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Although there were no Big Bird or JFK moments during tonight's second showdown between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Twitter users still sent more than 7.2 million tweets during the debate, peaking at either 110,000 per minute or 108,000 per minute, depending on which official tweet you believe.

And there was, of course, at least one popular new meme and the resulting Twitter account, @RomneysBinder.

According to Twitter, there were just more than 7.2 million tweets sent during the debate, down substantially from 10.3 million tweets sent during the first … Read more

In another example of what's fast becoming an American tradition of instant and amusing political-debate memes, a Web site called Binders Full of Women popped up before tonight's presidential face-off had even wrapped up.

The site surfaced following Mitt Romney's response to an audience member at the town hall-style debate who asked about gender inequality in the workplace. Romney said he had received "binders full of women" from colleagues while seeking to fill cabinet posts during his tenure as Massachusetts governor.

And thus, the Tumblr site Binders Full of Women was born. It features a fast-accumulating array of amusing images -- from pictures of binders with the word "women" on the cover to a photo of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton typing away on a BlackBerry with superimposed text reading "Romney still uses binders? LOL." … Read more

The goal of technology companies is to stuff their pockets with money, said Robert Levine.

"Venture capitalists may -- I haven't confirmed this -- also want to make money," Levine told snickering audience members, who were mostly from book publishing, during a panel discussion last March at the On Copyright conference.

What Levine wants to know is why everyone in tech gets upset when musicians and filmmakers try to earn a living. Levine has become a notable proponent of copyright and a defender of protecting the work of artists.

Since the publication last year of his book, … Read more

With the U.S. presidential election drawing nearer, a New York-based tech group sent both President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney a letter asking how his policies would benefit tech startups, and both candidates have provided outlines in response.

Among other things, Romney mentions raising visa caps for highly skilled foreign workers; lowering the corporate tax rate to 25 percent and strengthening the R&D tax credit; and requiring that all major regulations receive congressional approval.

President Obama mentions having created the position of U.S. Chief Technology Officer and pursuing open data initiatives (an unlocking of data … Read more

If you were paying attention last month, you might remember alarming headlines reporting an anti-Islam YouTube video "sparks violence in Libya," is "inciting violence," and caused "U.S. embassy workers' deaths."

One problem: those reports were untrue.

A flurry of disclosures in Washington, D.C., this week revealed that the Obama administration's blaming of the YouTube video for prompting a military-style attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi was wrong. And those revelations have reignited a long-running partisan debate over national security and security funding.

Republicans suggested that the White House's efforts … Read more

For the second time, JFK may have been the star of a vice presidential debate, and Twitter was all over it.

During tonight's debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the two got into a brief skirmish over former President Kennedy, leading Biden to say, disbelievingly to Ryan, "Now you're Jack Kennedy?" The line brought to mind then Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Lloyd Bentsen's famous moment in his 1988 debate against Republican vice presidential nominee Dan Quayle, who had compared his level of experience to that of JFK prior to Kennedy becoming … Read more

Twitter users may be tired of political tweets streaming through their feeds, but they shouldn't expect the flow to subside, because those tweets are driving actual political donations.

In a study Twitter conducted after last week's first presidential debate between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and released today, the microblogging service said that people exposed to any kind of political tweet are 98 percent more likely to visit a donation page as the average person on Twitter. Not only that, but even the average Twitter user is 68 percent more likely to visit such … Read more

This election seems to have become dirtier than an evening with Chelsea Handler.

We, the people, have been forced to don rubber gloves and hazmat suits just to surf the Web. We have been sickened by the verbal listeria that has become an intimate ingredient in every piece of election news.

But surely, surely, not even we could have imagined this.

For if you perform a Google search of the words "completely wrong," you get image after image of Mitt Wrongney. I am so sorry, I meant Mitt Romney.

See how we're being affected by what seems … Read more

Twitter launched a new star during the presidential debate on Wednesday, but he wasn't wearing a suit and tie. Big Bird from "Sesame Street" was the subject of an explosion of tweets after the topic of cutting funding to PBS came up between President Obama and his Republican rival Mitt Romney.

There was a point during the debate where the phrase "Big Bird" was tweeted 17,000 times a minute. That's some serious action for a fictional creature. He also spawned a slew of satirical accounts. This all just goes to show how Twitter … Read more