Latest by CGrant: I'm pretty bi-partisan when it comes to hilary and obama, but I must say she deserved it. I'm not hateful and I don't hate her but after hearing about all of the crap (propaganda, even hacking Obama's sites), I find more »
In the clip embedded below, an Obama supporter demonstrates how "someone hacked into Barack Obama's site" and changed a link into Obama's Community Blogs so that it instead directs users to Hillary Clinton's home page. We're shocked. Obama's Web presence is the product of Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes. Anyone familiar with that platform knows it's entirely resilient to human error or internal corruption. The video demonstrating the hack:
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Latest by bbucy: I'm sure the group will be full of people who have callouses on their hands, a back bent from lifting crates all day and a rosy outlook on life. Hi ho. more »
In the real world, politics are complicated. On the Web, things seem reassuringly simple, though. Take the Democratic campaign: Polls show Barack Obama ahead, but he doesn't have the necessary delegates to force Hillary Clinton to drop out. Web-traffic analyst Matt Pace of Compete.com believes he has the internet traffic stats to prove that Obama is a shoo-in.
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In a survey that found Obama and McCain in a dead heat among IT professionals, Clinton and Huckabee came in a surprisingly close second for both parties. The methodology seems suspect: Where were the Ron Paul supporters? [PC World]
MSNBC.com streamed Obama's speech on race in America live on its website today. Naturally, MSNBC ran some advertising along with the stream, but it wasn't the smartest product placement. Have a look:
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The Valley, despite the pretensions of some tech bloggers, has no influence on national politics. Candidates swing by, mutter "network neutrality" and other shibboleths, collect buckets of cash, and return to Washington richer but otherwise unchanged. This sad reality explains why we indulge ourselves in fantasies that we're run by aliens or robots. Those are politicians we could actually relate to. That's right: If Ron Paul supporters believed Obama was a Borg drone, they'd be more likely to vote for him.
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Latest by n/a: ... of course, McCain has always been obvious : [metamerist.com] more »
Mitt Romney, my choice for president, "suspended" his campaign today. More disappointing? Dave Winer, who will never, ever let you forget his pioneering role in blogging, will continue to blather on about the election in his Twitter feed for months and months. Dude, we get it. You like Obama.
Amber Lee Ettinger, better known as Obama Girl from YouTube's "I Got a Crush ... on Obama," did not vote for Barack Obama yesterday. Or anybody. "I didn't get a chance to vote because I'm not registered to vote in New York," Amber Lee Ettinger told the New York Times. So why didn't vote in New Jersey, where she is registered? "I was in Arizona for the Super Bowl — every time I get in the airplane I get sick," Ettinger told Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee — as they spoke at the Svedka Fembot election returns party in Chinatown Tuesday night.
Latest by bbfreak: Yeah, voting is so freaking hard, I mean you can't always be expected to show up to vote on a certain date! I mean its not like there are months and months to get everything sorted out and absentee ballots. more »
The top ten employers in California congressional District 15 include Cisco, Stanford, HP, Lockheed Martin, IBM, Intel and Google. Here's a hearty congratulations to the 9,388 of you voted for John Edwards. Good job. Too bad he isn't running for president anymore. Absentee voting by mail, a popular option in California, likely explains their votes. Another 8,104 of you voted for a guy — Mike Huckabee — who thinks Noah coaxed a T-Rex on board the Ark. Next time, if you want to participate in civic affairs, why not spend the afternoon editing Wikipedia? Here's how the rest of Santa Clara County voted, according to the Mercury News.
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Google has banned all personal attacks from political ads running on its ad network. "'Crime rates are up under Police Commissioner Gordon 'is okay, but 'Police Commissioner Gordon had an affair' is not,' writes Peter Greenberger on the Google Public Policy blog. Which of course means if Google had its way with the rest of the world, you'd never have heard of John McCain's black baby, Hillary Clinton's cookies or Barack Obama's drug dealing. Boring!
Presidential candidate Barack Obama read the top ten list on David Letterman last night, counting down his top ten campaign promises. At No. 4: "I won't let Apple release the new and improved iPod the day after you bought the previous model." Puh-lease. It's enough to make you long for the good old days, when candidates pandered for votes in the polling booth, not on Digg.
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Senator Clinton polls higher than Senator Obama in Santa Clara County, 43 percent to 27 percent, a Clinton campaign staffer told the Wall Street Journal. But we know what really counts in Silicon Valley: money. And when it comes to raising cash, Barack Obama's winning over the tech crowd. He raised about $500,000 just last weekend at a breakfast in Atherton. Wondering who was there? Here's a list of known Silicon Valley supporters for each candidate. More »
Google, like most other search engines, tries to guess what users are searching for even as the users type their queries. These guesses are partly based on prior user searches, so they can be telling look into the popular conscience. Here, for a query begun "who," Google offers "who is barack obama." Hmm. What do the Google searchers wonder about Hillary?
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Ron Paul, inexplicably, has locked up the geek vote. The quasi-libertarian crackpot has plenty of fans, affectionately known as "Paultards," from San Francisco to the Googleplex. Add to them Digg cofounder Kevin Rose, who listed Paul and Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama as his favorite candidates. (Blogger Will Chen noted the preferences on Rose's Digg profile page.) But I'd ask this: How much is Rose's support really worth?
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The online news-voting site Digg has added a page tracking the Democratic and Republican candidates for president. Digg's a virtual unknown inside the Beltway, so the page's geek-skewed results aren't a true barometer of candidate popularity. They're more a gimmick by Digg founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose to guilt candidates into participating on their site. Predictably, the Internet's unlikely favorites lead: Barack Obama, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel on the Democratic side, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee on the Republican side. You can view the candidates' favorite Digg stories — or rather, some anonymous campaign staffers' favorite stories. The lone holdout among candidates with a real shot at the nomination? Hillary Clinton. Her lack of participation shows she understands the true value of Web 2.0 in today's presidential election: none. An image of the current "Digg the President" leaders after the jump.
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Latest by OrangeAlert: massive web support...cult following...great at money raising...i'll bet a lot of paultards were deantards a few years back.
so all we do now is sit back and wait for paul's 'YAH!' moment. more »
Eric Savitz goes through Federal Election Committee filings, picks out the top political contributors in Silicon Valley. Barack Obama gets some big names: Sequoia Capital VC Michael Moritz, Google backer Ram Shriram, and YouTube founder Chad Hurley all gave to his campaign. Sadly, no information on Ron Paul supporters. [Barrons]
Valleywag
Hillary Clinton campaign site VoteHillary.org is vulnerable to a common exploit known as cross-site scripting (XSS), as demonstrated by Finnish security specialist Harry Sintonen. He says he's not particularly interested in American politics, according to Netcraft, which first reported Sintonen's research. He was just inspired by the attack on sites maintained by the Barack Obama campaign to see if Clinton's were also vulnerable to XSS exploits. This may redefine "political hack." But any hope that the electoral system itself might prove so pliable to technological alteration is too audacious to discuss.
Mitt Romney, my choice for president, "
