Finding your inner pundit

Posted August 27th, 2008 at 3:50 pm by Alan Warms, Yahoo! News

 3 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

Ever wanted to be a political pundit and call the shots on how the presidential election will play out? Ever wanted to “get behind the numbers” and understand why certain states are leaning this way or that? With the launch of our new and improved General Election Political Dashboard, you too can be the next James Carville. We’re excited about the launch and why not? More than 50% of voters now get their election news and information online — and more of them from Yahoo! News than anywhere else!

For the General Election, we’ve kept all of the cool features from the Primary Political Dashboard –- plus some new bells and whistles sure to enthrall the political junkie in all of us. At a glance, users still can see national and state poll averages and market predictions on the presidential prospects for Barack Obama and John McCain. Also, users can check out a new form of polling… candidate search results and popular search terms for each candidate. (It’s no surprise the most commonly search words for Barack Obama in recent days has been Joe Biden, but Jill Biden also has seen a big spike.) Users then can quickly scroll over each state to get a snapshot on how candidates are doing, or they can click on specific state to get key local headlines, state-wide searches, and voter demographic breakdowns. They also can click on the candidate images to pull up bios and campaign fund-raising totals. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

The new dashboard also includes a bevy of “Most Blogged About” election topics –- the first time BuzzTracker has been integrated into a Yahoo! News tool (stay tuned for more) — and gives users the chance to check out not only high-level blogs from a national standpoint, but also blogs from individual states. Who knew New Hampshire had so many bloggers writing about the election?

The “Create Your Scenario” tool allows anyone to make a call on every state based on the dashboard content and publish that content using a permalink in an email or blog. Essentially, we’ve put the power of the political pundits in your hands. Will Ohio go to Obama or McCain? Will Florida go blue or stay red? Take a stab at the electoral college and see how the numbers add up (remember: 270 electoral votes are needed to win the White House.) For inspiration, you can view celebrity scenarios (check out Arianna Huffington’s picks) and current and past election results. You can also compare your results to others to see where differences reside!

This Presidential Election truly marks a turning point — where distribution of information and content is no longer controlled by a few networks but rather can be created, consumed, and mashed up by the voters themselves. The Political Dashboard has been developed with you, the voter, in mind.

Have fun and enjoy the new features as we head into final few months of this historic election.

Alan Warms
Vice President and General Manager, Yahoo! News, Tech and Education

Tagged: elections, yahoo! news

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3 Comments Add your own

Abhishek | August 27th, 2008 at 6:49 pm

Thats great news for Blogosphere !!

cindy bottenfield | August 27th, 2008 at 9:26 pm

real nice

aike emma | August 31st, 2008 at 11:48 am

Well, now the democrats are deemed to be on a roll ok, the GOP got something for it going too, at least thats what the polls show. It ain’t gonna be one smooth ride for Obamas campaign team as expected and as the celebrity starved media would want most to believe. Obamas think tank got us going there with the ‘touche’ on a foreign policy legacy, but what about security and ‘national interest’? McCain’s camp would chip in.

Must say however that the run up to the november polls has been one that has generated much attention globally. Putin did’nt help matters more when he jibed the Bush administration of trying to gain cheap popularity off of the Georgia spat for the betterment of McCain’s candidacy, but if anything, he has actually echoed the global dimensions to this electioneering process.

Much as much is told, the transparency of the elections would actually go to show the direction that the American society has chosen to take as we dig in to the 21st century.