Must Be Election Time, Google Releases The 2008 Election Gadget

Here is a gadget that is bound to be near the top of the Gadget World, at least for the next year or maybe just 11 months.

Google has released an Gadget designed specifically to keep you updated on the very latest election news on you home page based on your geographic location. The LatLong blog predicts that more than 100 million Americans will be logging on to the internet to get their election coverage, and I bet a good percentage will be depending on this gadget for their news.

Word is that the Gadget created during the latest Australian elections were very, very popular.

Check out what the Blogger World is saying about the gadget:

Google LatLong: Google presents the Elections 2008 gadget:

With the 2008 presidential election just around the corner, political news is continuing to grow more important to U.S. voters. In fact, more than a third of Americans (that's more than 100 million people!) are expected to turn to the Internet for their election information in the coming year.

To make accessing this information easier, we have created an elections gadget that will help people stay up-to-date on the latest campaign maps, news, videos and blog posts from the election trail. Add the gadget to your iGoogle homepage to follow the race. You can choose the candidates you want to follow, or keep tabs on them all.

Make sure to check out the maps tab of this gadget to view candidate event trails. Try searching for your own city or state to see which presidential hopeful will be campaigning near you!

WebProNews - Google Launches Elections 2008 Gadget:

Like it or not, the 2008 presidential election is approaching, and should you be in that first category, Google is ready to keep you informed with a new Elections 2008 gadget.

At this point in the year, I’m more in the mood for a Santa tracker than American politics. Still, choosing someone to run our country for four years is an undeniably important process, so it’s good to see Google paying some attention to the issue.

“[S]tay up-to-date on the latest campaign maps, news, videos and blog posts from the election trail,” encouraged Brittany Bohnet on the Google LatLong Blog. “Add the gadget to your iGoogle homepage to follow the race. You can choose the candidates you want to follow, or keep tabs on them all.”

Also, “Make sure to check out the maps tab of this gadget to view candidate event trails. Try searching for your own city or state to see which presidential hopeful will be campaigning near you!”

Expect to see a lot more stuff like this coming from Google - it had an absolute overload of tools related to the Australia’s recent elections, and the company is, of course, based in the U.S. Also, Bohnet’s title provides a clue; she probably wouldn’t be the Elections Project Manager if one gadget was the end of things.

PC World - Google Launches iGoogle Elections Gadget:

Google Inc. this week released an elections gadget that it said is designed to help iGoogle users stay up to date with the latest political news.

Brittany Bohnet, Google's elections project manager, estimated in a blog post that more than a third of American, or more than 100 million people, will turn to the Internet for election information in the coming year.

The Elections 2008 gadget aims to help iGoogle users more easily follow the news by aggregating campaign maps, news, videos and blog posts related to the election.

"You can choose the candidates you want to follow, or keep tabs on them all," Bohnet wrote. "Make sure to check out the maps tab of this gadget to view candidate event trails. Try searching for your own city or state to see which presidential hopeful will be campaigning near you."

This ramping up of focus on the U.S. election follows a similar effort by Google to help Australian users keep up with political news prior to the federal elections held there on Nov. 24. The Google election site there provided users with maps showing electorate boundaries, along with detail of each post up for election.

Google created several iGoogle gadgets for the Australian election site, including one to help users search for statements made by current members of parliament and another to let users search news and query volumes to see what issues were most significant to voters. Another gadget delivered news and videos from a user's specific electoral seat directly to users individual iGoogle pages.

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