Real-Life Mashups: Beyond YouTube Presidential Debate Questions
July 24th, 2007 (11:00am) Mike Gunderloy 5 Comments
Presumably you haven’t been living under a rock, so you know that CNN and YouTube just hosted a presidential debate in which allegedly normal people got to use YouTube to ask questions of the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. By all media accounts, this was a success, meaning that we can look forward to more of this crossover between Web 2.0 and daily life in the future. Here’s some wild speculation about where this trend could lead us if we’re not careful:
The Twittermarket - No need to bring your grocery list to the supermarket any more. Just punch your Twitter user id into the wifi-enabled cart, and the people on your contact list can remind you of everything that you said you were out of over the last week. The fact that all your friends will know if you dine exclusively on ice cream and donuts provides a powerful incentive to stick to your diet, too.
President, meet Nerds - Fully-embracing the high-tech future, the next administration throws out the old media reporters and invites the SlashDot crew to moderate their press conferences instead. The Secret Service goes crazy trying to read all the commentary with their filters set at -1 to catch the crazies.
Fantasy Sports Become Reality - A major pro sports franchise at the bottom of its league hits upon fan interactivity as a means to revive flagging home-town interest. They set up a duplicate stadium in Second Life and hold a lottery to pick lucky fans to run the avatars of their favorite players, with the intent of running “user-contributed plays” at key points in the next game. Major problem: the coaches can’t find tails, wings, and jet-packs to equip the real-life players with when game time rolls around.
Digg Enforcement - We all know how well the “wisdom of crowds” works, why not apply it to traffic laws? In conjunction with a trendsetting Western state, Digg adds a new section featuring snapshots from traffic cams. If your license plate gets +50 diggs or more, you get issued a citation.
Remember, if any of these ideas come to pass, we expect a cut of the profits here at WWD. Feel free to contribute your own Reality 2.0 mashup ideas in the comments.
5 Comments Post your own comment
Ron Gell says: July 24th, 2007 11:25am
Can you envision more positive developments from this? The internet is finally a medium of political engagement for everyday people. Just as much as you have youtube.com giving people access to question these candidates, you have websites like unity08.com delivering the political process from partisan primaries and placing it into people’s homes. This is huge because it is there, in our living spaces where democrat, republican, and socialists alike can all agree something has to change. All these developments can only help to increase the means to question our so-called leaders. Just think how many more times we write our reps now that we have email.
Judi Sohn says: July 24th, 2007 12:07pm
Ron, that’s very true. But remember that Reps have the same resources to read the millions of emails they get that they did to read the hundreds of letters they used to get. Just because you can send more, doesn’t mean that it has any more meaning or impact than it did before.
Darayush Mistry says: July 24th, 2007 5:03pm
I think the Youtube CNN debate was cool and as you’ve mentioned an indicator of how finally mainline media has learnt to leverage the power of the web other than having me too news websites.
Its the 2.0 paradigm shift, while some might strike this off as a glitzy talking head video in front of a question that could have easily been asked through folks submitting them as emails. I feel those folks miss the entire point its the power of being able to easily disseminate video and expression as a community and emphasize that the question is actually coming from a cancer survivor who looks like a single mom somewhere in the heart of America is powerful. In the past these kinds of questions could have been easily struck off as staged via email and written by interns working for the party.
But then again these Youtubers might be paid actors as well .. and these questions seeded by Obama or Hillary … like the whole cheating girlfriend viral video on Youtube .. which was later discovered to be an actor/writer trying to create buzz.
But a very interesting paradigm shift none the less.
jesteramos says: July 25th, 2007 9:14am
As I have seen this CNN sponsored Democratic Debate via Youtube, all I can say is that they are contributing for a massive campaign not only for those presidential aspirants but for those who are advocating change. And I for myself is an advocate of that change. This can be a conclusive effort in the part of media that they are not only for sectoral reform but for the totality of this nation and perhaps of the whole world.
It may become as an excellent instrument of equality if the one I have is on full version with all of the candidates are performing in this debate, for us to know or understand their sentiments in regards of having the presidency.
With this, it can contribute for all people having a concern for change in one’s nation. Even tough a republican or a democrat.
How To Use Crowdsourcing, Online Expert Sources Efficiently · ReporTwitters Blog says: August 23rd, 2007 12:03pm
[...] use other technologies that match issues with people and sometimes come up with great ideas. A good example is CNN and YouTube’s collaboration hosting a presidential debate in which citizens used YouTube [...]