Posts from — November 2007

Quick post in the midst of my ongoing unpacking and catching up on stuff:

There was a really impressive DJ at the YouTube/Google post-debate party. I don’t think I’ve been impressed with a DJ before, but this guy did all these mashups that were really good. He played Ice Ice Baby and transitioned seamlessly to Under Pressure.. it was awesome.

One other thing that struck me at the Republican debate was the support for Ron Paul. His performance at the debate was typical, but his supporters definitely stood out. They were certainly the loudest in the debate hall (cheering and heckling from the back corner). More impressive was the Ron Paul fan presence outside the debate.

At the Democratic debate, supporters for most of the candidates were outside the debate hall with signs, chanting and stuff. There were more supporters for the big-name candidates, as you might expect, but everyone was represented.

At the Republican debate, this wasn’t at all the case. There was a huge crowd of Ron Paul supporters outside the debate hall, and at some other locations, in addition to signs near the airport, etc. Not only was there a huge Ron Paul presence, but I didn’t see ONE sign for any other candidate. Seven other candidates and not one sign outside.

The internet is much the same: while I was in Florida, I played around a bit with Google Trends. This graph shows the number of queries for some of the candidates.

Ron Paul is in light blue.
Red = Rudy
Green = Barack
Orange = Mitt
Purple = Hillary
(click the image to go to google trends)

The top section shows the number of search queries by candidate, the bottom shows the number of news articles about them. Note that Ron Paul is the most-searched-for but least discussed in the news. I’m not trying to make this sound like a conspiracy, but it’s interesting.

We thought that it might be some sort of query spam, but upon closer inspection, several different geographies are showing the same story, which makes spam seem unlikely. Part of the query volume could have to do with more people wanting to learn more about Ron Paul, and isn’t necessarily indicative of support (i.e. people are less likely to do a search for Rudy Guliani, since most people already know about him).

A few airports I’ve been to on this trip that have free wireless internet:
- Las Vegas (LAS)
- Hartford (BDL)
- Tampa (TPA)

JFK, FLL, and PHL didn’t seem to. JFK did have nice places to plug in laptops, though.

Lots of posts coming, in random order.

Last night was the second CNN/YouTube debate. I got some pretty good seats, and was at the edge of the area they were showing a lot on TV, which means I might have been on screen for a bit, but it also meant we had lights shining in our eyes a lot.

Highlight:
I was about 5 feet away from CHUCK NORRIS! Unfortunately I didn’t get to meet him and he didn’t come to the Google/YouTube party after the debate. Regardless, it was exciting.

As you may know, Norris recently endorsed Mike Huckabee:

The debate was.. interesting. It was weird: some actual debate broke out a couple of times. Additionally, this debate was far rougher than the Democratic one. Not just the candidates, but the crowd was really tough, booing when they didn’t like an answer, yelling things sometimes. A lot of that was from Ron Paul’s crew, I think, but I’ll post about that separately.

I thought that the questions were generally good. The answers ranged from good to terrible, I think. My least favorite was Rudy’s answer to “What should we do to repair the image of America in the Middle East?”:

You can watch the rest of the questions and responses here.

The amount of Hillary-bashing the candidates did surprised me. She was a punching bag for a lot of the candidates. I’m not a big Hillary fan, but I found this to be excessive and wasteful. I thought about it afterward and realized that this may have been fueled by the tough crowd. Hillary-bashing was the one thing they all could agree on, so candidates use that to get applause and support from the audience.

As part of the debate, each campaign is asked to submit a short “youtube-style” video from their campaign to be played around commercial breaks. At the Democratic debate, it was quite clear which campaigns knew what “youtube-style” meant and which didn’t (some just submitted campaign commercials, which wasn’t the point). I expected the Republicans to learn from this, but they didn’t. Rudy’s was the best, as it was at least tongue-in-cheek in part, but none of them were youtube-style, which was disappointing. Thompson played an attack ad in that spot, which was pretty awkward and was a poor decision.

Getting on the plane soon, more posts to follow…

I’ve fallen way behind on my posting lately with all the traveling and visiting going on, but I guess that’s OK. Maybe I’ll catch up in Florida.

Here’s an idea that I had:
I get really frustrated with grammar mistakes in blog posts. It would be cool if there were a community of grammar “people” who made corrections to things and consumed corrections from other people. In other words, there are plenty of other people noticing the same grammar mistakes I am, so I’d like them to be able to make a small correction and have it show the corrected version (with some sort of visual cue that it’s been altered).

BDL (near Hartford) has free, fast wireless, by the way, which is nice.

Boarding time!

This video from the Daily Show writers is pretty good:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzRHlpEmr0w)

A couple of clips I stumbled upon…

Straight-Talk Stock Market Investing Advice

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSoecK3u65Q)

Will Ferrell: Angry Boss

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYdhhcWELtg)
That one reminds me a bit of the BBQ sketch from his SNL audition.

Tony Bennett came to Google last week for a Q&A session followed by some songs. He talked about the music business, art in society, and some stories. One thing that struck me was his discussion about philanthropy. He founded the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in New York, so someone asked him why it was named after Sinatra instead of Bennett. He then talked about how there’s too much self-promotion, so he decided to name it after someone he really respected as an homage.

Here’s what he sang:

They All Laughed
I Left My Heart In San Francisco
Who Cares?
The Good Life

The accompanist was really talented, too.

I enjoyed the sarcasm in Nick Carr’s post The social graft about facebook:

“Once every hundred years media changes,” boy-coder turned big-thinker Mark Zuckerberg declared today at the Facebook Social Advertising Event in New York City. And it’s true. Look back over the last millennium or two, and you’ll see that every century, like clockwork, there’s been a big change in media. Cave painting lasted a hundred years, and then there was smoke signaling, which also lasted a hundred years, and of course there was the hundred years of yodeling, and then there was the printing press, which was invented almost precisely 100 years ago, and so forth and so on up to the present day – the day that Facebook picked up the 100-year torch and ran with it. Quoth the Zuckster: “The next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today.”

It seems like there should be a lot of value in social advertising, but even after the facebook ads announcement, I don’t think anyone has figured it out yet. It’ll be good for things like music, movies and books (which people were already essentially endorsing), but I’m not convinced it’ll scale too far beyond that. I haven’t taken a look at the new marketing pages (I haven’t been on facebook since the announcement at the start of the week), but they didn’t seem to offer any value to me.

That’s another issue… there doesn’t seem to be much value in these for the user. Facebook Beacon seems a bit more interesting, allowing people to make news feed events for off-site actions, but it’s still constrained so that you can only see it inside facebook (i.e. you can’t really do anything interesting with it). Whatever. If I get a facebook CD in the mail, I’ll really know they’ve become AOL (and it’s 1996).

A couple of videos from the writers’ strike. First, from the writers of The Office:

Second, a WGA video about their demands and the reasoning behind it:

On some parts, I’m in complete agreement.. internet broadcasts with advertisements should share revenue with writers as if it were on TV. I don’t think anyone should still be making money from reruns of I Love Lucy, though… the term for copyright is absurdly long.