So everything has been said about the election, so let’s start reviewing the pictures, not in the way of life magazine of old, these are much less polished, in fact they are deliberately overworked images. These are screenshots of what you’ve been looking at most of the time, your work desktop/laptop or your phone. You see the mobile story is not complete without both the sharer and the reader. Yes, we are reading opinion pieces, but we’re also looking at newsfeeds of our friends, election term search keywords, election graphs, and mocking videos, probably more than the primary sources. So while we work tonight to keep 1/3 of the mobile web up and running, we thought we’d share the olympic opening ceremony that we’re seeing over the mobile web as well as where it came from on the desktop.
Citizen Journalism took off on the momentum of news traffic and the promise of mobile video that works in some cases from flip camera videos sent to Youtube and iReport and other times from mobile phone services like Flixwagon, Qik and Kyte, which made these sites like Ground Report’s ‘Video the Vote’ and 12 seconds’ mobile upload for video election discussion possible.
This election the results split into two specific content categories, a hunger for election results data, which on the desktop was dominated by http://fivethirtyeight.com and on mobile we saw many instances of election results sites for each property shift their homepage to the results page and braced for traffic more than 10x what they see regularly.
The second content offering was much more interesting in terms of new mobile behavior. We are now seeing an IMDB effect, where people are looking to more than data, but facts and well known personalities to win an argument while reading mobile content and potentially discussing issues with friends and colleagues. This year the elections spurred an interest in new news portals going mobile, such as yesterday’s Huffington Post launch.
You’ll see that the diverse content on the Huffington Post is always laced with political relevance, here’s an example on the desktop of astrology linked to politics, (thanks Mary for this one). And below, the new mobile site which contains Huffington Post content from many of their desktop categories.
Maybe you are swapping graphs back and forth with friends who have different opinions to show how well you know the polls…
Or maybe mobile helps you get your bearings. Checking for weather before you vote, checking tweets from friends about the lines at the polls, whether to vote at all based on the polls. Looking to see if your friends are peer pressuring you into voting…and seeing how people in other networks of yours are leaning. We all learned over this election in NYC that our NY candidates did not fare well outside of well, New York City. If you are tracking search.twitter.com you might see these sentiments early.
Or maybe it’s just about laughing with friends and relatives about what you saw on Youtube, Colbert, Jon Stewart, and of course Saturday Night Live.
(Thanks Andy for Wassup and many other links.)
What I’ve learned with everyone in at work and at home now nearly all having iPhones, I cannot assume that it will take a few days before people react to things I send. In fact I usually see responses with the footer:
‘Sent from my iPhone’
It’s going to be a long, long night here for us and all of our team, but thanks everyone in advance, we’re hoping for both electoral and mobile victories tonight.
The Pro Football Weekly site, found at http://m.profootballweekly.com, or redirected from http://www.profootballweekly.com on your mobile phone, helps fans keep track of the most up-to-date football information for fans leading up to Super Bowl XLIII and kicking off the 2009 season with the NFL Draft.
Crisp Voices
