It will also be illegal for any citizen, journalist or not, to tweet or blog or post something on a Facebook wall about the election results, until all the polls are shut.

Ordinary citizens aren’t immune. In 2000, Elections Canada brought charges against a Vancouver blogger and software designer named Paul Bryan after he dared to publish election results from Atlantic Canada on his small-audience blog. Bryan was fined $1,000. He fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds, with major media outlets from across the country joining his battle. It did no good. In 2007, by a vote of 5-4, the court upheld Bryan’s conviction, and Section 329.

The four minority judges were passionate in their dissent.

By Paula Simons in “Ban on Twitter, Facebook election-night posts draconian“, April 20, 2011

This election will be tweeted. I’m hopeful that Elections Canada will act appropriately, by not acting. Then the newly elected government can fix these laws.

Now, I’m taking another look. Why? Because of the WordPress Prologue Theme.

If you haven’t heard about Prologue, it’s WordPress theme that people are calling a twitter for groups, created by the Automattic team: Matt, Joseph, and MT. It is available on WordPress.com or you can download it for your own WordPress install.

I’ll admit I thought it was a lot of excitement over nothing, but my nay saying didn’t diminish Matt’s enthusiasm. Then he announced Prologue, and everyone was really excited about it! The titles of the articles are quite telling, here are a few:

• Twitter – Public Timeline = Prologue
• WordPress’s Prologue: part Twitter, part Basecamp, all business
• Prologue: Twitter for WordPress for Groups
• Will Prologue bring the Twitters back?
• Prologue/WordPress–Private Twitter II

Still I didn’t get it, until I really started to use it. Now, after using it these last couple of months did, I couldn’t live without our private Prologue for sharing with the Automattic team and even more important keeping up with what they are working on and ideas they are playing with. As MT describes it:

Prologue was designed for something different—easily setting up and sharing a dialogue within a fixed group. It puts aside the standard “behind the scenes” method of blogging and makes the act of posting part of the experience. It creates a kind of archived and searchable conversation, like an IM window that’s archived, taggable, and accessible from any web browser.

Every team or group needs a prologue to share tidbits of what you are working on, without the pressure. Is there a similar tool you use?

This is why I’m now turning to Twitter and family to see what use I can make of them.