One of the biggest complaints about Twitter is that its 140-character limit is simply not enough to say what you need to say sometimes. Of course, this limit works both ways–it can also 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.

And that’s exactly what ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos is planning to do next week. On Tuesday, Stephanopoulos will interview senator and former presidential candidate John McCain for his show, “This Week.” To conduct what the network is calling the first “twitterview,” both the questions and answers will be sent out via Twitter, bound by the 140 character limit.

Read the rest of this post

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.

“Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.

And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 BlackBerry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.”

Read the rest of this post

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 the 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.

Here’s a quick index of AllThingsD’s digital-eye view of the fracas:

• An overview of the tech policies of both candidates.
• Election in your pocket: Walt Mossberg discovered Election ’08, a data-packed app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that uses an algorithmic calculation of who’s winning in each state based on multiple available polls.

Some would argue that this race could be decided by viral video campaigns, rather than strictly political ones. Here is the evidence:

• “Saturday Night Live” was the heavy hitter here, and it was kind of a toss-up whether John McCain and Sarah Palin’s respective appearances trumped the outright parodies of each one.
• Then there was Hollywood’s ironic plea not to vote.
• And Google’s plea (with help from The Donald) to employers for a “Vote Hour.”
• No one came close to Sarah Silverman in terms of outright exhortation, though.

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.

Read the rest of this post

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. Because people are starting to realize that Obama is not all that cool. He’s earnest like C-3PO, emotionless like Spock, overly practical like Encyclopedia Brown and incredibly skinny like C-3PO, Spock and Encyclopedia Brown.

Read the rest of this post

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.

With 20 years of service in the Senate, the 70-year-old Arizona Republican has spent much of that time as a member of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, where the majority of technology bills originate. Over the course of his congressional career, McCain has cast votes on tech-related bills since the early days of dial-up Internet connections.

With votes on tech bills and issues going to back to 1986, McCain has staked out clear positions on network neutrality, H-1B visas, free trade and Internet taxes. While he has long cultivated an image as a maverick, when it comes to technology issues, he rarely strays from the GOP tech policy position books.

Read the rest of this post

Some political pollsters appear to be undercounting the support for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama by not including people who have only wireless phones, Bernstein Research analysts Craig Moffett and Patricia Pan in a research piece today.

The Bernstein analysts note that according to a December 2007 survey conducted by the Center for Disease Control, about 16 percent of Americans now have only wireless phones, and no landlines. That group tends to skew young: The CDC found that a third of the population 18-29 years old have only wireless devices. The analysts note as well that “there is compelling evidence that younger voters”–those most likely to have only wireless phones–strongly favor Obama. They note a USA Today/MTV/Gallup poll that found 18-29 year old voters support Obama over Republican John McCain by 61 percent to 32 percent.

A Pew Research Center study on the topic of wireless bias, they add, found that the cellphone-only population preferred Obama over McCain by 55-36 percent.

Read the rest of this post

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. The economic crisis has since made it certain that a White House CTO would become one of Obama’s most important advisers, should he triumph in November.

Read the rest of this post

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.

Ms. Whitman, now co-chair of Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, retired from eBay earlier this year as the company struggled with stagnation. Amazon, meanwhile, has emerged as one of the most vibrant and reliable retailers in the country.

Read the rest of this post

Spammers prefer Sen. Barack Obama (D., Ill.) over his rival, Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), by landslide-like numbers. According to Secure Computing Corp., spammers were nearly seven times more likely to slap Obama’s name in the subject line than McCain’s during September. The bulk of Obama’s lead in the spam wars came from a massive blitz early in the month.

Read the rest of this post

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. So far, video of Mr. Letterman’s tirade against Mr. McCain, who bowed out the day of the telecast, has generated more than 3.5 million views on YouTube.

Read the rest of this post

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.

Read the rest of this post

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.

In response, top aide Douglas Holtz-Eakin waved his BlackBerry at reporters.

“He did this,” Holtz-Eakin said, according to Politico. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

Read the rest of this post

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. This platform touted John McCain’s experience. It described him as the former chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, a committee that plays a major role in the development of technology policy. And indeed for much of the last decade, John McCain has led the most important committee in Congress dealing with Internet and technology matters. But that experience, in my view, brings with it a certain responsibility. For the single most important fact about the Internet’s development over the last decade has been the extraordinary decline the United States has faced compared to our competitors.

Read the rest of this post

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. And Fiorina’s recent gaffes–apparently not knowing the Arizona senator’s voting record–show she still has a lot to learn since bursting onto the national political scene several months ago as one of McCain’s top economic advisors.

Read the rest of this post