How to volunteer to help process election data

Now that the 2024 US election results have been certified by the states, those results have been made available to the public through the state election offices, usually part of the Secretary of State for each state. A non-profit, Open Elections, has been working for over a decade to collect and make US election data publicly available for academic and political analysis.

I am helping again with my home state of Oregon. For many counties throughout the US, the county election office releases a PDF file of results for each precinct. Open Elections depends on volunteers to process these files and create files in Comma Separated Value (CSV) format. The files are reviewed and then committed to a GitHub repository organized by state. Some counties also make results available directly in CSV format, but not many. Fortunately, there are several tools that can be used to capture data from PDFs in a table format (Tabula, a Java application, and Microsoft Excel). I have been using Excel this time, and it is working well for me (Tabula would not run on my Windows 11 laptop).

For more information on how to help, check out their documentation site (a little dated, still refers to 2020 election, but there is work going on for 2024 results). I feel like I am doing something positive as opposed to just feeling bad about the 2024 presidential election results. Take a look!

The end of podcasting, chapter 64

My last post in this series was in April 2024, so I have not touched this topic in a while (although I have been writing about podcasting and some issues with WordPress podcast feeds). However, in the November 2024 issue of New York magazine, an article called “How YouTube Ate Podcasting” appeared, which sounds ominous, so let’s check it out…

The pull-quotes seems to be that podcasting is moving from audio to video:

A lot has changed for podcasting in two decades, but one shift is both underrecognized and obvious: It’s not really an audio medium anymore….YouTube, typically known as the go-to platform for video content, has risen to the top as the most popular service used for podcast listening in the U.S….The trend is more pronounced among younger listeners, Edison says, citing research from earlier this year, which found that “84 percent of Gen Z monthly podcast listeners … listen to or watch podcasts with a video component.”

So – younger “podcast listeners” are “watching” more “podcasts” instead of “listening” to “podcasts”. I am using “podcasts” in quotes here, because the podcasts in question are YouTube videos. However, they are discoverable in podcast apps like PocketCasts, and there are tutorials for how to construct a RSS feed URL for a YouTube channel.

Maybe part of the problem is in the creation part, says Chuck Shotton (via Dave Winer):

Posting a video to Youtube is infinitely easier for a lot of people than understanding how to publish a podcast. That’s really the gist of it. Any dingdong with a phone camera can be a YouTube star.

So, yes, recording a video and posting it to YouTube is a skill that many people have nowadays -but is that “eating podcasting”? Is that keeping people from creating new audio podcasts? No (using WordPress is pretty simple). Is that preventing people from listening to audio podcasts in the way that they have been? No. Is it providing an easier way for people to monetize their “podcasts” using the tools that YouTube has set up? Ah, now I think we are getting closer to the nut of “How YouTube Ate Podcasting” (see “Money makes the world go ’round“). People who want to make money from podcasts definitely could be moving to YouTube to do this, as well as other services (see chapters 57, 58, and 59). However, I think the thing to do is to make great things and find ways to innovate. Let’s get out there and compete people – come on!

Followup on creating WordPress podcast feeds

In November 2024, I wrote a post about an issue I discovered in trying to create a WordPress category feed for a set of audio posts. The category feed had issues in being recognized by a podcast app. I found that when I set the post type/format as “Audio” in the WordPress editor, the category feed could be recognized by a podcast app.

Last month, I noticed a tweet by Ken Smith that some WordPress themes do not have the support in the editor interface for the post type/format. He linked to a video (shown at the end of this post) showing how to modify WordPress files to add this feature to a theme if not present. I checked some of my older WordPress websites, and found that several of them had this issue. I appreciate Ken bringing this to a wider attention.