A new way of covering elections?

I was privately quite excited by the notion of letting bloggers lose on election coverage, sadly though, despite Luke Akehurst promising: "I'll colour your bland bits, alright" he didn't really seem to be given the chance. And they didn't break any stories and the BBCs 'Emily's Election' blog is more like a report from a celebrity shindig than an innovative way to talk about an election, and it is dashed hard to find.

Most interesting for me is what Iain Dale is up to, I loved the twitters last night; where else could you find the comments "Emily Maitlis is a very funny (and rather beautiful) lady. I am very lucky to be spending the night with her" and "Michael Portillo is sitting on a sofa reading a book, not deigning to talk to anyone". Perhaps that was the real value of it all, the perspective from behind the scenes.

More seriously is Iain's updates all day from the Mayoral count: unsurprisingly he tips Boris to win, but evidence suggests he may be right (if so how is that for a turn around in image and he failure of negativity). His updates are on his blog here. It should get more interesting as the day goes on.

The serious point, the updates are perhaps the best thing. While election coverage is very formulaic and attempts to be entertaining and dramatic (though Jeremy Vine's antics last night were cringeworthy only); those who do watch til the last result crawls in really want results as they happen. Perhaps the twittering of elections is the future and we can all get the results on our laptops, palmtops and PDAs and make our own assessments. Perhaps also it gives more chance for those who want to, to comment themselves via their own blogs, other's blogs or news pages: could it just get a few more people watching elections.