Widgets Winning on Election Day

The Huffington Post's Ariana Huffington offers up her take on the U.S. election's big winner - the Internet - but her own site is featuring prominently one of the real social media winners this election: embedded content on social media Web sites. While many traditional news organizations struggled to get an audience edge in an election season that was powered in many ways by the voices of people empowered by social media, sites such as the HuffPost excelled at aggregating widgets, embedded videos and links to content from sites around the Web along with a thin layer of newwire content and their own rotating crew of guest columnists.

On the evening of Election Day HuffPost is featuring a rotating gallery of widgets indicating poll closing times, an electoral vote tracker for the Presidential race, a live vote total tracker and election results widgets from CBS News, CNN and MSNBC. Each of these widgets is a useful tool, but the ability to aggregate them in a place that's a favorite for many political enthusiasts is the beauty of the contexts that social media publishing tools enable them to exploit. It's also a reminder that when news is about real-time events data and graphics are key content types that attract and retain audiences more effectively than text and, oftentimes, video. No wonder that HuffPost kept this rotating gallery of widgets as the "headline story" as the results prepared to come in. More to the point, as a part of their brand-building efforts sites like MSNBC make it easy for anyone to embed these widgets into their sites: it's no longer a huge deal to get this kind of content from a major media outlet into any Web site, including their video content from their proprietary videos that are embedded easily via the industry standard technologies that power social media.

Who will win tonight? We will. As I outline in Chapter 6 of the Content Nation book, the truly amazing impact of social media is in how it has enabled everyday people to have an influence over political processes as never before. In days past it took influential newspapers, books and broadcasters to set the center of the political dialogue. Today social media has brought us the electronic "cracker barrel," the ability of citizens to collect at an electronic commons, similar to how people in small towns used to gather around a cracker barrel or pot-bellied iron stove in a local general store and pass back and forth opinions and insights to their peers. It's also given us the ability to fund candidates who we support, creating a new political power from average citizens that used to be reserved mostly for the wealthy and major businesses. This is only one nation's experience with this technology, of course, but it bodes well for the future of all of Content Nation.