If you use Twitter, there’s the Twitter Vote Report project. All you have to do is go to your polling place, tweet about your experience and add “#votereport” to your tweet to get registered onto a national map of polling places. The site is also asking you to participate even if you don’t use Twitter. You can send a text message starting with #votereport to 66937 (MOZES). Also, you can call 567-258-VOTE (8683) or 208-272-9024. There are even apps for iPhone and Android users.

Facebook is targeting all users ages 18 and up to vote. There’s a notice at the top of each person’s newsfeed reminding you to vote. You can also tell others you voted by posting a vote badge onto your wall. Facebook also created a voter page where you can search for your polling place using Google Maps.

To top things off, Foursquare has created a map that tracks the number of polling place check ins across the country. It created a special “I Voted” badge and website for members to add to their collection. To get the badge, all you have to do is say #ivoted into the Foursquare message. You can also post it to Twitter by adding #votereport to include it into the Twitter Vote Report at the same time. (By the way, if you like Gowalla, you can get an “I Voted” pin if you use the word “vote” or “voted” when you check in.)

These are just a few of the interactive ways to share your participation on election day. I hope you get a chance to go out and vote!

Check it out:

The hard part is learning how to communicate with each newsroom. I set up a project using Base Camp… But I’ll be honest. I think most people ignore the comments I and some project members post. Either way, it is a good place to keep all of the thoughts, documents, links and images that we all need to talk about. If someone claims that I didn’t tell them, I can prove that to be untrue. So I’m glad to have a place to collaborate work. There are a number of other open-source/free sites that have popped up since I started working with Base Camp this summer. One of my favorite is a very fun brainstorming tool called bubbl.us. I’ve tried it out a bunch of times to help sort out the many ideas that churn through my brain. There area couple of other products that have popped up, but I haven’t had time to test them.

Anyway. I’m trying to collaborate with three different newsrooms that have different workflow and different personalities. I’m obsessed with workflow and communication. But I have to say, this has been some of the most challenging conversations. The good news: As I continue to communicate, I’m starting to figure out ways to reach everyone.  I’ve also found using a database training manual as a good way to reach many of my student/employees who work on the komu.com content. A student of mine and I put it together with the help of Drupal. It’s also the content management system that we hope to use to build our election website.

So much to do, so little time.

A year ago I had a moment of genius. I thought how cool it would be to match voters up with candidates by using a social network tool called introNetworks. It’s a flash-based social network site that would be SUPER COOL to use and give people the insight about candidates that match closer to their viewers… but not so close that they won’t want to learn more about their candidate. Well, my idea came true. I got an email from introNetworks saying a group called Neighborhood America is using my idea. I couldn’t afford it so I’m thrilled to see someone else put the money into this technology. I’m also very, very jealous that I didn’t have the funding to do it myself. I highly recommend checking out the how-to video on how this works. It’s exactly how I had envisioned it.