From Dave Winer…
Barack Obama, who’s running for the Senate in Illinois, spoke briefly at the Blogger’s Breakfast. He’s an up and coming star of the Democratic Party, according to David Weinberger, he’ll be President in 12 years.
The post was dated 26 July 2004.
This is Mark Newman’s ingenious cartographic way of representing how the US voted, down to county level. For more maps, see his special page on the subject.
From a NYT Interview with Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO.
Q. Earlier this week, Google walked away from an advertising partnership with Yahoo, after the Justice Department said it was planning to block it on antitrust grounds. Yahoo said it would have defended the deal in court and that it was disappointed you chose not to. Was Google less committed to this deal than Yahoo?
A. We were unsuccessful in convincing the Justice Department of something which we strongly feel, which is that providing better value to advertisers would have occurred by virtue of this deal. We concluded after a lot of soul-searching that it was not in our best interest to go through a lengthy and costly trial which we believe we ultimately would have won.
Q. This is the first time that regulators have gotten in the way of a Google deal. Are you concerned that, as many antitrust experts believe, this will happen more frequently now? And if so, was it a mistake for Google to propose the deal in the first place?
A. We have no regrets about attempting to do the right thing from our perspective. With change comes risks. This is a risk that we understood. Now you ask a hypothetical question, which is, Given that that event has occurred, is there another scenario? We don’t see one right now, but you never know.
Q. Will Google think differently about deals after this incident?
A. Probably not. I think that this was a unique situation.
This morning’s Observer column…
A few days ago we had the extraordinary spectacle of a Republican presidential candidate complaining that his rival had more money to spend on TV advertising than he had. To those of us who grew up in an era when conservatives always had more money and controlled the dominant communications media, this was truly extraordinary. It summoned up memories of Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock running doomed, underfunded campaigns against opponents who had cash to burn and the best PR expertise money could buy…
MORE: Fascinating video interview with Jascha Franklin-Hodge — cofounder of Blue State Digital, which built Obama’s online social-networking tools — describes how the president-elect’s social-networking strategy made for a well-oiled Election Day effort. And how it can be used in government.
He’s set up a Transition Site called Change.gov. Not much on it yet — but the link to the Transition Directory brings up some fascinating info. It’s a much more open process than anything that happens in the UK.
… in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution began as forces led by Lenin overthrew the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky.
Remember the photograph of the teenage Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK?
Extraordinary story on CNN.com by George Wallace’s daughter.
MONTGOMERY, Alabama (CNN) — I heard a car door slam behind me and turned to see an elderly but spry woman heading my way.
The night before, a gang of vandals had swept through the cemetery desecrating graves, crushing headstones and stealing funereal objects.
My parents’ graves, situated on a wind-swept hill overlooking the cemetery, had not been spared. A large marble urn that stood between two granite columns had been pried loose and spirited away, leaving faded silk flowers strewn on the ground.
I was holding a bouquet of them in my arms when the woman walked up and gave me a crushing hug. “Honey,” she said, “you don’t know me, but when I saw you standing up here on this hill, I knew that you must be one of the girls and I couldn’t help myself but to drive up here and let you know how much me and my whole family loved both of your parents. They were real special people.”
Read it — it’s got a lovely twist in the tail.
Thanks to James Miller for the link.
From this week’s Economist…
Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions. Viewed as such, blogging may “die” in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.
What the piece is really saying is that blogging has gone mainstream.
John McCain’s graceful concession speech ought not to obscure some uncomfortable truths, of which the most important (and scariest) is that over 46 per cent of the US electorate voted for him and his fruitcake of a running mate. Or, as Andrew Sullivan put it:
Now all I want to say here, ahem, is that they realized all this about this person within a few days of picking her and yet they went ahead for two months bullshitting us … and risking the live possibility that she could be president of the United States at a moment’s notice after next January.
You know: I took a lot of grief for my pretty instant realization back in August that the Palin candidacy was a total farce. But when you cop to the fact that the McCain peeps knew most of that too very early on after their world-historical screw-up, you’ve got to respect and be terrified by their cynicism. I mean: country first?
And they only lost by a few points?