAN would try to improve upon their success with the presidential debates. I got a sneak peek tonight, and wow, let’s just say that CSPAN has succeeded in putting the debate footage directly in the hands of citizens and citizen journalists where it belongs. Larry Lessig would be proud. Who needs network or cable news when you get this kind of tiered, targetable, sortable, and shapable data and video at your fingertips? It’s blogger heaven! Here’s what to look for at the CSPAN Debate Hub (right now it’s populated with old debate footage that will roll over later today):

Launching 4 websites, one for each debate; will be launching later this week
Each website will act like a time capsule, containing the blog posts, tweets, transcripts and video from each debate
Tracking twitter posts with: #debate08, Palin, McCain, Biden and Obama
YouTube video “sneak peak” on Washington Journal Friday morning http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwM3aikjdi8
C-SPAN’s [very active and popular] Twitter account

But let’s talk about the details. First, all of this will be available sometime tomorrow afternoon before the debates and there will be a slight time lag because video clips and transcripts have to synched.

You can follow twitter posts and trends (#debate08, Palin, McCain, Biden, Obama, and others as they come up).
There is a clickable debate time line that allows you to pull up moments of the debate in editable video clips and their accompanying transcripts. The video clip editing process will be familiar to anyone that has done any kind of home video editing. Not only are the video clips editable, you can then get the embed for your edited video clip.
You can view a word tree by clicking all on any part of the time line and then get video clips and transcripts organized by mentions of those words. If you click the little check box that says “show transcript,” you can get an entire transcript for whatever video clip you choose.
And just a head’s up–all of CSPAN’s archived videos are easily accessible, searchable, and editable. So you could find some footage of John McCain extolling the virtues of deregulation from 1999, or maybe something Keating Five related, and then juxtapose it with remarks McCain makes during the debate.
I almost forgot to mention that everything was designed using open source technology–Wordpress and SIMILE

Please, take a moment and celebrate CSPAN’s efforts to finally give citizens the kind of access they deserve. CSPAN has blown the lid of new media. This is some seriously bad ass shit. @Jay_Rosen_NYU–are you watching CSPAN?

Look for my Twitters and blog posts.

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