Globe's Live Election Results Dashboard powered by the Open Web

The election results are in for Canada.

But how did those results come in for the growing number of Canadians that don’t have televisions or radios in their homes? That’s what I was curious about on Monday night when I started to review what each of Canada’s national news organizations was up to online.

Social media was a big source, obviously – possibly the primary source for many? – and lots has already been said about it. Most interesting for the social media channels is Canada’s curious rules about reporting on the election, which are easy to run foul of, it seems.)

However, I wanted to look at what was being offered up on Canada’s national news Web sites. Specifically, how each organization approach the information design, the tension between live results and background stories, and what Web technologies they employed behind the scenes. It’s quite educational.

I should probably put together a little chart of features and a ranking for how well they were implemented, but that would possibly require some real effort, and everyone knows that I’m pretty lazy. But, hey, who knows!

Either way, I did want to highlight the excellent work by the team at The Globe & Mail online. The Globe’s “Live Election Results Dashboard” is a study in well-presented data. It’s not only easy to read, but it’s delivered using only the basic building blocks of the open Web – HTML & JavaScript – making it just as useful on my tablet or smart phone, as it is on my laptop.

I’ll be following up with colleagues there to get the full breakdown, but it looks like they converted the live results into a JSON feed that they then used to update the pages in real-time.

Classy.

What election-night Web site(s) did you rely on for results?