No matter which presidential candidate is elected on Nov. 4, there’s already a clear winner in the 2008 campaign season - Nate Silver, 30, the founder of polling analysis Web site FiveThirtyEight.com. (Poll analysis sites put new spin on statistics)

While Nate Silver was out there raising the bar, dozens, possibly hundreds, of other journalistically minded programmers, database experts, spreadsheet wizards, interaction designers, and infographic artists have worked tirelessly to generate insight and find truth amidst tidal waves of data surging through the super-pressured news cycles. Media historians will, I hope, notice that this election was the one when substantial, sophisticated data analysis and presentation grabbed hold of the conversation and became established social currency.

It’s hard to gauge what the world will look like on November 5. When you do something that has never been done before, you’re changed. Beat political reporters, the ones authoring post-election stories, will try to capture that feeling. The computer jockeys who have created this new world of journalism will live it. And they will, I expect, take their heightened skills, insight, and prominence and go after the next frontier in computing and journalism. That’s because they can’t stop. They don’t get to, at least not for long. While the political beat cycles down and its reporters enjoy extended down time, the lower profile computer folks will head back to their laptops and workstations to continue the revolution they’ve started.

To the computational journalists who worked so hard during this year’s election, thank you.

Last week, for instance, a cluster of articles on gay marriages in California included those from major national and California outlets, like The Los Angeles Times, The San Jose Mercury News and The New York Times. It also included an opinion piece from a radio news service in West Virginia that was critical of gay marriage.

“I don’t think it is a negative that they have this kind of diversity in the news,” said Danny Sullivan, a search expert and editor of the Web site Search Engine Land. “With the diversity can come weird stuff.”

Google said that juxtaposing various viewpoints is part of the appeal of Google News. “If you see opposing points of view battling it out, it makes you wake up and think,” said Krishna Bharat, the research scientist who created Google News. “That’s what makes people news junkies.”

The machinery that runs Google News is, when viewed positively, a solid success. The diversity of stories mentioned in the article equates with the sophistication of the algorithms being deployed. The information density for the word- and number-filled, single-page interface runs very high, no accident when it’s free of real estate-hogging video. And given that the design serves viewers mostly at one-page intervals, news.google.com still ranks Number 8 among all news sites.

The Times, however, presents a less rosy perspective on Google News, pointing out that other, higher-ranking news sites geared towards multi-page views and showcasing multimedia (like Yahoo! News, MSNBC, and nytimes.com) have grown much faster over the past few years.

It’s worth noting that the NY Times is currently hiring a range of journalistically-inclined software developers. Since June 15 the company has posted jobs on Monster.com for:

• Software Engineer-FEEDS
• Associate Technical Writer
• Interface Engineer
• Technical Project Manager
• Online News Designer
• Design Technologist
• Information Architect
• Software Developer-Content Management Systems

The Public Health Editor will be responsible for writing weekly articles which cover the latest discussions and topics related to public health and human rights in the developing world …

More.

A recent post outlines his upcoming plans and he asks for suggestions. Please give him your help. And somebody give him a raise.

So even as humanity is in the midst of conducting the vast “geophysical experiment” of rapidly altering the global greenhouse, a growing array of people — scientists, communicators and campaigners in their various realms — are also experimenting with new ways to consider and respond to this problem (or issue, in the parlance of the White House).

Dot Earth has greatly lengthened my workday, eating up time that could be spent reporting stories for the printed paper (or being with family and friends). But I believe it’s unavoidable, necessitated by the nature of our times, in which complexity and uncertainty shape events as much as the things we understand well. The days when the media could do their job by summarizing developments of the day — epitomized by the reassuring Walter Cronkite signoff, “And that’s the way it is” — are long gone.

That said, I will be shifting a bit more of my workday back into reporting and writing for print in the coming months, so my post rhythm here may slow a bit. Themes I’ll be exploring, both on the Web and in the paper, include the question of whether the next (and necessary) green revolution can be “green” in the environmental sense. I’d be happy to hear from you on that.

I’d first thought that Joe Gregorio’s Sparkline Generator (http://bitworking.org/projects/sparklines/) would kickstart widespread use of the in-line, word-size info graphs back when he introduced his webservice in 2005 (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/06/22/sparklines.html). The original idea goes back to a May 2004 Ask E.T. post by Edward Tufte (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR).