Dear Colleagues,

On September 23rd, the US Election 2008 Web Monitor has been awarded the First Prize in the category "Online Communities, Web 2.0 and Social Networks" of the Austrian National Award for Multimedia and e-Business (photos and press release at www.ecoresearch.net/election2008/download). After investigating candidate performance during the primaries and continuously refining the analyses, we took this opportunity to re-launch the Web site at www.ecoresearch.net/election2008. The project now focuses on the presidential candidates and their running mates (including the Green Party's presidential ticket of McKinney/Clemente), collects environmental quotes, supplements the analytical tools with semantic and geospatial interfaces, and includes two social media applications built upon the Facebook platform.

With the first Facebook application, you can support and track your preferred candidate. The second application called 'Sentiment Quiz' follows the tradition of games with a purpose by inviting Facebook users and their network of online friends to evaluate whether quotes from an archive of election-related documents express positive or negative sentiment. By leveraging the "wisdom of the crowds", we hope to gain new insights into the phenomenon of hostile media effects, a term that describes the different perception and interpretation of content depending on the reader's own value system.

We would like to thank the active participants in the Sentiment Quiz and hope that you will find the Election Monitor's new functionality useful for tracking the candidates in the remaining weeks of the presidential race.

With best regards,
Your ECOresearch Team

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UPCOMING EVENTS
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September 30, 2008
Electing the US President: Do New Media, Blogs and the Net Make a Difference?
A Presentation by Steven Clemons Venue: MODUL University Vienna
http://www.modul.ac.at/nmt/0809-presentation-steven-clemons
Celebrating the accreditation of the MBA Program in New Media Technology & Management, the Embassy of the United States of America and MODUL University Vienna cordially invite you to a presentation by Steven Clemons, Senior Fellow and Director of the American Strategy Program and Publisher of “The Washington Note”.

October 05, 2008
IUCN World Conservation Congress
http://cms.iucn.org/news_events/events/congress/
Venue: Spain, Barcelona
More than 8,000 of the world’s leading decision makers in sustainable development: from governments, NGOs, business, the UN and academia. Together in one place for 10 days: to debate, share, network, learn, commit, vote and decide. The objective: ideas, action and solutions for a diverse and sustainable world.

November 02, 2008
Climate 2008 Online Conference
http://www.klima2008.net/
Venue: Germany, Hamburg
Although climate change is regarded as a critical issue and sound scientific knowledge is needed in order to address the problem in a holistic way, there is a paucity of events focusing on the different aspects of climate change. Therefore, an Internet-based (and therefore largely CO2-neutral) scientific event concerned with approaches, methods, strategies, and other types of action needed in order to cope with the challenge of climate change, is a welcome development.

January 04, 2009
Minitrack on Information Systems and Sustainable Development
http://www.ecoresearch.net/hicss-42
Venue: United States, Hawaii, Waikoloa
The Minitrack on Information Systems and Sustainable Development at the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences emphasizes the significant synergies that exist between information systems and sustainability research from an organizational as well as a technical perspective. Collaboration and cross-fertilization between these domains can be mutually beneficial and present unique, timely and socially relevant ‘real-world’ research opportunities as well as viable public sources of empirical ecological information for interdisciplinary research and application.

February 24, 2009
Energy and Environment
http://www.wi2009.at/track35_engl.html
Venue: Austria, 1010, Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring 1
The Energy and Environment Track at the 9th International Conference on Business Informatics (WI-2009) focuses on two major influences increasingly changing energy markets and their value chains: Liberalization, which is particularly driven by European regulation ("legal unbundling"), and decentralized, regenerative power generation in order to meet the political aims regarding climate change. These changes affect market participants and their IT infrastructure.