SOMEWHAT FRANK

Experiencing History In DC

Today in Washington, DC, I was able to attend the Inauguration of the 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Obama. Though the festivities were streamed live via CNN and Facebook with commentary from my friends I decided I needed to experience this historic event in person. So I jumped on the Metro and made my way to the National Mall. In doing so I captured a number of images and videos which will serve as lasting memories of this historic day. The Internet connections via the wireless towers in the DC area were brought to a crawl so it was tough to stream videos from the Mall but I captured what I could with both Flixwagon and Qik. I also posted my Inauguration photos on Flickr.

Enjoy the videos below from my Inauguration experience:

Walking down 18th Street to the National Mall for the Inauguration

Watching the Inauguration from the National Mall

Obama Speaks

Barack Obama: The First Tech President

I recently spoke on a panel about social networking & the 2008 election and at the time I went out on a limb and predicted that Barack Obama would win the election. He was not projected to win by anyone at the time but he was leveraging technology to communicate with people through a number of different mediums. He was using text messaging to contact his army of follower anywhere and at anytime. He was using social network sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to reach people on the Web. Through the use of these tools the feedback loop is nearly instantaneous. He also used more conventional methods like email to send important messages in the final days before the election. I felt he was out campaigning John McCain in a grassroots fashion similar to how a number of startups have leveraged it to spread the word. Interestingly, John McCain used the Internet in similar ways in prior elections but it seems he was out done in this election.

John McCain is a great man and a great American. He has served this country for a long time and I respect him deeply for it.  But in this Election 2.0, one that will be the subject of a number of case studies, he was battling the tight social connections that technology has brought to this world and so I think Barack Obama has rightfully earned not only the title of President Elect but also the first Tech President. I just hope he continues to connect and listen to the people through these various modes of communications as he tries to bring change to the United States of America.

Tropicana Helps Track Twitter Election Tweets

Watch election 2008 related twitter activity today thanks to the Tropicana micro-site that launched just in time for the election called An Orange America. Check out the live twitter analysis of proposition related information plotted with arches (above). Oh and don't forget to vote and tweet about it today.

Social Networking & The 2008 Election

With the 2008 Presidential election only 48 days away it has been a rather unique one as no other election that I can recall has gone on this long or leveraged mobile and web technology so resoundingly. I previously called this Election 2.0 as it is leveraging the new Web 2.0 technologies as they race for the White House. Today I participated on a super panel discussion at the NVTC Cool Tech event focused on the effects of social networking sites on the election 2008 and I was joined by:

Ben Adler, Staff Writer, Politico.com
Joel Cherkis, General Manager, Government Solutions, Microsoft
Ed O'Keefe, Multimedia Journalist, Washingtonpost.com

MODERATOR: Wyatt Andrews, CBS News

The panel was moderated by the very polished, Wyatt Andrews, a veteran CBS News reporter. It was a pleasure to meet Wyatt and to learn of his experiences, including, his experience serving as White House correspondent for George Bush Sr.

C-SPAN Launching Site To Track Election 2008

I am in Boulder this week and it is buzzing as it prepares for the the Democratic National Convention which is taking place just a few miles away in Denver starting next week. With the Republican National Conventions also right around the corner and the election only a few months away C-SPAN has launched some new sites to accent the C-SPAN Politics to ensure we are all kept up to speed with all social media related conversations surrounding politics and the 2008 election.

Designed by Washington, D.C. interactive agency Jess3 the site acts as a up for the upcoming election. It also has specific hubs for both the DNC08 and RNC08. The site pulls in social media content from Twitter, YouTube and Qik and even highlights certain items. The new C-SPAN Convention Hubs do a great job aggregating up to the minute coverage by leveraging user-generated content to offer a social angle on the 2008 election.

Screen-shots can be found here. TechCrunch also offers some additional commentary.

Video: Politics, Social Media & Wine Converge

Last week Robert Scoble and Gary Vaynerchuk visited Washington, DC. Robert Scoble was escorted around the city by Andrew Feinberg and met with a few folks on the hill. While Gary Vaynerchuk visited for a book signing. They were welcomed on Wednesday evening with a party that converged DC politicians, social media folks and wine lovers. Peter Corbett from iStrategyLabs was on location talking with folks through the evening.

The event was sponsored by CapitolValley, Scobleizer, Wine Library TV, Somewhat Frank, SocialTimes, Odeo, Freshbooks, and iStrategyLabs.

LOUD3R Network: Quick News For Enthusiasts

If you are a motorcycle or political enthusiast than listen up because you are going to like this. LOUD3R, a network for niche enthusiast offerings, has launched a couple of different aggregation sites. FAST3R the motorcycle site and VOT3R the political site are pulled together by leveraging a semantic publishing engine used in combination with natural language processing and human intelligence the engine selects and publishes the best and most interesting content to the network. Users can also contribute content and comments to the site.

Google Maps Twitter Super Tuesday

Super Tuesday! Did you get the load of election action you were looking for? If not, you might still be able to catch some thanks in part to a map mashup that TechCrunch reported Google teamed up with Twitter to provide. The Google Maps Twitter mashup is similar to Twittervision but for political related twits (a twit is a Twitter message) so you can track the today's Super Tuesday elections on real-time on a map. Acquisition next?

Android Announced, IAC To Split Up, Digg Being Sold?, Forbes Buys RealClearPolitics.com and BlogWorld Takes On Vegas

Photo of the Week: I spoke at BlogWorld Expo about RSS feed this past week and the Hard Rock Hotel Las Vegas and it's oversized guitar was a reoccurring scene as Brian Solis captured in this photo.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 11.11.2007

JibJab Video Includes Bloggers

JibJab, the online video site which came to fame during the 2004 U.S. presidential election with videos like "The Land," has created a new video series called the "The News" and has decided to include some bloggers. Bloggers Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo were featured around the 1:20 mark of the video below. If you squint while watching, you might catch a glimpse of my face in the crowd of people.

Election 2.0

With a number of political candidates creating MySpace profiles, YouTube videos and Second Life avatars it appears that the Internet and web 2.0 technology are being leveraged for political campaigning.

TechPresident, a project of the Personal Democracy Forum, launched recently to aggregate the activities of U.S. presidential hopefully on popular web 2.0 social media sites. Aside from a blog which gives perspective on the presidential race, TechPresident also tracks each candidates MySpace friend counts, YouTube videos, and Technorati mentions and Google and Yahoo ads. I would love to see it add Second Life (virtual world) and Twitter (micro-blog platform) to the mix as candidates also appear on these sites.

The video below titled, Election 2.0, explains just how the 2008 United States election will be like no other election as web 2.0 takes on an unprecedented role. My only critique of the video is that it breaks the "context before detail" rule which would have made the message more powerful. Nonetheless, I think it is well done and worth watching.

OpenCongress Aggregates U.S. Politics

OpenCongress, a political information mashup, is a great resource for anyone strongly interested in politics on Capitol Hill.  By cataloging information (and there is a lot information) in an easy to navigate format, users have access to voting records, and statements by Senators and Members, including the always interesting breakdown of who or what is donating to a particular legislators campaigns. 

OpenCongress, a project by Participatory Politics Foundation and The Sunlight Foundation, leverages Google News to obtain news articles about Congress, and Google Blog Search and Technorati to obtain blog posts about Congress. OpenCongress also uses these automated services to search the internet widely for relevant search terms to display on OpenCongress pages for bills and Members of Congress. For example, if you are looking to find out about the latest status on the bill S.574, OpenCongress offers pretty healthy aggregation of blogs and other information and even offers a feed about it.

For those interested more in issues than politicians, the site offers a wide-angle lens look at the big issues such as health care or criminal justice as well as tracking of legislation before the House and Senate.  The site is a must stop after reading any news article to give readers access to all the information the political reporters, operatives, or politicians themselves have. Hopefully OpenCongress expands into polling information.  The community continues to lack a refined and sophisticated website providing detailed and extended polling data, not merely concerning which candidate is polling ahead, but also how certain issues are playing as well.  Overall, OpenCongress is a great resource for serious political junkies.

Betocracy: Create Prediction Markets

Betocracy is a new site offering easy to use tools for the creation of prediction markets on websites. Though in Beta, Betocracy has markets covering the Democratic Presidential Nominee in 2008 as well as a Stock Market for the popular Second-Life multi-player role-playing universe. Betocracy was created by freelance web developer Yaron Koren.

Prediction Markets are best understood like a combination of a stock market and the bookie at a horse race, where users bet for or against events occurring.  The event can be anything: will the horse win the race, will the stock price go up, or, who will win the election?  The Washington Stock Exchange is a similar product dedicated to the political arena.  The website uses points instead of money, so there is no real risk of great loss (other than the time spent on the websites using predictive markets).

However, Betocracy is quick to point out that even the points reflect real value in the terms of predictive data. According to Yaron: 

"...the administrators of a site can always choose to reward those who have done well on their markets, where laws permit."

It will be interesting to see if Betocracy can truly play fortune teller.

Special thanks to LBJ for assisting with the information in this article.

Constituent Dynamics Polls For Predictive Election Results

A few weeks ago I profiled The Washington Stock Exchange, a new site offering political junkies the opportunity to play in a special stock exchange dedicated to political probabilities.  With just over two weeks remaining until election day, there have been a number of political sites emerging to better tell the election story.

Constituent Dynamics offers an amazingly in depth look at the political reality.  The site focuses on new polling methods to produce more accurate and predictive results.  While targeted toward professional political operatives, the Majority Watch project offers an impressive look at the midterm elections that any lay-man can enjoy.  Majority Watch features updating polling data for key races, with more being added everyday plotted on a map (shown below). Similarly, Google has also recently rolled out their own election focused mashup which combines Google Earth with information about the upcoming congressional elections.

If you are looking for election news, Constituent Dynamics offers more information than is offered on many mainstream news site, you can select an individual District to view demographic breakdowns and side-by-side data comparing the midterm race against the last presidential election.  All said, it is an impressive site for anyone interested in politics in general, or this year's tumultuous midterm elections in particular. Of course, if you are looking for additional content and analysis, you might want to visit The Stump - AOL News Elections Blog, AOL's recently launched elections blog.

Six Apart Business Blogging Event In DC

Yesterday (October 19, 2006) I had the opportunity to represent AOL at the Six Apart Business Blogging Seminar in Washington, DC. The event was a half day seminar focusing on politics and advocacy. It was supposed to be lead by Six Apart's Anil Dash but unfortunately, Anil was ill so he could not make the engagement. It was unfortunate but Marissa Levinson and the rest of the Six Apart team did a good job filling in. Joe Loong one of the major bloggers also was in attendance. Jake Parrillo spoke on behalf of FeedBurner about leveraging feeds for politics and advocacy. Jake is a politician himself so speaking at this seminar was a great fit for him.

The event spoke to all levels on blogging and feeds. I have written several posts on Somewhat Frank (a Six Apart Typepad hosted blog) about business blogging, feeds and how to get started with blogging, so I thought it might be helpful to point some of the most popular:

• Naked Conversations: Blog Success Tips
• 8 Tips To Promoting Your Blog
• BusinessWeek Talks Business Blogging
• Technology Evangelist 'The Innovators' Series Visits Somewhat Frank

While all the speakers did a wonderful job presenting, I definitely was more interested in the questions the audience had to ask since it offers some insight into the understanding of blogs and feeds outside the tech community. Photos from the event can be found here.