My friend and member of the Reynolds Journalism Institute futures lab staff and newscast director extraordinaire Travis McMillen created this quick look at what you may have missed if you weren’t watching the Smart Decision ‘08 webcast.

The end of the 2008 election season wrapped up a piece of my online obsession - SmartDecision08.com. Along with helping keep that site running with content from KOMU.com, KBIA.org and the ColumbiaMissourian.com I also decided to turn the partnership up a notch and produce a multi-newsroom webcast. We ended up also including a new internationally-focused newsroom called Newsy.com into the webcast as well. So for four hours we worked with content from four newsrooms and conducted interviews with participants in a big non-partisan watch party we created to coincide with the webcast. It was pretty fantastic to be able to combine multiple newsrooms AND the community all into one event. I’m proud of the dozens and dozens of people who helped make the event happen. I’m exhausted from it all still.

I actually had to run out of town the very next day for family reasons so I haven’t been able to truly digest the many things we were able to do since SmartDecision08.com launched a year ago. I don’t want to see the site die - so I have to come up with ways to let it continue to grow even without any funding. The great thing about RSS feeds is the content continues to flow, so I’m trying to conceptualize a way to help the website follow political news and issues even if I’m not overseeing it often.

In the meantime I’m about to go halfway around the world to train some journalists in China. I’ve never had this kind of opportunity before and I am excited and nervous to go. I’m planning to spend some quite, focused time preparing for the trip. When I get back, I hope to spend more time digesting and sharing the lessons learned from the SmartDecisoin08.com project.

I have to leave a quick note here because I jumped into a little experiment with Twitter in the last couple of days. I decided to see if mid-Missouri would be interested in tweeting (that’s the verb used when you want to talk about that act of posting something on Twitter) politics leading up to election day (using a tag of #sd08). Once we all go to the polls, I’m also asking mid-Mo tweeters to send a post or two while they’re casting their ballot (using an additional tag of #votereport)

The #sd08 tag means it’s a part of Smart Decision ‘08. That’s a site that I have created with the help of committed students and professionals affiliated with a number of newsrooms in Columbia, MO. It has been my baby project for quite a while. One election day, I’m hoping mid-Missouri Twitter users will add an additional tag to help us keep track of their experience in the polls: #votereport. It’s a quest created nationally by Twitter.com. Hopefully Twitter users across the country will let us know what it’s really like when they cast a ballot. It’s also a way to see where things are going wrong. When I was talking to a representative at Twitter, I hear about this tweet:

OH_observers: #EPOH from 866 report -fake election officials letting people vote from parking lot in Columbus #votereport #43204 http://tinyurl.com/6nfrmw

I think that’s so cool that we can all participate and talk about experiences during the election year. I like this involvement so much that I’m producing a four hour webcast involving KOMU-TV, KBIA-FM, The Columbia Missourian and Newsy.com. During the webcast, you’ll be able to see details about what people are talking about from our Blog Watch Desk and I’ll have a segment where my Twitter watchers will let us know what’s going on. We’re also inviting the public to attend an election watch party as we record the webcast. We’ll check in with the participants and see what they’re talking about. It’s very exciting and it will be interesting to see what really happens. Four newsrooms. Four hours. Wow. You can watch it election night 8:00pm-midnight Central Time from SmartDecision08.com.

I’m taking part in a wonderful project through a non-profit group called e-thepeople. They put together a widget that helps you see your ballot, learn about the candidates and even print out your ballot before you go to the poll on November 4th.

Check it out:

Aggregation. It’s a big focus of my life these days. I’m looking for easy ways to collect information and share it with the general public. At the same time, I’m trying to find ways to collect the websites and social networks I visit and aggregate it into one place. That’s why I’m curious to see how Google’s Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpace’s dataportability may help play in this goal to link everything into one location on the Internet.

I look at this on two levels: How can it work for me and how can it work for my news website.

For me, I love social networking. I love chatting, learning and sharing. It’s kind of obvious from my previous posts. But I think it’s so cool to be able to share and see different perspectives from people I trust. It’s the same idea as having a get together with your friends - but I know I’m not alone when I say many of my friends live across the country. We move around a lot! Not to mention, my job has given me the chance to meet really cool and smart people in all kinds of locations. Social networking lets me stay in touch in ways that writing a letter and sending it in the mail can’t do. And in a slightly self-centered way, it gives me a chance to know what my friends are doing after years of them reading my family blogs and never leaving comments! They know all about me but I don’t know a thing about their most recent updates.

On the professional side of things, I want my news product used by my market! So that’s why I tried an aggregated website sharing the news from KOMU.com, the local NPR newsroom and a local newspaper as a test. We’re aggregating all of our election-themed news and sharing it into the SmartDecision08.com website. This is a way to create a one-stop information hub on the election season in Missouri, specifically mid-Missouri. I don’t have enough funding to make it function as well as I would like it to function, but it is deep. There is so much information and it’s delivered in a way that can really let a news and political information consumer learn a lot. I want to find ways to help collect information and give people the change to socially learn and share on this kind of level. Take news and make it personal. That’s been my goal for years. It’s so cool to see how today’s technology is reaching the concepts I thought about a long time ago.

I am trying out a new site called blippr.com - it gives you a way to socially share the things that entertain you: books, movies, music and games. It’s a level of social networking I haven’t really participated in before. Facebook has all kinds of options that include those items, but blippr seems to have a very clean, concise and non-gimmicky way to accomplish sharing entertainment reviews. It connects to facebook and twitter and friend feed so the idea is to use it as an aggregator of sorts to collect and share your likes and dislikes within the products you already use. I think that’s where everything is headed. I just wish I could wrap my head around how we can use these kinds of tools and still help inform online consumers the news they want and possibly need to know to participate in the non-computer based world where they live. I would have something really cool if I had money and programmers who would put up with my constant brain dumps!

We officially launched smartdecision08.com last week and I’ve found my audience is not quick to sign up. I have teams of people trying to go out into our communities and encourage participation — And I’ve found when local organizations are introduced to the idea of blogging or video blogging, they are not interested. I wonder why. I have worked with a group of people to try and create an opportunity for the community to feel involved. A place where candidates could go to see where the conversations are headed. But so many people are turned off by the idea immediately.I’d love to hear opinions on how to get people interested and driven to collaborate, write, share and communicate online.