A lot of my time on the trip was spent with googlers and youtubers, not surprisingly. I met a lot of people with whom I had only exchanged email or talked on the phone. The majority of them didn’t work in Mountain View, too.

Sometimes it’s hard for engineers (myself included) to see why non-engineers have challenging jobs. It can look like some jobs just involve sitting in meetings and sending email, both of which are pretty easy. This is similar to people thinking that programming is a fancy kind of typing. I talked with the events coordinator who organized a lot of the events for the day, and the more I learned, the more I understood how challenging it is. The Google press party (after the debate) was an amazing event, and it was meticulously planned (in PowerPoint, I later learned). I’ve included some pictures below, neither of which do it justice. There was a professional photographer there, so hopefully I’ll be able to get some of those pictures.

The event took place in an old bus station. Here’s what it looked like the night before:

Another thing I learned was that I really enjoy doing demos and introducing products to people. I did demos of Google Earth and Google Maps (probably the two flashiest google products to demo), and got a chance to talk with a bunch of people about how they did things, features they did and didn’t like, etc. Maybe I’ll have a chance to do this again if I go to Florida for the Republican debate.

Going into Monday’s CNN/YouTube Democratic Presidential Debate, I was worried that it would seem gimmicky. To some (though nobody I’ve talked to), it did, but I was actually quite impressed with the event.

It’s not going to revolutionize democracy, it’s not even really democratic (CNN picks the questions), but it was more engaging, interesting, and entertaining than the debates I’ve seen in the past. Calling any of these debates is a bit of a stretch- it’s really more like 8-person recitations of semi-prepared remarks at times, but I’ll let that go (it’s nothing new).

Some notes on the format, for those who didn’t see it:
- 39 questions were asked, each of them was a short video from youtube from a public submission. The questions were selected by CNN.
- Anderson Cooper moderated, directing which candidates should answer which questions and doing followups on behalf of the question-asker (some of whom were there, but not most).
- Each candidate was asked to submit one “youtube-style” video to be played at some point during the night.

The questions were generally good. They were visually interesting and a refreshing change from the typical sterile questions asked at debates. The questions were displayed on a big screen, which was great for those in the audience, but for reasons I don’t understand, TV viewers had to watch live video of the screen, instead of the youtube clip being played directly to TV. Hopefully they’ll fix that in the future.

The advantage of having questions recorded by people ahead of time and not asked by the moderator became apparent when Anderson said to a candidate who was flustered by a question “It’s not my question”. Now, since CNN is picking the questions, things are a bit more complicated than that, but I do think that the difference is non-trivial. Moderators have a symbiotic business relationship with candidates, and that relationship limits what they can ask. YouTube isn’t a solution to this, but I think it did help.

You can see all the questions and responses here.

Some of the candidate videos were quite good, others just submitted ads they had already made. It seems that the production value of the video was inversely proportional to how appropriate it was for the debate. My favorite was from John Edwards:

It’s funny, insightful, simple and true.

Some people asked me who I thought won the debate. I don’t really think about it that way in general, but I don’t think anyone stood out as far better or worse than they did before the debate. So, I guess that’s a win for Hillary, but whatever.

Slate has a good recap of the debate, with many of the same conclusions I had.

If you saw the debate on TV, I’m curious to hear what you thought of it.

I got back from my trip to South Carolina yesterday. It was a great trip, though I’m still quite tired from it. I won’t write a big mega-post with a play-by-play of the trip, but I will write some posts about things that interested me.

Two more people who I’ve met and have wikipedia articles:

• Steve Chen - YouTube co-founder
• Richard Schiff - Toby from West Wing

Some proof of the latter:

Kinda a weird picture, but that’s ok.

I saw Richard in the debate hall before the debate began. At first, it made sense that Toby (communications director for the white house) would be there, until I realized West Wing wasn’t real. Unfortunately.