Digital Media

Updated 2.37pm PST with comments from the developer

The first step in discerning the source of the "Should Obama be Killed?" Facebook poll has been taken.

Jesse Farmer, of Bumbalabs in Palo Alto, Calif., has given permission for Facebook to reveal that he was the developer, but, significantly, not the author behind the poll that nauseated many Monday.

The poll, which was removed by Facebook when it was brought to the site's attention, offered those who wished to enjoy such an exercise four potential answers (see screen grab by The Huffington Post). More than 730 people participated before it was removed.

On Farmer's Twitter feed, Twitter.com/jessefarmer he describes himself as "Entrepreneur living in Palo Alto, Calif. I grew up in the Midwest and think everyone is awesome." Which will naturally be a relief to many.

(Credit: The Huffington Post)

On his site 20bits.com, which I am fairly sure stands for one more than 19 bits, rather than two obituaries, Farmer seems a genial and sociable type, saying: "If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, drop me a line and let's meet up!" He may be getting one or two requests.

Farmer describes himself as "a bit obsessed with data and using it to build better products and companies."

On his Twitter feed, he declares that he has already talked with the Secret Service, who he endearingly abbreviates to "SS." Farmer posted: "The conversation with the SS was fine. If the goal was to resolve the issue + inform the SS, the way it went down was suboptimal."

A reading of a rather fractious Twitter exchange with Bababoosh, an Oklahoma City programmer, suggests that Farmer was unhappy that a third party had informed the Secret Service rather than leaving him to do so.

Farmer accuses Bababoosh of assuming he had "the worst motives."

In an e-mail to Technically Incorrect, Farmer says he first saw the offending and offensive poll Monday morning.

"I have a system in place to flag potentially offensive polls that I check once per day; I checked it Monday morning, saw the poll, and deleted it," he said.

Which might make some wonder what other potentially risque polling might have slipped onto Facebook's pristine pages.

He says that he knows the Facebook identity of the poll's author and one presumes that this author might have received a social call from the Secret Service.

Farmer's own chat with the service he describes as lasting 15 minutes and being "friendly," although he won't comment on specifics.

Perhaps it might amuse some and appall others to discover that he is an Obama supporter.

He told me: "I went to school at the University of Chicago (SB Mathematics, '06), where he was my state senator. I volunteered for him in the primaries, worked with the California data team, and canvassed in N. Michigan during the general."

All human life is to be seen on Facebook. Which, for some, is not necessarily a good thing.

Facebook has removed a poll asking "Should Obama be killed?" But not before at least 730 people took part in the poll. The poll offered four potential answers to the question: "Yes", "No", "Maybe," and "If he cuts my health care."

The Plum Line, a Washington Post site, reports that the Secret Service has begun an investigation into who might have been behind such an imaginative exercise. It appears that a blog called the Political Carnival first noticed the poll and alerted the Secret Service over the weekend.

(Credit: The Huffington Post)

Facebook is increasingly becoming a popular forum for all kinds of hateful speech--from Holocaust Denial Groups to anti-Muslim organizations. Groups purporting to hate specific individuals have also found a home on Facebook, and the company has not found it easy to keep up with the amount of policing that is required to cover more than 300 million members.

However, this poll will represent for many an entirely new dimension in human dementia. It will be interesting to see how quickly the source is located and who that source might turn out to be.

Facebook's Barry Schnitt told me in an e-mail that while the site doesn't comment on actions against individual users, "penalties for posting content in violation of our policies range from warnings to temporarily or permanently disabling accounts." He also confirmed that the site is working with the Secret Service but couldn't provide any details of their investigation.

As to the source of the poll, he said: "The third-party application that enabled an individual user to create the offensive poll was brought to our attention this morning (Monday). It was immediately suspended while the inappropriate content could be removed by the developer and until such time as the developer institutes better procedures to monitor their user-generated content."

When President Obama talks about employing technology to improve the health care system, perhaps he's talking about something like the kidney donation software developed by Silverstone Solutions.

Designed by software engineer David Jacobs--whose own brother died of kidney failure--Silverstone's Kidney Paired Donation technology is built around the idea of radically improving the process through which those in need of kidney transplants must go to get what they need. If they are able to at all.

Today, Jacobs said, there are 83,000 Americans waiting for kidney transplants, each of whom has to wait between seven and eleven years for a new organ, much or all of that on dialysis. Many of those people don't survive the wait. Silverstone's technology (listen to a podcast about the software) aims to capitalize on a concept that has existed since the 1990s in which multiple pairs of incompatible donors and recipients are mined to uncover a suitable pair.

Silverstone Solutions' software is designed to find suitable matches between kidney donors and those suffering from kidney disease. Already, the software has been used by a San Francisco hospital to save nearly two dozen lives, the company said.

(Credit: Silverstone Solutions)

Silverstone is one of 39 companies presenting at Demo in Palm Springs, Calif., this week.

While the concept has been around for some time, Jacobs said, the technology didn't exist to deal with the complexities of finding the needle in the haystack: the pair that does work out of many which, for one genetic reason or another, don't.

After his brother died, and his own kidney failure led to two years on dialysis waiting for a transplant, Jacobs said that he realized he could apply his software skills to solving the problem faced by thousands of people across the United States--that of the frustration and frequently deadly consequences of having someone who is a willing kidney donor whose organ is incompatible.

In general, Jacobs said, making appropriate matches often wasn't possible in these circumstances because of a multitude of factors, including the difficulties of sharing patient information among multiple clinics, and the inability of those clinics and hospitals to apply sophisticated enough software to identifying the right matches.

Now, however, Jacobs said, his software--which in general will be licensed by medical institutions--will make it possible to quickly and efficiently find appropriate matches among even thousands of otherwise incompatible pairs. By evaluating the genetic data among the many potential pairings, the software can find the right recipients for the kidneys of willing--and importantly, living--donors.

What used to take months, or more, Jacobs said, can now take minutes, potentially saving the lives of many victims of kidney disease.

Already, San Francisco's California Pacific Medical Center is using Silverstone's software, and has so far saved nearly two dozen lives, Jacobs said.

The heart of Silverstone's software, he suggested, are algorithms that can find the right matches out of what might millions of possible combinations. What's key, he said, is that the software works with potential matches involving living donors, whereas the national list of 83,000 people needing transplants relies on finding matches for the organs of those who have just died. By working on potential pairings involving living donors, there is more flexibility in matching up the donors and the recipients, and, perhaps just as important, more time available for getting the donated organ to the patient.

For now, Silverstone's software is dedicated to kidney transplants. And while its algorithms revolve around genetic analysis specific to kidney disease, it seems logical that the software could also be used for finding appropriate matches for other organs.

A Googlebomb returned President Barack Obama's official Web site as the top Google search result for 'cheerful achievement.'

(Credit: Google)

One administration after George Bush became the top result for a Google search for "miserable failure," new President Barack Obama has his own such artificially engineered result for the query "cheerful achievement."

Earlier Thursday morning, a search for the relatively unusual term returned Obama's whitehouse.gov site as the top link, the result of a bit of work called a Googlebomb . However, perhaps illustrating the frailty of this particular effort, the result had been bumped to second place behind news of the Obama Googlebomb published by the Google Blogoscoped blog. See the more recent view in the screenshot below.

Google uses an algorithm called PageRank to help choose what sites get top rankings in search results; a site's PageRank score is higher when many other sites link to it. A Googlebomb can exploit this algorithm when many people create Web pages and appropriate links.

Eric Baillargeon of Montreal initiated this particular Googlebomb and claimed a victory at 10:45 a.m. PST.

It didn't affect search sites of either Yahoo or Microsoft on Thursday morning.

Update 10:13 a.m. PST January 23: Google didn't have anything new to share about this particular Googlebomb, instead reiterating a two-year-old blog post about the subject.

"By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead," Ryan Moulton and Kendra Carattini said in the post.

Google tries to address the issue in part because "over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries," which isn't true.

After about an hour, news of the Googlebomb effort derailed the Googlebomb itself.

(Credit: Google)

Just as President-elect Barack Obama has been busy assembling his Cabinet, the Presidential Inaugural Committee has been busy selecting providers of tech services for this week's inaugural festivities.

The PIC has already made arrangements with YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr. The latest appointee? Microsoft's Silverlight Media Player, which has been tapped to enable live and on-demand video streaming of Tuesday's ceremony on the PIC Web site.

The PIC will also stream video of a Baltimore event on the Whistle Stop Tour that will take the President-elect and Vice President-elect Joe Biden to Washington, D.C., from Philadelphia.

This is not Silverlight's first major foray into politics. In August of last year, the Democratic National Convention Committee used Silverlight to stream convention proceedings, including President-elect Obama's acceptance speech.

Silverlight's participation in the inauguration could help Microsoft boost the momentum it gained from its work with NBC streaming live coverage for last summer's Olympics in Beijing. Over a 17-day period, Microsoft said NBCOlympics.com had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video watched.

After initial sluggish demand for the browser plug-in, the software maker said the Olympics helped boost Silverlight's U.S. penetration by 30 percent.

Silverlight, a competitor to Flash, debuted in 2007, and the final version of the Silverlight 2 media player came out in October. Among the new features are support for digital rights management technology, improved cross-platform support and deep zoom technology.

Sen. Barack Obama has already proven himself to be the most popular presidential candidate on the Internet, what with his more than 1.3 million Facebook supporters and lofty aims of 2 million online donors. Now the presumptive Democratic nominee is not only outshining other politicians on the Internet, but also the very stars of social networking--Obama has just overtaken Kevin Rose's spot as the most followed person on Twitter, according to Twitterholic.

By Twitterholic's last count, Obama stands at 56,661 followers, compared with Rose's 56,442. Obama also has the second highest number of friends on Twitter--59,338--according to Twitterholic, which calculates individual statistics for each Twitter user a couple of times a day. The candidate's Twitter page offers up such rousing tidbits of news as "Holding a town hall on economic security in St. Petersburg, FL."

But for all those followers, there just may be a few who don't feel sufficiently networked with the candidate. For those who want to be in-the-know about all things Obama--like his VP choice--a millisecond before millions of others, the candidate reminds us to sign up for his text message alerts.

Between 2,000 and 3,000 liberal-leaning bloggers are getting some face time this week, in hopes of gathering strength before the fall election.

The four-day Netroots Nation 2008 conference, which started Thursday in Austin, Texas, will feature more than 150 speakers and 125 panel discussions and events.

With the presidential election less than four months away, the conference is attracting the attention of a number of Democratic heavyweights--with the major exception of presidential candidate Barack Obama himself. According to the Austin American-Statesman, Obama apparently bowed out due to a planned trip to Europe and the Middle East.

Keynote speakers include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and two former presidential hopefuls: Howard Dean, who now leads the Democratic National Committee, and retired Gen. Wesley Clark. Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and founder of Change Congress, will also speak.

Panels include "Pundit Project: How To Outtalk The Talking Heads," "Sunshine Laws For Bloggers," and "Measuring and Managing Your Online Paid Advertising Campaigns." There are also caucus meetings such as ones for Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, "geeks," "moms," "street prophets," and Mother Jones readers.

This is the third annual such conference, which was previously known as YearlyKos, and the first one that could help influence the outcome of a presidential election. Netroots Nation, a site where liberal bloggers converge, was originally part of the Daily Kos blog--thus the previous name of the gathering.

"Bloggers want to be involved in the election of the next president," Matt Glazer, editor of the Austin-based blog Burnt Orange Report, told the Austin American-Statesman. "Networks of bloggers aren't just talking to one another; they are making very strategic decisions about the issues they want to discuss."

At the same time the liberal bloggers are meeting, their conservative counterparts are gathering in Austin as well. The Texas Defending the American Dream state summit will be markedly smaller than the Netroots Nation gathering, with about 300 expected, according to the Statesman. But its speakers include Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr.

There's an interesting blog at Silicon Alley Insider about how Barack Obama's team has exploited Web video better than Hillary Clinton's.

Obama's go-to guy for online is Arun Chaudhary, who spoke at an event at New York University. He says the senator devoted way more resources to video than Clinton.

At campaign stops, the Clintonites would send one person to tape her. Obama's side often would train five cameras on him at events.

"They posted new video constantly, and quickly--19 minutes from shoot to post, in one case," wrote Alley Insider's Michael Learmonth. "And they'd ping community voters via e-mail to alert them to new video."

Here's an interesting fact: the average viewer is middle-aged, between 45 and 55 years old. Also, the humorous videos weren't the most popular. Speeches and unscripted moments were the most viewed.

This undermines the argument that YouTube and Web video only reach teens and twenty-somethings.