Three things really stand out about the current Iranian conflict.

1. User generated content is easily able to slip through any blocks that the government puts in place over traditional media.  Journalists were locked in hotels in the dark, while a protester sitting on a balcony can snap pictures and post on Flickr/YouTube/Twitter/Blogs.

2. Instead of new media sources being used to highlight traditional media articles, the traditional media was highlighting and analyzing new media posts. Maybe thats where it’ll go in the future?

3. Anything posted to UGC sites was referred to as “unconfirmed” – which is an important aspect of print media. How does one verify things posted online? Will we rely on technical checks (EXIF data in photos, GPS location of twitter posts) or rely on the wisdom of the crowd to decide what is real?

Tom Friedman has a great op-ed in the NY Times regarding  the auto bailout. He raises a good point which I believe can apply to entrepreneurship…

As I think about our bailing out Detroit, I can’t help but reflect on what, in my view, is the most important rule of business in today’s integrated and digitized global market, where knowledge and innovation tools are so widely distributed. It’s this: Whatever can be done, will be done. The only question is will it be done by you or to you. Just don’t think it won’t be done. If you have an idea in Detroit or Tennessee, promise me that you’ll pursue it, because someone in Denmark or Tel Aviv will do so a second later.

As the current auto industry, and it’s failure to adapt to a changing consumer, represents “Car 1.0″ – why should we sink our taxpayer dollars into saving it? When we instead could be investing in the next generation of clean tech?

I had an idea for a widget, and felt like brushing up on my Flash and Actionscript skills.

Here is a very very rough Version 0, with Clearspring already set up!

I have to work a lot more on the style of course. I’m also thinking that these narrow dimensions just arent cutting it.

Just finishing up another great night over at the C-SPAN Debate Hub. One of the cool features in there is the Word Tree, a treemap display of the most popular words in the debate.

One thing stood out. McCain said “friends” 18 times. Obama? Zilch.

It’s clear who has my vote.

When I first made the jump from a big consulting company to a tiny creative agency, I was worried I would be spending most of my time doing small boring web projects. Yeah, right.

As if I the C-SPAN Convention Hubs that I wrote on earlier weren’t successful enough, we at JESS3 teamed up with C-SPAN and New Media Strategies again to launch the Debate Hub. I served as lead developer. Not only does this have the same great features as the Convention Hubs, like embeddable video, Twitter coverage, and blog content from all over the web, we added in some really killer features.
The Timeline is one of the best features. We’re pulling in transcripts as the debate progresses, and have it segmented out by speaker. Click on a piece of the timeline, and magic happens. This is built off of MIT’s SIMILE project.
The Transcript Treemap is another awesome feature. It shows the most used terms of each candidate, based on the transcripts, along with sparklines (more appropriately, the jQuery version). I even managed, thanks to some more jQuery magic, to allow you to dynamically filter what debates/candidates to show. Of particular importance to me, as the Treemap was created at my alma-mater’s Human Computer Interaction Lab, where I was a researcher for a short period of time (more on what I did there later).

It’s received a ton of press coverage, including ZDNet, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, RedState, and a number of other sites. It’s been a wild ride.

I’m not a very politically involved person. For me, I make sure I vote when possible, care about the issues I choose to care about, but never get more involved. However, I like to think that, when working on projects like these, we’re giving more people access to more information than they previously had, and allowing them to make more educated decisions when it comes to electing their leaders. It may only make a small difference for a small group of people, but that’s all that matters.

Hard to believe I graduated college two years ago…

Thanks to Jimmy for pointing this out.

Effective July 1, 2008, Maryland’s 6 percent sales tax will apply to computer services, including:

• Computer facilities management and operation.
• Custom programming.
• Computer system planning and design that integrate computer hardware, software, and communication technologies.
• Computer disaster recovery.
• Data processing, storage and recovery.
• Hardware or software installation, maintenance, and repair.

Help Stop The Maryland Tech Tax.

Please, Martin… don’t make me move to VA. I hate the traffic.

I found this breathtaking – not just that they endorsed someone else, but that Giuliani gets completely torn apart. These three paragraphs disassemble the image of Rudy as “America’s Mayor.”

Primary Choices: John McCain – New York Times

The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. Racial polarization was as much a legacy of his tenure as the rebirth of Times Square.

Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking. When he claims fiscal prudence, we remember how he ran through surpluses without a thought to the inevitable downturn and bequeathed huge deficits to his successor. He fired Police Commissioner William Bratton, the architect of the drop in crime, because he couldn’t share the limelight. He later gave the job to Bernard Kerik, who has now been indicted on fraud and corruption charges.

The Rudolph Giuliani of 2008 first shamelessly turned the horror of 9/11 into a lucrative business, with a secret client list, then exploited his city’s and the country’s nightmare to promote his presidential campaign.

362 days, 6 hours, 41 minutes.

In 362 days, we’re going to have a new president. We’re mired right now with candidates of both parties yammering about their platforms, attacking each other (since when did being called a Muslim get considered an insult?), and telling us what we think is important.

But what do you think is important? I was told of a site, On Day One, that asks you just that. People can submit their ideas for what they want the president to do right from the get-go. Pretty cool use of technology to assist politics – now if only someone would start paying attention.

Here’s what I wrote.

As I’m browsing through the many submissions, one thing really resonates. Almost all of them are related to undoing the actions of the past seven years. Did this happen during the clinton years? The previous Bush years? Have we ever, in the history of our nation, been so looking forward to the current president being out of here that we started trying to figure out who will replace him more than two years before?

362 days, 6 hours, 32 minutes to go.

In short, at the top of the meritocratic ladder we have in America a
generation of students who are extraordinarily bright, morally earnest,
and incredibly industrious. They like to study and socialize in groups.
They create and join organizations with great enthusiasm. They are
responsible, safety-conscious, and mature. They feel no compelling need
to rebel—not even a hint of one. They not only defer to authority; they
admire it. “Alienation” is a word one almost never hears from them.
They regard the universe as beneficent, orderly, and meaningful. At the
schools and colleges where the next leadership class is being bred, one
finds not angry revolutionaries, despondent slackers, or dark cynics
but the Organization Kid.

The Atlantic – The Organization Kid

A nifty Google Maps mashup shows where all the presidential candidates have been. If you drag the right-hand slider above the map all the way to the right, you can see the full timeline.

New Mexico isn’t getting any love (Bill Richardson does not count). Nor is Maryland. And if anyone can tell me which states the candidates care about most, you win a prize.