Election Gets Serious, Bored Audiences Want Fun. What to Do? Check This Roundup

There are lots and lots of ways to keep up with tonight’s town hall between John McCain and Barack Obama.

You could watch on TV, of course, but what fun is that? Here are a few suggestions to make your viewing experience more engaging:

• Graphic designer Erica Smith, whose creative and prolific mind has come up with the oft-cited Paper Cuts newspaper layoffs mashup, has just launched Presidential Bingo. Pick your candidate or pundit and mark away.
• CurrentTV is again airing Hack the Debate. Watch on cable or online. If you’re on Twitter, include the hashtag #current somewhere in your message (at the end is good) and it’ll show up on the broadcast.
• Update: NPR has two engagement efforts on Twitter tonight:
  Fact check the debate: Think one of the candidates is wrong? Find a source that proves it and tweet the URL with the #factcheck hashtag. You can monitor fact checking here. Need more detailed instructions? NPR’s got em.
  Rate the Debate: Send a Twitter message with the hashtag #dialtest and monitor one of two ways: verbally and graphically on Plodt.

  To participate:

  1. Follow Plodt on Twitter.

  2. Tweet about the debate, ranking the candidates’ performance on a scale of 1 to 10. For instance:
  Let me be clear, I’m ambivalent. *Obama 5.3*

  If they use the words Main Street one more time, I’m going to slit my wrists. *McCain 1* *Obama 1*

  Take that, non-maverick! *McCain 6*

  There are further details on these projects if you need them.

• For more fact checking, PolitiFact.com, the Washington Posts’s Fact Checker live blog, which begins at 9 p.m. ET, and the post-debate wrap at FactCheck.org look promising.

Even if you can’t be at Belmont University, you can still be part of the action. Enjoy!

One for Fun: Predict Who Wins the White House

While election coverage may be on hiatus, speculation on who will be our next president is about to run wild.

Sean Connelley of the Los Angeles Times created an interactive, embeddable map that lets you test different electoral vote scenarios.

Think Wisconsin will go to McCain? Click and the state turns red. Believe the die-hard Democrats and progressives will come out in force? Click again and the state turns blue.

Assign a color based on which way you think each state will go, then click “share” and embed the map anywhere to trumpet your predictive prowess or just show what it will take for Obama or McCain to get into the Oval Office.

Politics may be serious business, but as the jockeying during primaries has proven, it’s also a bit of a game.