I recently volunteered to post events for a local organization across various event websites. In the process, I started thinking about how no particular event site really seems to be standing out at this point in time. You can find events listings everywhere: MySpace, Facebook, your local newspaper sites, Eventful, Upcoming, Meetup, Google Calendars, etc. But you either have to check them all frequently to stay on top of what's posted on each, or subscribe to rss feeds for your interests at all of them and wade through them in your reader, which may speed up the process but doesn't lend itself to spontaneous browsing. To make it easier on those looking for events, most of these events sites have ways for the user to export the event to a calendar, email, and/or social networking site. As an event creator, though, what I really need is a tool that will allow me to create an event once and then post it to all these other sites without having to re-create it on each.
I've spent the last 3 days looking for such a tool and can't find one. I did find a good summary of my problem posted on Microformats, so at least I know I'm not the only one noticing a lack of options for this situation. If I knew more programming, it seems like it'd be easy for me to create something that would do this for me. After all, if users can push information to their many online profiles and accounts, how can there not be an event aggregator publishing tool? Plus, it looks like most of the sites use the hcalendar markup standard. Maybe I'm just missing something.
Perhpas there is a for-fee service somewhere. Mashable's list of 35 tools for events had a few for businesses that hinted at being able to do such a thing, for a fee.
I'm investigating Microsoft/Windows Live to see if there's anything there that might help. I will continue to do more research to see if there's already a freely available tool for this out there. In the meantime, maybe the best I can do is customize a startup page for myself that includes all the sites where I will post events listings.
This campaign has made me wonder what the "do not call" registry really means. I am pretty sure I'm on it. And I've been getting an average of 6 messages a day over the past week from politicians asking for my vote. I wouldn't be as annoyed if half of them were coming from people I'd actually vote for. At least there'd be equal coverage that way. Instead, I'm being phone-spammed by one of the two major parties. And they're talking to the wrong answering machine. I've already voted and their phone calls wouldn't have swayed me one bit. The reason I have an unlisted number, which I pay for monthly, is to avoid calls like this. It's enough to make me get rid of my land line altogether. But I've found out that the regular "do not call" registry pretty much only covers for-profit telemarketing calls. If you want to stop receiving campaign calls, you can add your phone number to the Stop Political Phone Calls Now registry. There's no guarantee that it'll work, but it's worth a shot.
I read another great, timely, article about how citizens are using social media to monitor the elections tomorrow. Written by Simon Owens for PBS, it covers the background of the "Video Your Vote" movement and provides further insight into the Twitter Your Vote movement. It also talks about the Voter Suppression Wiki, a site that is dedicated to educating the public about voter suppression and providing a space for voters to tell their stories. The Incident Tracker page conveniently lists problems encountered by state so you can see what's happening near you. So now, everyone can tweet, video, blog, and wikify their voting experience. This is documentation on a scale that has never been seen before in an American election.
I don't know how anyone is going to be able to work tomorrow. Which is why it makes even more sense for the United States, in my opinion, to follow all the other countries who vote on the weekends or holidays. The entire nation is distracted by what's going on; we might as well just take the day off and focus on what is most important.
Rachel Maddow calls these long lines the new poll tax:
According to the Arizona Republic, the votes in Maricopa County may take days to count up because of all the early ballots that will be walked in on election day.
I've been thinking about writing another post full of resources all week. I just hope I don't forget any here.
I saw this video today and found it very moving:
This election is so important. Please encourage all your friends, family, and neighbors to get out and vote.
First on the list today is Election Protection, an organization that's here to help you with any problems you may encounter at the polls on November 4th. You can call them for help on any trouble you have voting at 1-866-OUR-VOTE. You can also tweet what you're experiencing at the polls through your cell phone and have your message immediately appear in their feed at the Twitter Vote Report website (and their twitter feed) by adding the hashtag #votereport to your message. Instructions can be found here on how to participate. You don't even need to sign up for a Twitter account to send a tweet - here are instructions on how to do it without an account. The standard number to dial in the US to send a tweet is 40404, but they have a special section called "How do I submit a report?" on the Twitter Vote Report website. Election Protection has their own tweet feed as well. If you don't use Twitter, you can still view all the messages that come in by bookmarking these sites and checking in periodically, or by subscribing to their rss feeds (if you use an rss reader like Google Reader) using the button on the bottom left of each page.
Then there's Video the Vote, an organization encouraging people to record their voting experience - particularly any problems that arise - and upload them to the web for people everywhere to view. You can subscribe to their feed through YouTube. They also have a twitter feed. You can add the hashtag #vtv to show up in their coverage feed. They are looking for volunteers to video voting problems in their communities, to help get videos uploaded as quickly as possible to the web, to serve as a dispatcher who connects up videographers to voters experiencing a problem, to drive videographers to the places they need to get to, and to blog about the reports as they come in.
There's also, on YouTube, a channel called Video Your Vote, which is partnered with PBS and tons of other organizations. What's cool about this group is that they have a Google Map you can add your video to. One of their playlists currently has 117 videos in it, although you have to dig into their subscription page to find it.
VOTERSTHINKdotORG is another resource on YouTube for news coverage about the election, with lots of clips from different news shows. It's pretty liberal in tone.
Of course, Twitter also has a whole section devoted to tweets about the election, which I've found to be my best source of late-breaking news. You can even follow what people are saying in your area by using the advanced search page and filling in the city you're in and some keywords.
Over on Voters Unite, I'm keeping a close eye on their elections problem log, where you will find daily updates about what some voters have been experiencing, including both a summary of the problem, the state it happened in, the date, and links to how it was reported in the news.
From the Representative Press comes this video commenting on a fraudulent flyer aimed at voting Democrats, as reported by AP News.
This video campaign that you can send to your friends and family to spur them into voting is cracking me up. But I like its message and think it's an important one - every vote makes a difference.
