Twitter’s 140-character limit is a blessing and a curse–for the former, it can stop people from going on for too long about something. And that’s something that politicians are known for. So in a way, an interview with a politician conducted entirely over Twitter almost makes sense. Almost.
The McCain-Palin campaign fire-sale dumped a bunch of orphaned BlackBerrys, including at least one loaded with confidential personal numbers of important people, and a ton of internal campaign email. These were the people who were planning on running an entire country.
Thanks to the Web, 2008 marks a high point in the level of engagement between American voters and their presidential candidates. As Arianna Huffington declared yesterday, “I am ready to declare a winner in the 2008 race. The Internet.” On Election Day itself, that statement is more apt than ever. Sites like fivethirtyeight.com and politicalwire.com will provide virtually up-to-the-minute numbers on every race. It’s a level of immediacy that was hard to imagine before now–but it’s also hard to imagine we ever had it any other way.
Have you voted? Are you having problems voting? Are the lines at your polling station short or long? Let your fellow voters know via Twitter Vote Report. The site will aggregate all tagged tweets (use #votereport) and share the results publicly. The tweets are being analyzed and displayed on maps. Waiting times are also being plotted and analyzed.
I am not at all concerned about the Bradley effect–the theory that secretly racist white people tell pollsters they’ll vote for a black candidate like Barack Obama but will actually pull the lever for a white one like John McCain. I am, however, deeply worried about the Urkel effect, which holds that voters leaning toward Obama will walk into the voting booth and suddenly think, I cannot take four years of listening to that giant-eared nerd.
Campaign promises are one thing, a proven track record is another matter entirely. Unlike any other candidate in the race for the White House–Republican or Democrat–John McCain’s long U.S. Senate career leaves little doubt about the technology direction of a McCain presidency.
Voters who use only a wireless phone are being undercounted by political pollsters. Given that these voters skew young, that young voters (according to USA Today) favor Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 61 to 32 percent, and that many polls don’t include wireless phones in their samples, it seems there would be a discrepancy in poll results–leaning toward the Republican hemisphere. Don’t forget to vote, my friends.
Barack Obama says that the U.S. is not doing nearly enough to create jobs through technology. Shortly after he launched his campaign, the Illinois senator promised that if elected, he would create the first-ever Cabinet-level post of chief technology officer.
When the e-commerce giant eBay emerged from the last recession seven years ago with an aura of invincibility, its chief executive, Meg Whitman, boasted that “eBay is to some extent recession-proof.”
As the online auctioneer’s revenues and stock price kept climbing, one of its primary rivals, Amazon.com, just limped along. How times have changed.
Spammers prefer Sen. Barack Obama (D., Ill.) over his rival, Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), by landslide-like numbers.
Sen. John McCain’s snub of David Letterman last week may have deprived the “Late Show” host of some needed star power last week, but it’s given him a hit on the Web.
Turns out we’re not the only ones who’ve been inspired by John McCain’s brilliant idea to suspend his campaign to focus on the economic crisis. The cranks at Twitter are doing the same thing, using “#suspending”–a “hash tag” Twitterers use to track a meme.
Yeah, it’s silly season, all right.
At a press conference this morning, a top aide to GOP presidential nominee John McCain was asked about the candidate’s computer illiteracy, the subject of a recent attack ad by the Obama campaign.
On Aug. 14th, just 82 days before the general election, John McCain released his technology platform, an extraordinarily important document, if only because of the extraordinary importance technology has to the Nation’s economy.
Political pundits speculating on whether Carly Fiorina could end up on the Republican presidential ticket with John McCain have quickly dismissed the former Hewlett-Packard chief as a long shot, given her scant experience in politics.
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