How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

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How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

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New York Times article by Claire Cain Miller on how the Obama campaign used the Internet and changed politics...

One of the many ways that the election of Barack Obama as president has echoed that of John F. Kennedy is his use of a new medium that will forever change politics. For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet...

“The campaign’s official stuff they created for YouTube was watched for 14.5 million hours,” Mr. Trippi said. “To buy 14.5 million hours on broadcast TV is $47 million.”

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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For me the best thing about the media coverage of the 2008 election is the work that Nate Silver did. Also anyone who comes up with PECOTA is simply a genius...

Nate Silver owned this election on the polling front: one young guy with a background in baseball stats beat out the mainstream media in a couple of months. And he beat out the old web: I mean if you consider the total joke of Drudge's recent coverage and compare it with Silver's, you realize that the web is a brutal competitive medium where only the best survive - and they are only as good as their last few posts.

Open Office 2007 .DOCX Files in Gmail, Google [Google]

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Open Office 2007 .DOCX Files in Gmail, Google [Google]

The Google Operating System blog points out that both Google web search and Gmail can now read and convert Office 2007 documents, i.e. .DOCX files. That makes for easy mail-yourself conversion if you need it, or bulk-converting files to HTML, just like with PDF files. There are, of course, online tools like Zamzar for those without Gmail.


It's Official: The Canon 5D Mk II Will Turn Us All Into Professional Cinematographers [Canon 5D Mark II]

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It's Official: The Canon 5D Mk II Will Turn Us All Into Professional Cinematographers [Canon 5D Mark II]

Yeah, sure, it was cool to see a professional photographer spin HD video gold from the Canon 5D Mark II. But that guy is famous, had a mountain of equipment, a crew, and a freaking helicopter. Not so for the humble photographer and videographer at Akihabara News, who took the 5D, a few days and a laptop to shoot and splice together this stunningly beautiful five minute video.

The results are spectacular, and really drive home the point that with this $2700 camera, anyone with an eye for shooting and a laptop can create a cinematographic masterpiece. There is a discernible and annoying shake in some shots, but nothing that couldn't be remedied with a little jury rigging.

Make sure to enable the HD and smoothing options in the embed, and check out the second half of the video for more evidence that the 5D's low-light capabilities are completely unreal. Another lesson learned from this video: even the most amazing shots can be ruined by unsettling facial hair. Deal with it, Monsieur Akihabara. [Akihabara News]


louisgray.com: FriendFeed Offers Twitter A Chance to Play Lifestream

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louisgray.com: FriendFeed Offers Twitter A Chance to Play Lifestream

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Louis Gray posts about a new feature from FriendFeed that allows you to post items from your various social networks automatically to Twitter. For example you can set up FriendFeed to automatically post to Twitter when you make blog posts, Flickr posts and a number of other such social networking sites that you have set to update in FriendFeed. As he points out you might not want to do this for all of your activity, but the ability to have items automatically update in Twitter is a pretty nice feature...

Today, FriendFeed introduced a set of features that lets users update Twitter with all their FriendFeed activity, based on their own preferences - be it with native FriendFeed entries, or shares from popular sites, be they Disqus, Last.fm, YouTube, Flickr and many more.