A Technologizer Guide to Election 2008

Ed Oswald — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:31:23 +0000

Depending on your views of politics, Tuesday either brings relief from the endless assault of political ads or the most exciting day of the year. With technology quite prevalent in this election, we here at Technologizer thought we’d might compile some of our favorite spots to watch the day’s events.

See our picks below the fold…

From the Left…

Daily Kos – http://www.dailykos.com
Arguably the go to weblog for all things progressive, Markos Moulitsas has made a name for himself over the past six years by providing the liberal “netroots” a spot to both vent their frustration with the Republicans as well as becoming a starting point for the re-emergence of the Democrats. Especially neat is the site’s own polling, done by Research 2000, and state maps which will allow you to view results county-by-county and compare them with previous elections results rather easily. This will be the spot to watch for election irregularities — in 2004 it had considerable reporting of the voting problems in Ohio.

From the Right…

RedState - http://www.redstate.com
This site is probably the closest that the right has to a site like the Daily Kos. The site has provided quite a bit of good analysis on the race from a conservative viewpoint, and will be a good resource for what Republicans are thinking as Election Day unfolds, win or lose.

Number Crunching

FiveThirtyEight - http://www.fivethirtyeight.com
Although it may come with a bit of a leftward slant (the creator was a well-known diarist on Daily Kos whose projections on the Democratic primaries were nearly flawless), FiveThirtyEight has emerged as one of the standout election projection sites this year. Nate Silver has taken his experience in the sports projection business and applied it to politics, and the result has been one of the most comprehensive projection sites available. Worth a look.

Political Overload

RealClearPolitics - http://www.realclearpolitics.com
RCP is just chock full of news clips, polls, blogs, and anything else you can think of when it comes to all things political. As the above site may have a bit of a liberal slant, the analysis here seems to be more on the conservative side. That said, I personally have noticed this election season that they have been much more balanced. (For what its worth, their projections have been quite accurate — then again they’re just averaging polls).

We’ll be adding more to this throughout the day and on Tuesday, so keep checking back. If you have any suggestions, by all means leave us a comment!

John McCain: Secret Wikipedia Fan?

Harry McCracken — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:12:19 +0000

A political scandal! A dead service with a funny name! Two e-mail services that have had trouble doing e-mail! And a computer we all know that’s celebrating a very special day! They’re all on today’s T-List.

Speechwriting the Wikipedia Way
Congressional Quarterly’s Political Insider blog has taken note of a fascinating fact about Sen. John McCain’s speech on the Russiia-Georgia crisis today: Several passages are uncannily similar to Wikipedia’s entry on Georgia. Considering that McCain says he’s just now learning to use a PC, one presumes that any funny business was committed by a McCain speechwriter, not the senator himself. But it’s still a strange testament to the power of Wikipedia’s community-driven content: Contribute an entry, and maybe your words will end up being spouted by a candidate for the highest office in the land!

Read more at: Political Insider

Vongo: It’s Gone-go
Cable TV movie channel Starz is axing its Vongo PC-based movie service, which will go away as of September 30th. Introduced in January of 2006, Vongo got decent reviews but was ne of numerous new ways to wach movies that never quite caught on. (Hey, anyone remember Moviebeam?) You gotta wonder whether Vongo would have stood a better chance if it had sported a better, more descriptive name. Such as oh, let’s say…Starz?

Read more at: PaidContent.org

Google Says It’s Sorry
After today’s Gmail outage, Google has apologized–profusely–on its official Gmail blog. As far as I can tell, few Gmail fans’ faith in Gmail has been shaken to the core, and the blogosphere isn’t seething with anger about the downtme. I still think that in instances like this, the eating of crow is ultimately less important than honest and straightforward discussion of what happened, how it was fixed, and what the company in question is doing to prevent it from happening again.

Read more at: GigaOm

MobileMe: Still a Mess?
Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop is reporting that users of Apple’s trouble-ridden MobileMe service are still suffering e-mail outages, a couple of weeks after the promised regular status updates on Apple’s MobileMe blog ended. If they persist, MobileMe will enter its second month of erratic service; wonder if Apple will extend the month of free service it offered as an olive branch to everyone who’d shelled out $99 for MobileMe?

Read more at: Infinite Loop

Happy Birthday, IBM PC
Tuesday marks the 27th anniversary of the announcement of the IBM PC–the machine that introduced MS-DOS and led to the “Wintel” platform that dominates computing to this day. Big Blue’s first personal computer wasn’t sexy or innovative–some of us who were into early computers thought it was a great big snooze at the time–but its impact turned out to be immeasurable, and a little bit of it lives inside every Windows system. Next time you need to perform the “three-fingered salute” to reboot a Windows PC with ~~, consider it a silent tribute to the original DOS box.~~

Read more at: Wired News

Technologizer » Election 2008

A Technologizer Guide to Election 2008

John McCain: Secret Wikipedia Fan?