[Air-L] "Hack the Debate" - Twitter and CurrentTV join together

Margaret D Lattimore mdlattim at syr.edu
Mon Oct 6 13:57:48 PDT 2008


Hi Stephanie and other Twitter-ers --
What's your username?  Mine is deanya, and one of my tweets made it  
onto the tube during the first presidential debate.
:-)
Deanya Lattimore
http://www.deanya.com


Quoting "Tuszynski, Stephanie" <stuszyns at bethanywv.edu>:

> Some of you may already be aware of this.
>
> For all the debates in the US presidential election this month,   
> CurrentTV (the network founded by former Vice President Al Gore) has  
>  collaborated with Twitter.com to run a program called "Hack the   
> Debate." Essentially what happens is CurrentTV selects messages   
> being posted to their Twitter channel/page and runs those messages   
> on the bottom of the tv screen during the debates.
>
> It's a little like Pop Up Video for politics, for those who remember  
>  that show.
>
> Current and Twitter are both promoting this as being the first time   
> this has ever been done, running live "tweets" over a tv broadcast.   
> I'm sure it's the first time it's been done with Twitter, but   
> running text messages over a tv broadcast has been done before, I'm   
> pretty sure.
>
> I've participated in both of these so far. There's a severe lag   
> between what's posted to Twitter and what appears on the television   
> screen, leading to some unintended humor and of course the majority   
> of the actual messages on Twitter don't appear on the television   
> screen (the network is also filtering out profanity, etc.). At first  
>  there wasn't much interaction between people posting on the Twitter  
>  channel but during the VP debate you started to see more messages   
> being aimed at other people posting, so who knows what will happen   
> during these last 2 debates.
>
> http://current.com/topics/88834922_hack_the_debate
>
> PS - See some of you in Austin this week, I hope!
>
> Dr. Stephanie Tuszynski
> Assistant Professor of Communication
> Bethany College
>
>
>
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