Tag: POLITICS

Look, we don't know where you live. But statistically speaking, there's a pretty good chance that if you're in the US, your state is holding a primary election tomorrow. And if you still haven't decided who you're going to vote for, what better way to research the candidates than by watching YouTube videos? Yeah, we're not entirely convinced either. But Google has slapped together a Super ...

It's not as if politics and Twitter are new to each other, but it probably hasn't ever looked this nice. Politweets keeps pulse on where the buzz is in politics, specifically this year's election and the candidates involved. As tweets flit back and forth among the people of Twitter, Politweets scoops out the tweets that contain the name of candidates and throws them up: to the left for Democrats, ...

What do you get when you mix user-submitted video, the news judgement of NPR, and user-community of seemingly all single, unmarried, childless democrats? Well, in a word: Current.tv. This cable channel wasn't so much news as reality video, and it was created to compete for mind share with XBox and YouTube, not with CNN and Fox News. Developed by Al Gore, the TV network was ridiculed early on for ...

A fellow running for office in Rockingham, North Carolina recently discovered the dark side of YouTube content-producer rights. Essentially--there are none. The guy made a political advertisement, which, due to its Star Wars parody content, was a natural fit for posting on YouTube. Some time later, Viacom used the clip in a program that aired on VH1. Feeling more than a little slighted, the guy ...

In politics, candidates have to contend with big money, big labor, big special interest groups, big corporate, big media, and now, they have the mother lode of all bigs to exploit contend with - netroots. Netroots is derived from grassroots + internet to describe a new brand of political activism organized through blogs and other online media, including wikis and social network services. With ...

Interestingly, dirty campaign tactics are now de rigeur for virtual communites as in real life. The blogosphere is all a twitter about a recent defilement of John Edwards 08 headquarters in Second Life. It seems a group of Republican marauders vandalized the Edwards' campaign headquarters and even went so low as to put the candidate in blackface. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. When will those Republicans ever ...

If you are hankering to become a policy wonk and find yourself glued to C-SPAN and all things political, you might be interested in OpenCongress.org, a website with all the tools to launch you into political wonkdom. The site is devoted to bringing transparency to government and features a one stop shop for information on bills, related news articles and blog coverage. It is a free, open ...

When politics and computing mix, the results aren't usually pretty. Politicians have fundamental misunderstandings about computing, the internet and how computers and people interact; a fault which often causes them to enact useless or even harmful legislation. Senator Sam Brownback is pushing a bill that would force the people who rate video games to play the full game in order to render a ...

Who says software and politics don't mix? Google has released an update to Google Earth that adds a "2006 US Election Guide" layer to the cross-platform mapping app. The new layer includes two sub-layers: a "US Election Guide," which adds useful voting information like links to voter registration info for each state, and "US Congressional Districts," which, in case you hadn't guessed, outlines the ...

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, or USCC, is calling for an investigation into Lenovo, the Chinese company which bought IBM's PC arm last year, before the State Department closes a $13 million deal to buy 15,000 Lenovo PCs. The USCC wants to be assured that the Chinese computers, which are built in Mexico and North Carolina with components manufactured in Taiwan, are not ...

In December 1990 there was a single web site on the Internet, and by the end of 1991 that figured had jumped to ten. Today there are millions of sites and billions of pages, and the web is a universe unto itself. It's impossible for any one person to keep track of even one percent of the interesting stuff happening on the web, but still we try until our favorites folders are overflowing, our ...