As Barack Obama and John McCain square off in Mississippi tonight, cable channel C-SPAN will be providing searchable, embeddable clips of the debate, accompanied by realtime commentary from livebloggers and Twitterpundits, at a newly-launched debate hub that seeks to provide a one-stop shop for info-junkies.
C-SPAN is scarcely alone in trying to integrate social media into coverage of the presidential debates: Current.TV's "Hack the Debate" will superimpose contemporaneous Tweets over a live stream of the event. Twitter has its own election channel. And Reason magazine will be Twittering pseudo-participation in the exchange from Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr.
But C-SPAN's project may be the most ambitious. According to C-SPAN producer Ben O'Connell, who this acknowledges is the hoary public-interest channel's "first foray into new media—that is, Web 2.0 social media," describes it as an element of a broader plan to transform C-SPAN into a "platform agnostic media network" that "makes all of C-SPAN's assets to people in whatever media form they choose to utilize."
The above is from ARS Technica site.
The S-SPAN site is great. You can see video of the debate and you can read comments from blogs and live Twitter coverage.
People seem to be saying that Obama won the debate. I am a Democrat and I could not say he won. He sure did not lose the debate but I saw no knockout.
