CNN gets kudos for most original idea during Election 2008 coverage yesterday by “holographing” correspondent Jessica Yellin and pop star Will I Am into the CNN studio to virtually converse with Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper. Gizmodo explains how they did it:

On the subject’s side:
• 35 HD cameras pointed at the subject in a ring
• Different cameras shoot at different angles (like the matrix), to transmit the entire body image
• The cameras are hooked up to the cameras in home base in NY, synchronizing the angles so perspective is right
• The system is set up in trailers outside Obama and McCain HQ
• Not only is it mechanical tracking via camera communication, there’s infrared as well
• Correspondents see a 37-inch plasma where the return feed of the combined images are fed back to them. Useful for a misplaced hair or an unseemly boogar
• Twenty “computers” are crunching this data in order to make it usable

On the HQ side:

• Only used on two out of 40-something total camera feeds that CNN has
• The delay is either minimal, or we’ve gotten used to satellite delay that we don’t even notice now
• An array of computers takes the crunched info feed from the subject’s side in order to mesh it with the video from Wolf’s side.
• Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the images are actually “projected” onto the floor of the CNN studio so that Wolf can actually talk to the person, you know, in a face to face. So it’s not quite Star Wars just yet. Only after computers merge the video feeds together do you get a coherent hologram + person scenario.

Virtual presence applications for TV media conjure up images of virtual world avatars. The symbolism of TV celebs as avatars is consistent with the idea that in the future everybody will be represented by a variety of avatars or web personas, and that constitutes the social graph.

The media buzz on Election 2008 is all about how the internet provides real time updates and commentary much faster than TV and other broadcast media:

Passing of the Torch: TV to Internet – Screenwerk

I’m Ready to Declare the Winner in the 2008 Race – Arianna Huffington (it’s the Internet)

Media groups turn on Web for Election coverage – Reuters

Viewers will be watching the races with TV and PC in tandem. TV provides the pundit and celebrity analysis, and the Internet provides the fastest updates and social commentary. The Internet commentary is often punctuated with comic interpretation of what the TV networks are showing (see Election.Twitter.com to see amusing reactions from the masses).

Tom Steinert Threlkeld @ ZDNet blog Between the Lines is conducting an informal poll:

Here are a few more creative ways to monitor Election coverage:

Add Election results with Firefox add-on RSS Ticker – creates a “ticker tape” of real time news feeds from the online news media sources.

Google has a real time Election Gallery available for embedding into blogs. It is a cool mashup that makes a blog an Election media site so I put it up at the top of this post. Every election monitoring application should have such a simple embed to proliferate their brand.

Love the White Oprah comment by Palin/Fey… I’m assuming she would enjoy being a talk show host more than being a governor.

Note: NBC has their content distribution act together by allowing anybody to embed their videos from their video library. ABC and CBS have yet to follow suit.

Tonight’s SNL appearance of Sarah Palin has all the trappings of being a historic media event combining politics and laughs. The East Coast has the advantage as YouTube devotees set up their vidcams in front of their TVs at 11:30EDT for “taping” and subsequent posting on YouTube. The winners are rewarded with lots of traffic to their YouTube site.

This simple news-gathering linkbaiting strategy will snowball into a massive social media trend – “everybody media” – where individuals seek to become go-to news sources.

I’m hoping that SNL plays it straight up and provides Palin with a script that has her do Weekend Update impersonating Tina Fey’s role.

UPDATE 10/18/08 9:30pm PDT: Huffington Post posts Sarah Palin on SNL, who is getting uniformly poor reviews on Election.Twitter.com. What a wasted opportunity for both NBC and Palin… just see how Obama and McCain shine as comedians in their own right in the previous article Obama and McCain do Stand-Up.

YouTube got it up within a few hours of the Al Smith Foundation dinner:

Update 10/16/08 11:30pm PDT: Steven Weber at Huffington Post agrees with me that this funny John McCain is the way he should have run his candidacy. Fire his handlers! Al Gore had the same “serious” problem in 2000, and we found out he was funny too.

The debate reactions are more transparent with real time polling on CNN by their pundits and by commentary from Election Twitter and Friendfeed 2008 Elections. The effect of real time feedback is the immediate dissection of the debate second by second instead of waiting for pundits to interpret it for us later.

Election 2008 permanently changes the political landscape by giving the public voice, in theory, equal footing with the mass media. With the social media, ordinary folks like Joe the Plumber can become instantly famous (h/t Duncan Riley The Inquisitr)

We Westcoasters get a full three hours of excellent Tina Fey reviews on Twitter before SNL airs in California…

What NBC should do: Start advertising your shows in real time with scrolling Twitter quotes in a :15 second spot. I’m certainly tuning in.