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?

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?

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.

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

It’s clear who has my vote.

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…

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.

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.

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

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.

To travel to Iraq, would-be contractors needed permission from the Bush administration, which was far from blind in its appraisal of applicants. In a much-ballyhooed example of favoritism, the White House originally installed a clown named Jim O’Beirne at the relevant evaluation desk in the Department of Defense. O’Beirne proved to be a classic Bush villain, a moron’s moron who judged applicants not on their Arabic skills or their relevant expertise but on their Republican bona fides; he sent a twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance to manage the reopening of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appointed a recent graduate of an evangelical university for home-schooled kids who had no accounting experience to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget. James K. Haveman, who had served as Michigan’s community-health director under a GOP governor, was put in charge of rehabilitating Iraq’s health-care system and decided that what this war-ravaged, malnourished, sanitation-deficient country most urgently needed was . . . an anti-smoking campaign.

The America I know is the last, best hope for that child looking up at a helicopter. It’s the country that put a man on the moon; that defeated fascism and helped rebuild Europe. It’s a country whose strength abroad is measured not just by armies, but rather by the power of our ideals, and by our purpose to forge an ever more perfect union at home. That’s the America I know. We just have to act like it again to write that next chapter in the American story. If we do, we can keep America safe while extending security and opportunity around the world. We can hold true to our values, and in doing so advance those values abroad. And we can be what that child looking up at a helicopter needs us to be: the relentless opponent of terror and tyranny, and the light of hope to the world.

Regardless of politics, after this, he has my vote. No doubt.

Bush has been the formative political experience for the youngest generation of voters, those 18 to 30. Studies of voting preferences show that the experience imprinted on a generation in its 20s largely determines its future political complexion. This generation is the most Democratic generation ever — more Democratic than the youngest voting generations of the New Deal and the 1960s. In generational terms, their political alignment is also logical. As the children of the 1960s generation and the grandchildren of the New Deal generation, they have inherited those generations’ political genes. The in-between, more conservative generations — the so-called Silent Generation of the 1950s and their children — are smaller in numbers and weaker in cultural and political influence.

-“Generation Dem” Salon

The Republican attacks the Democrat for supporting a timetable for withdrawal in Iraq. The Democrat says that they haven’t endorsed a timetable, a change in course must be made to right what’s been wronged. The mediator asks the Republican whether or not, knowing that Saddam had never had any WMD. The Republican dodges the question a few times, and instead attacks the Democrat for not supporting our troops by voting against a bill for body armor. The Democrat admits it, adding in that the funding for body armor, 300 million, was part of an 87 BILLION DOLLAR bill, with a lot of the money going to Halliburton. That amounts to a whopping 1/3 of 1 percent of the bill, which is what the Republicans threw in as protection against anyone disagreeing with the bill, ignoring the fact that Bush/Rumsfeld sent the troops into Iraq with deficient armor in the first place. The Republican then argues that the war in Iraq is going REALLY REALLY WELL, despite both the mediator and the Democrat citing dozens of bi-partisan sources saying otherwise. Then the mediator questions the Republicans’ claimed independence from Bush and at the same time lists their voting record, which is usually something in the neighborhood of 95% agreeing with Bush, along with some articles and speech excerpts from a year back. The Republican dodges it. Then, finally 2/3 of the way through the debate, they go on to state-specific politics, in which case whenever the Republican is being questioned, it always goes back to the War on Terror.

Seriously, listen to any of the recent ones, it is exactly that!

A year ago, you could picture the Republicans as an unstoppable force with tremendous power. All they had to do was cite the war on terror or call their opponents liberals, and nothing else they would say or do would matter, because they would win. Now, after a recession, intelligence failures, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, Foley, Enron, Halliburton… Time magazine came out with an article citing that the Republicans have become a dying kingdom, attempting to maintain power for the pure sake of having power. We’re entering a new Democratic era, where I believe real change will happen.

What is my actual political party ideals? I believe in extensive freedom, free markets, legalization of many victimless crimes, privatization of Social Security, and others. Choosing a party is not as important as figuring out for yourself what you believe in. If I had to choose one party that most closely represents what you believe in, I’d have to say Libertarian. However, as long as Republicans remain a morally corrupt, religious-driven, and power-hungry threat to America, I will always vote Democratic (despite maybe erring on the side of Republican core values).

In case you care, I’ll post a list of all the podcasts I subscribe to at a later point.