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This afternoon I attended the Conservative Bloggers Briefing during which The Heritage Foundation's President Ed Feulner discussed the current state of conservatism. 

I expected to hear that Feulner is optimistic, but I was pleasantly surprised to listen to him extol the importance of new and social media.  He spoke about how often he hears congressmen and women mention that they were thrilled to receive a flood of e-mails urging them to vote one way or another on a piece of legislation and ignore the potential to use those e-mail addresses to promote action and improve constituent relationships.  Obama's use of e-mail and text messaging was an example of he would like to see more conservatives harness grassroot action.

However, Feulner seems to do more than merely talk the talk when it comes to social media.  He did attend a luncheon for bloggers and new media strategists that was broadcast on The Heritage Foundation's BlogTalkRadio channel today.  He has a Facebook profile as well.  Further, at the end after speaking with someone, he yelled across the room to Rob Bluey, who runs the Bloggers Briefings for Heritage, something to the effect of: "Rob, can I Twitter, too?"  

It is interesting to see the attitude change among conservatives towards social media; it was a lot different a year and a half ago when I moved to the DC area a year and half ago.  Of course, this is helpful for the conservatives to answer the left's strong use of the Internet, but using social media also boosts transparency in politics.  That's why I'm excited to see more politicos — of all ideological positions — embrace social media.

Dan Farber of CNet has a good blog post up on what he calls the “lifestreaming” of Barack Obama.  He writes:

Barack Obama will be the most shadowed president in history, and it won’t be just the Secret Service and press corps surrounding him.  Citizens and paparazzi armed with camera phones and a variety of other multimedia devices will chronicle every movement he makes in public and post it online.

In the article, Farber points to Politico 44, a micro-site by the Politico about the Presidential transition.  The site contains a feature that tracks Obama’s activities day-by-day and minute-by-minute.  Mind you they aren’t just highlighting the big stuff, they are literally tracking Obama’s every movement in real time.   Here are some sample entries to whet your appetite:

10:07 am on November 22: “Obama worked out at the gym for 78 minutes and was back home by 11:30 EST.”

9:38 am on November 21: “Obama arrives back home to change clothes.”

6:35 pm on November 20: “The motorcade leaves the transition office and heads to Regents Park apartments, where Obama reportedly has his haircut at the apartment of his friend,  Mike Signator.”

7:11 pm on November 19: “Obama is inside the Lookinglass Theatre in downtown Chicago.”

The feature reminds me of Gawker Stalker, a controversial feature on Gawker.com that allows users to submit celebrity information on encounters with celebrities.  I don’t really have any big point here, other than that the unprecedented interest in Obama himself combined with the rapid sharing of information brought on by the Internet will make Obama probably the most scrutinized and tracked person in the history of time.

The level of transparency this will bring is exciting, but it is hard not to worry that things are going to be taken way too far.

Papa Johns Pizza is currently running one of the cleverest Facebook promotions I’ve seen.  Between now and December 1, if you sign up to be a fan of of Papa Johns on Facebook you will receive a coupon for a free medium pizza (fineprint: you must first purchase a pizza online, which insinuates this is really a buy one get one free type of things).

The promotion appears to be working, as Papa Johns has gone from 10,000 fans to 168,509 fans in a matter of days.

Not bad, particularly when you consider the coupon isn’t any different from the ones the pizza chain mails out and offers on their website every day.

As if being named "[the] youngest self-made billionaire" by Forbes wasn't enough, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and creator of Facebook, was recently named one of GQ's coveted Men of the Year for 2008.  It just goes to show that being a hacker and a dropout can still lead to an awesome fiscal future.

Some of the members of this list are obvious (Barrack Obama, Michael Phelps, Ted Kennedy, etc.) but others a little more obscure (apparently Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares is more popular than I thought…).  Still, it's interesting to note that Zuckerberg is the only member of the list that is noted for achievement in technology, and looking back at past winners, he seems to be the one most social media-savvy as well.  He almost seems a little out of place among all the actors, athletes, and politicians, even though his moniker of "Boy Genius" suits him well.

Read the entire list of winners here and see if you agree with me.  Does he deserve to be on this list?

Time Magazine is running a poll on their website in conjunction with their annual naming of the Time Person of the Year.  Twenty five finalists are presented, and  users are encouraged to rank each person on a ten point scale.  Following in a time honored tradition, supporters of scientist Douglas Melton have apparently hacked the poll, as Melton currently has an average ranking of twelve on the ten point scale.   Well done.

Update: Melton’s average ranking has now dropped to a more resonable ten, probably due to Time finding and fixing the problem, or the Melton supporters realizing they’d gone to far and covering their tracks a bit.  Note Obama’s number is also suspiciously high. 

Update 2: One of our developers here, Brandon Savage, weighs in on how the poll was probably hacked:

“I took a look at the process of voting with a very basic set of tools on Firefox: Firebug and LiveHTTPHeaders. What I found is that when you submit the rating, it calls another page and passes a key, the rating, and the poll information through the URL to the page, like so:

http://www.timepolls.com/contentpolls/Vote.do?key=eba3a55e955bc93ade4fc820649cde04&rating=9&id=1857552&pollName=poy2008

Theoretically, then, you could hit this page as many times as you wanted with any rating you wanted, and drive up a candidates’ score. Though one would expect that Time would have figured that anyone could game the system, it’s easy for a programmer to forget that what they don’t intend for public viewing may still be visible, and that they always need to check to ensure that the data they expect is the data they are getting.”

Though I was not in attendance at this year' Web 2.0 Summit in sunny San Francisco, most of the content is available online for anybody to check out (I love how efficiently information disseminates when you put on a convention chock full of web 2.0 nuts). Featuring some highly influential speakers including Al Gore, Mark Zuckerberg, and Arianna Huffington, this year's theme was "Web Meets World" — most of the speakers' presentations at least loosely touched upon this broad and interpretive topic. I found messages presented at the summit ranging from redundant to insightful, and I would like to present some of the highlights through a series of scrutinal blog posts. Who said what and what does that mean for 2009? You can check out the content from the summit here.

First up on my lineup is Mr. Gore, a fitting highlight considering that we've decided to track his coverage in our ImpactWatch demo on renewable energy sources. Despite a fleeting accusation of claiming to have invented the internet during the 2000 election, Al Gore has indeed worked closely in developing internet technologies as an economic growth medium, a tool for information distribution, and as an educational tool. Check out this Wikipedia article that highlights some of his IT-related accomplishments to date.

In his speech, expert panel, and Q&A session Mr. Gore focused on the democratization of media, and the need to explicitly define a purpose for web 2.0 technology. "We have everything we need to save it, and in the process create millions of new jobs, reduce our national security exposure, and solve the climate crisis," Gore claims, however, "Barack Obama's election would have been impossible without the new dialogue and new ways of interacting on the Web; the only way this is going to be solved is by addressing the democracy crisis."

I'm not sure that I agree that web 2.0 is static to the point of definition. There is an incredible variety of ways to use web 2.0, for better or for worse. Is there a potential tipping point at which web 2.0 could hinder democracy? Todd Zeigler of our own Bivings Report has already examined in detail the role of web 2.0 tools in the recent election. Does web 2.0 truly make you feel more empowered, more personally involved in our democratic process? Or is it just a fancy facet of the same old ways of doing things? Your thoughts in the comments, please.

Guardian Blogs Editor Kevin Anderson dropped by our office a few weeks before the election to interview me about the role played by the Internet in the 2008 Presidential campaign for the Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast . You can listen to the podcast here.  Andy Carvin from NPR and Garrett Graff from Washingtonian Magazine also share their thoughts.

During my bit I compared the social networking strategies of the Obama and McCain campaigns, with a focus on the internal social networks both sides built (My.BarackObama.com and McCainSpace).  My basic point is one I’ve made before on this blog:

The secret of the success of Barack Obama’s social network is that at its heart it is really a social action center.  When you login to My.BarackObama, you are pushed to make phone calls to undecided voters, knock on doors and raise money for the campaign, not to produce content.  Sure, that functionality exists on the Barack Obama website but it isn’t the main point.  The main point of My.BarackObama is to help Obama get elected.  The same cannot be said for the much more nebulous McCainSpace.

It was great talking to Kevin and I’d encourage you to give the podcast a listen.

I'm not a fanatic of Bravo's competition show Top Chef, but my colleagues Chuck and J.W. who both sit next to me are big fans of the show.  So, in honor of the show's fifth season premiere tomorrow and the likely endless commentary that I'll overhear at work for the next few months, I've decided to do a cooking related blog post today.

While I don't know if any of the Top Chef contestants, judges, or fierce fans, google or search Yahoo! for recipes, some people do use search engines to help plan a meal.  As the Food Channel explained in November 2005, search engines can help with meal planning.  You can type ingredients that you already have into a search engine to look up recipes using them.  I have never done this, but perhaps I'll give it a try someday to see what would come up if I use three ingredients that I do have — apple pie spice, microwave popcorn, and spinach…

My point is that technology influences our lives in interesting ways.  Who would have thought that Google or Yahoo! would help you cook dinner?  Well, maybe that doesn't sound that big of a stretch for Ask's mascot, Jeeves the butler. 

Has anyone had success with cooking with the help of search engines?

Is Jeeves Top Chef material?