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DaveNet: Florida!  Last night's story: First the networks said Gore won Florida, then Pennsylvania and Michigan -- the key "battleground" states. Bush said no way, Florida is too close. They took it back. Later they called it for Bush. By that time it was the margin, the candidate who would win Florida would win the presidency. Gore calls Bush to concede. A Florida vote counter calls Gore while he's on his way to give his concession speech. "Wait a minute Al, it's not over yet." Gore calls Bush and says "Dubya, I changed my mind." Less than 2,000 votes separate the two in Florida. We await a recount. What a mess! How did the networks all get it wrong in Florida twice? Just listened to PBS's News Hour; they interviewed Warren Mitofsky, the statistician who advised CNN and CBS on their projections last night. The networks pool a lot of resources. We have so much faith in their projections. It seems safe to assume that in the future we won't believe these reports so readily, and let's look to the networks to separate their processes. What will the statisticians learn from the experience of making two mistakes in one race? Could it possibly have been more confusing? It's Y2K, and Murphy is having a blast.Mail starting 11/08/00. Upside: The Tech Vote. It's time for a survey: Who will win? CNN: "The reason we have an Electoral College is that the founding fathers thought there would be several candidates for president and that the Electoral College would narrow the field to two or three. Then the House would make the decision. But the party system made the Electoral College a rubber stamp and the process simply didn't work out the way the founding fathers thought it would." Dan Bricklin: "Larger-than-expected Buchanan numbers in some areas known to have only elderly, Democratic-leaning voters, along with complaints about ballot usability by those people, brought this to national attention. I heard about it from a relative in Florida before the voting closed." Valdosta State University is doing a survey on politics and the Web. "The purpose of this survey is to examine the Internet’s influence on the U.S. political process. Although we recognize that the Internet is a global medium, we asked that only those individuals who are eligible to vote in the U.S. participate in this survey." CNN: Florida vote count. NY Times: Florida will prove decisive. "The outcome of the presidential race between Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore balanced early this morning on no more than a few hundred votes in the closely contested state of Florida." Search for "Dubya" on UserLand-hosted Manila sites. Washington Post: "All the major television networks have declared Republican George W. Bush the 43rd president of the United States, based on the Texas governor's victory in Florida." (Screen shot.) This year's Dewey Defeats Truman front page. CNN's Dewey Defeats Truman home page. The Onion: "In one of the narrowest presidential votes in U.S. history, either George W. Bush or Al Gore was elected the 43rd president of the United States Tuesday, proclaiming the win 'a victory for the American people and the dawn of a bold new era in this great nation.'" WorldLink: "On this extraordinary post-election morning, spare a thought for those of us in a European time zone." The best site?  I'd like to give an award to the news site that did the best job of covering the US presidential election from a technical and user interface standpoint. If you want to nominate a site, post a message in the discussion group, in response to this message. Then I'll run a survey, and ask the Scripting News readers, who are some of the best Web designers in the world, to choose one. Rafe Coburn: "The best election Web site I found last night was Voter.com." Non-election links Sun's analysis of Dot-Net. "Is .NET a radically new and innovative platform, as Microsoft claims? Or is it another migration path for Windows developers who have not yet embraced the Java platform?" PC World evangelical piece on Mac OS X. Low End Mac: OS X Dooms Apple. Apache's Turbine framework includes XML-RPC support. The Bluetooth Weblog continues to impress. Zope performance benchmark pointers. A little game to test your maleness. Interview on weblogs A major US newspaper found EditThisPage.Com and got excited. Fun interview. Why are weblogs happening now? Answer -- they're not new, but they're exploding now. After the dot-com euphoria, the dust settles and people are doing it for love. Amateur journalism. All these ideas worked in the interview. BTW, I told the reporter about our competition and gave her links to their sites. This is the proud way to do it. The readers deserve the chance to hear about our competitors. Localization Manila is popular in Germany, Italy and The Netherlands because it's localized. The Managing Editor of a Manila site can choose the native language of the site. Then all prompts and messages, the entire user interface, is in the user's language. So far most of the press has come from English-speaking countries. This is probably because the reporters don't know about Manila's European-friendly features. An example, here's a French language weblog for Zope developers.
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