These were being passed out today in NYC and LA (I’m told 1.2 million copies), a fake NY Times. Whatever your feelings on the war, it’s brilliantly done:
You’d never know looking at it right away that it wasn’t a real paper. It’s dated July 4th, 2009.
Update: looks like there’s a bit of video about the prank.
Rocketboom came by the Williamsburg Coworking space last Friday during the code-jam to do some interviews of the various folks working on the "TwitterVoteReport"http://twittervotereport.com project (from designers to press folks to coders), and ended up including Yours Truly among the interviewed. The resultant episode on their site provides a great introduction to what’s going on with TwitterVoteReport and how it works, so check it out:
Worth pointing out again and again, since the name might be a bit misleading, that it’s not just for Twitter. You’ll be able to send in SMS reportsn, report by telephone call, use an iPhone app (if Apple deigns to allow it in the app store on time), and a Google Android app is up in the Android Market.
We’ve been really busy lately here at Zetetic, which is why you haven’t heard from us in a bit. We’ve got a new design for our website on the way, we’re running a beta program of the next version of Tempo while developing another major release in the background, we’re working on an iPhone app (actually two), we’ve donated some time to helping out the folks over at the Twitter Vote Report project, and we’ll be doing yet more work with them as the crunch to the election day gets closer, and we’re still hiring.
And we’re still working hard for our clients. So, not so much time for blogging this last month.
Just to expand on a couple of these things:
Tempo Beta
If you’d like to participate, send an e-mail to support@zetetic.net and we’ll give you the details. We’re particularly interested in feedback our users have during the end-of-month billing period, as this next version should make reporting a lot faster and easier.
Twitter Vote Report
Twitter Vote Report is a project we became aware of through the folks at the Williamsburg Coworking space where I work in Brooklyn, NY. Basically, it’s a project that will allow users to text or call-in reports from polling places to build a database of activity and problem reports. Hopefully this will help to monitor the election, problems at voting places, and identify any hotspots early on the 4th of November. So far we’ve done a bit of coding and contributed a bit to the architecture and security discussion, and we’ll be contributing more work to help them get over the finish line as we get closer to the election.
The basic gist of it is that a user can tweet a problem or send an SMS message to short-code 66937 to report a problem, along with their location, like so:
#votereport long lines here l:11211
#votereport #wait:20 they won't let grandma vote l:courthouse, va
More information will be available on the TVR site soon. Lots of smart folks are putting a lot of time into making this happen and it’s been awesome to watch it come together. If you think you could help out in some way, even if it’s just spreading the word, do get in touch with them. In particular we’ll need folks who can volunteer to be “sweepers”, folks who help comb through the incoming data looking for mistakes.
Stephen forwarded me one of the Coudal Partners newsletters the other day, and it had this rather interesting bit where they describe the three questions they ask themselves when determining whether or not to pursue a new idea:
The article then goes on to show how they applied it to their Field Notes Brand. Just figured I’d pass that along, you should be able to access the whole thing over here, at least for a little while.