June 28th, 2004

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Politics
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Who Has the Coolest Vote Tracking Thingy?

Cross-posted to the BlogsCanada election weblog.

As results start to roll in, I checked out some major media sources (via Jim’s entry in the e-group) in Canada to see how they were reporting the results. Everyone but the CBC has a pop-up flashy-flash vote tracking system:

  • Globe and Mail: Sweet map of Canada with mouse-overs, but it’s kind of tricky to drilldown into the ridings, and they’re only showing the percentage of votes, so you have no idea how many polling stations have come in.
  • CTV.ca: Nice looking interface with Mac OS left-to-right-style drilldown. There’s no map, but they make all of the data easy to consume. Oddly, they’re missing a photo of Paul Martin under “Leaders”.
  • Global: It rotates between official languages, which is a bit irritating. They seem to be using the same UI, more or less, as CTV, but the latter’s looks way better.
  • CBC: A table with a refresh button? What, did they give this project to the high school intern? It’s awkward to navigate, and is the least slick of the lot.

Personally, I’m going with CTV.

UPDATE: Except that the CBC thingy is far more current than the CTV or the Globe. So, apparently low-tech beats flashiness.

I wonder, from a technical perspective, how this data is reported? How the numbers are passed from the polling stations to the government proper, and how they push out the data so that Flash clients like this can consume it? I expect it’s some XML/Web services fanciness.

Comments: 6 Responses so far

Rog
June 28th, 2004
8:00 pm

Sorry, my vote goes for the CBC table. Simple, informative and useful. Ugh, I don’t want to deal with crappy interfaces (ahhhh, the CTV one had me screaming, I’m not an OS X fan obviously =P ).

Aside from which I also like how the CBC site breaks down the different ridings in their updates, with nice normal lists. I almost had an anerism with that little custom scrollbox that CTV uses.

Okay, I’m overexagerating here but ugh UI design is much more than about slick. How about not trying to fix what isn’t broken?

[Reply]

col
June 28th, 2004
8:21 pm

i keep flipping between ctv and cbc, but cbc is far faster with the results!

[Reply]

Sue
June 28th, 2004
10:13 pm

I’m so old-fashioned. I just kept the TV on. As far as TV coverage, my money (and my TV) is on CBC - they’ve got intermittent Rick Mercer segments!!

money is on CBC? TV is on CBC? should that be ARE on CBC? Or does it stay “is” because of the parentheses?

[Reply]

Andrea
June 28th, 2004
11:06 pm

11 pm on Election Night: Canada.com site is loading verrrrrrrrrrrrrry slowly. Of course, it was slow when it worked properly earlier tonight, too.

[Reply]

Derek
June 29th, 2004
7:34 am

The CBC site worked better than anything else for me. I wish they’d had a blue/red/orange/green map somewhere, but otherwise the riding summaries, background, and numbers were fast to update and easy to find. Plus they worked in any browser I could throw at them.

Definitely easier than trying to keep up with badly-retyped Usenet postings as I did in 1993. :)

[Reply]

Everything Is In/Flux
June 29th, 2004
7:52 am

Bigotry

I’ve been enjoying reading the pro-Conservative blogs this morning, particularly the ones that had called for a very strong Conservative minority government win in last night’s Federal Election.

I was caught off-guard by this statement:I think we …

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