[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. The Times provide a helpful list of bloggers covering the election. To list them here:

“Some websites try to remain neutral or dispassionate, such as politicalbetting.com , which allows political gamblers to place trends and events in context or the Guido Fawkes blog , which cuts across all kinds of political stories.

“The pollingreport.co.uk site (and its blog) is excellent at deciphering voting intentions, as is electoralcalculus.co.uk, which has clear constituency background information.

“British bloggers are just as partisan as in the US. Sites such as honourablefiend.com and concom.blogspot.com make little attempt to hide their allegiances. Also good value are sites that pick on a party and knock it as hard as they can – labour watch, libdemwatch or torytrouble.”

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Interesting article by Amy Gahran on how interviewees might publish transcripts of their interviews – including what the journalist says – on their blogs. “When I interview sources I will make a point of asking if they have their own site or weblog, and whether they’re intending to write about the interview. I will consider the whole conversation mutually on record unless otherwise specified.”

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Google Maps has already made some waves in the US, so it’s good to see it now over here – and what a lovely piece of technology it is. Intuitive, click-and-drag control with a slider to zoom in, with great detail.

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Here’s an article I wrote for Journalism.co.uk in its pre-edited form. Click here for the edited version, which makes the wise decision to hang it on the recent Murdoch speech…

The virtual election

Forget the fight for Number 10. The real fight in this election season is between the news organisations – and it seems that when it comes to online journalisma clear gap is emerging between the switched-on, and the switched-off.

As always the BBC, which had promised “the first truly interactive election coverage”, backs that up with a whole section devoted to engaged, imaginative user experience. An animated Peter Snow hosts a raft of interactive tools including a quiz, a seat calculator, and a poll tracker, while the real Peter Snow provides video instructions on how to use the interactive swingometer.

Channel 4 News online goes for the hard-hitting angle, launching the FactCheck site to “test the veracity of claim and counter claim”, while it also gets brownie points for its co-opting of Photoshop Battles.

The Guardian’s online arm continues to impress with a simple but effective policy comparer and – for those who want to watch that Mingella soft-focus over and over again – a page of party political broadcast videos.

After Murdoch’s speech last week on the need for papers to take online journalism seriously, it was interesting to see how News Corp’s websites would respond. The Sun is alone in the tabloids in having a devoted election section, with an ‘e-poll’ and an election tracker which allows you to search by country, postcode, constituency, party targets and candidate – although for the latter searches for Blair, Howard and Kennedy failed to yield any results.

But The Times’s online election coverage is even more impressive, with an array of bells and whistles that includes audio reports and an interactive Q&A with John Sergeant. Most impressive is a visually engaging slideshow illustrating the change in Britain political landscape over the last four elections, and a Flash game – Quote Unquote – which engages the user by asking you to match quotes in key areas to the leader responsible.

Finally, The Daily Mail may not be known for technological literacy of its audience, but has some imaginative use of the web with live chats with politicians, polls, an election messageboard and, best of all, an election quiz which proposes to reveal you who you’re likely to vote for.

Common Features

There are some features that seem to be more or less standard. Specific election email alerts are offered by The Guardian and the BBC, where you can also download a desktop alert service. And Channel 4 offers an SMS alert “when the election is won”, conjuring up images of being woken at five in the morning by a strange beepingsound.

RSS junkies, meanwhile, can subscribe to specific election feeds at Sky News,
The Daily Mail, The Guardian, and the BBC (both election and blog), and you can find interactive election maps at The Guardian, Channel 4, Sky News and The Times, although many don’t promise to show anything until the results start to come in.

The now-ubiquitous blog has been taken up by a number of sites, including the BBC, The Daily Mail and The Times. The Guardian has an election blog and a candidates’ diaries blog, and incorporates a “folksonomic zeitgeist” to show what the current talking points are. But biggest of all is Channel 4, which has a whopping eight election blogs written by both presenters and MPs.

Finally, having spent your day immersed in MP-speak and the vagaries of the election system, you could be forgiven for forgetting the journalism and getting your own back by clicking on a leader and starting Radio 1’s cathartic mud slinger game. Who gets your vote?

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Now this looks pretty impressive: an interactive museum of news, with sections on front pages, photography and photojournalism, cartoons, coverage of particular events and a US-centric news quiz.

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Useful page outlining the arguments for and against using ‘click here’ as a hyperlink – as well as some suggestions for alternative sentences to link from.

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. US journalist Duff Wilson’s Reporter’s Desktop has some great ideas, some of which translate to British practice (the dictionary and reference links), some of which are only useful in America (demographics; government) – although the latter should still prompt some ideas as to link it might be worth having.

On another page he outlines his own processes in tracking people – again in the US, but again, the process itself is well worth looking at for parallels over here.

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Thanks to Andy for drawing my attention to CNN’s online coverage of the Jackson trial. The company have clearly ploughed some hefty resources into this one, with video reports, a gallery of key players, and an interactive timeline. Well worth exploring.

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Thanks to a colleague for introducing the slightly-more-useful-than-Google Google Suggest: basically Google with an auto-suggest function that guesses what you’re searching for (and tells you how many results there are).

So, ‘s’ and ‘sp’ bring up ‘spybot’; ‘spr’ brings up ‘sprint’; and ‘spra’ brings up ‘sprained ankle’. Just what I was looking for…

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. From Buzzworthy: “NAA‘s Presstime magazine looks at how newspaper editors factor in Web traffic when deciding what stories will make the front page in print. (At the Post-Intelligencer, printside editors get regular reports about what stories are most popular online but I think they usually make their decisions based on more traditional criteria.)”