Today, Hop Studios started work for the CBC. We’re going to be providing some moderation of one of their latest projects, one that’s a perfect with what we like to focus on—participatory media. As you know, Canada is abut to have an election—it was called about a week ago and the campaigns will run about 6 weeks until the voters decide on Jan. 23. CBC’s online coverage is excellent, and they’ve set up blogs for every one of the 308 ridings in Canada. (Ridings are geographic regions that each elect one member of the House of Commons).
As part of CBC’s online election coverage package, they are encouraging residents of each riding to share their knowledge about the issues and events occurring in their area. It’s partially an opinion forum, but also partially a civic space for information sharing. It’s moderated by several people to make sure that the posts comply with basic decency and journalistic legal standards. We shall see how successful it is—it’s already getting significant traffic and it’ll get even busier as the election day draws closer.
Interestingly, CBC is running it all with Typepad. The design is pretty sophisticated, and looks nothing like a standard Typepad blog, but I assume that, as with some of our clients, it’s just easier to pay for a hosted service sometimes than to deal with the business and technical issues raised by hosting your own blogging solution.
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