Election day is here and if I understand all the media strategies correctly, there should be a tremendous amount of real and near time data available, most of it focusing on the voting experience.
CNN has their voter hotline and “eye” reporters posted throughout the CONUS ready, willing and able to help voters and report on their successes to do so. It is a bit nice to see such efforts from the media, even if there are underlying motives.

In the technology world, Twitter seems to be the sexy communications channel for monitoring today’s events. Mitch Wagner, Information Week editor, has a good list of Twitter feeds that are helpful for “removing the bull” [his words].
I can add another site, one that I think is pretty fantastic. I heard about this one from one of the New York tech mailing lists I monitor. You can read more about the technology and background here.

Another interesting Twitter solution comes from Twitter itself. Twitter Election Day Filter
Twitter is running a special Election 2008 filter that lets you track opinions and conversations about the presidential election through the lens of users’ Tweets. Basically, any time you use the word Obama, McCain, Palin or Biden in a tweet, it will show up in the live monitor.

The site is called Twitter Vote Report. Essentially you twitter your vote experience to them so that they can aggregate, map and summarize the experience and sentiment of Election Day. So far I am pretty hooked. As I have CNN in the background I have noticed that Twitter Vote Report is much more relevant and, as Mitch attests, obviously has less nonsensical commentary. If there is a problem I bet it will be on Twitter Vote Report 15-20 minutes before it emerges on one of the networks’ radar.

Additionally Ignite Analytics has some interesting posts on how marketing trends relate to Election Day.

What I really find amazing is that Twitter Vote Report was created from volunteers as a grassroots project! Nice example of how powerful an idea is and how today’s technology and community can make those ideas a reality.