Election Day in the USA
Tuesday, November 7, 2000 by Dave Winer.
Good morning! 
And welcome to Election Day in the USA.
As I trawl the big news sites, I'm surprised that none of them appear to be trying to get us to tune into them tonight as the returns come in. If you find a pointer, send it to me and I'll link it into today's Scripting News.
A huge firehose
Imho, the ideal election returns interface would be several windows open on the screen side-by-side, one for each of the major news outlets, looking something like this. The windows would refresh every minute or so, showing new states being called. A scrolling list of news stories. Kind of a dynamic weblog, refreshing every minute. Click on the state to get the current returns. This would be a good adjunct to the channel-flipping interface of years-gone-by.
This has been one of the most interesting campaigns in my experience. If it's a tight race, we'll get to explore new interfaces for Web-based information; it'll be interesting to see what the major news networks have come up with. This night is unique, a US national election's news flow is like a huge firehose, and hopefully this year the Web will play a role in making it understandable, for those who care.
Join us tonight
We're going to be following the election returns and learn as we go. We have lots of great tools. We'll use as many as possible. Hope you can join us.
Dave Winer