- Update: News-starved Burmese snap up grim cyclone videos.
- McCain widens dialogue on blogs. Via tPrez. C.f. McCain Campaign Pioneers A First: Courting Lefty Bloggers.
- The Amazing Money Machine: How Silicon Valley made Barack Obama this year’s hottest start-up. Via PoliticalWire.
- The importance of Wikipedia for political candidates.
- The State of the News Media 2008. “Looking closely, a clear case for [media] democratization is harder to make.” Via Mike Allen.
- Secret Data in FBI Wiretapping Audit Revealed with Ctrl-C.
- ObamaGirl sparks Russian rewrite.
- Power plants open to hacker attack.
- On the subtle art of the pitch man.
- And Now a Word From Our Sponsor: The best Web sites and books about advertising.
- Tracking a Trend: Issue Advocacy.
- The overachieving, high-ambition young stars who power the Web these days aren’t irredeemably awful.
- Online fundraising’s role in the Repubs’ current congressional election woes. (see page 2)
- Instant messaging ‘a linguistic renaissance’ for teens.
- NATO to give Estonia cyber defences. New NATO thinktank.
- MoveOn gets punk’d in Obama ad contest. The enduring joys of social media.
- Christmas in May: Roll Call gets a new website. Compare with National Journal for a design showdown.
- Estimate: Online Advertising from Political Campaigns and Advocacy Groups Will Reach $50 Million This Year. Still tiny compared to TV spending, and way below the percentage generally spent by commercial marketing campaigns.
- Facebook’s Glass Jaw. From a loyal reader (thanks, Dad!).
- Obama + Internet Marketing = President?
- Get maximum brand lift from widgets. Some uses for engagement and fundraising — just change “payment” to “donation” as you read.
- Two via PoliticsOnline: MoveOn.org’s Anti-McCain Effort Turns To Facebook and How the internet is challenging Egypt’s government.
- Twitter Helps with Reporting, Filtering the News and Why Twitter matters, from Jennifer Gallardo.
- McCain’s Chances May Have Hit a New Nader.
- The Australian government’s plan to censor the internet. Whoa: check out the site’s tagline…
- How would Obama’s success in online campaigning translate into governing?
- Gamers teach search engines how to see. Improving image search.
- John McCain: Tolstoy in My Inbox.
- Billionaires v. Bloggers and the declining role of 527s. Also note the “existence” of the Larry Craig Center in Second Life.
- Report: Government’s Cyber Security Plan Is Riddled With New Spying Programs.
- How the MySpace mindset can boost medical science: Social networking is empowering patients and enabling some incredible disease research possibilities.
- Thoughts On Video Commenting.
- What Went Wrong with the Clinton Campaign?
- Demographics of Twitter, via TechRepublican.
- Read this Heather Havrilesky article all the way to the end: “If you’re successful enough, if the huddled masses of aspiring whores tell you you’re the greatest for too long, you might just wake up one day and find yourself posing for a Glamour Shot behind the wheel of your car. Look into those eyes, kids, because you’re looking at the spray-tanned face of a man who believes his own press.”
- Quote of the week: “I do think that the quality which makes a man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and is masochistic. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.” (James Jones). Via MediaBistro.
– cpd