The Social

NEW YORK--Solar panels clusters in New Mexico, wind farms dotting the Great Plains? That's all very nice. But that railroad tunnel in Baltimore is important, too.

On a gray and rainy Thursday, I went to Time Inc.'s midtown Manhattan headquarters for what was supposed to be a panel about the company's flagship magazine's annual "Person of the Year" honor. But amid consistently grave economic news, not to mention the fact that everyone in attendance seemed to agree that President-elect Barack Obama eclipses any other options for the award, the conversation was less about a magazine headline and more about the future of the country.

After a hefty fall season of digital-media and Web conferences, I was surprised to witness that outside the culture of think-big tech pundits, "the future" is a lot more mundane.

"This is what President Obama's going to face," said panelist Elizabeth Edwards, Center for American Progress senior fellow and wife of former presidential candidate John Edwards. The road out of the economic crisis is "not a refund check" encouraging more consumption, "not more houses with more flat-screen TVs...(but) bridges that work and schools that inspire students."

The panelist lineup was impressive: in addition to Edwards, there was NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams; Mad Men actor John Slattery; personal-finance talking head Suze Orman; Saturday Night Live head writer Seth Meyers; and congressional Rep. Artur Davis (D-Alabama). None of them were the sorts of people whom I'd seen onstage in the past two months of tech industry events, from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York to the Future of Web Apps in London to last week's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco (which featured Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and former Vice President Al Gore, among others).

To be sure, the Techmeme set talks a whole lot about recession and recovery these days. Al Gore has urged us to move beyond "the gee-whiz stuff." Back in April, Tim O'Reilly expressed mild disgust at the fact that some of the U.S.' best and sharpest minds were busy building new ways to throw virtual hamburgers at each other on Facebook.

The problem is that some of these digital thought leaders' "real-world solutions" are still painted with that wide-eyed, change-the-world Valley sparkle. There is a distinct soldier-on, innovation-won't stop attitude, even as dozens of tech companies slice off a fifth, a quarter, a third of their workforces. Tech innovation will change the world in big ways, but it will change the world in small and unglamorous ways, too, and we're not hearing a whole lot of that.

At the Web 2.0 Summit, Gore suggested that in ten years we can build a "unified national smart grid" of sustainable electricity, a plan that would create thousands of jobs but which critics say might not even work. Paul Otellini excitedly showed off an Intel prototype of a camera-like gadget that could do language translations in seconds. Other panels at the same conference were all about consumer solar equipment retail, home DNA tests, and $100,000 electric sports cars.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams

(Credit: NBC)

There was none of that on Thursday at Time Inc.'s headquarters. Williams suggested that perhaps President Obama's priorities should, FDR-style, putting people to work repairing a national infrastructure that's in bad disrepair. "Would it be that bad if we had a big jobs program?" Williams posed.

He asked why New York's LaGuardia Airport is in disrepair, why some of the city's infrastructure hasn't been touched since the days of controversial public works czar Robert Moses, and why it was possible that a bridge collapsed in Minneapolis last year. He asked why the U.S.' only high-speed train line, Amtrak's Acela Express, has to slow to 25 miles per hour to get through a tunnel outside Baltimore that dates back to the 1930s.

If people were put to work repairing it, Williams said, "you could get to Washington 20 minutes earlier."

The nifty smart-camera gadget that Otellini showed off at the Web 2.0 Summit might as well have been a flying car on The Jetsons in comparison.

SAN FRANCISCO--There wasn't much time for Current Media, the cable news network co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, to recover from last week's election and its marathon live broadcast, infused with content from Digg, Twitter, and countless video bloggers.

On Friday, Gore was giving the final address of the Web 2.0 Summit, a few blocks to the west of Current's offices, at the Palace Hotel, and plenty of advertising and marketing types were in town for the occasion.

Since it's a media company partially dependent on ad and sponsorship revenues, Current seized the opportunity, inviting a selection of visiting Madison Avenue types over to its offices for a meet-and-greet lunch with a special appearance by Gore, who famously went from losing the 2000 presidential election to winning an Academy Award and a Nobel Peace Prize.

That morning, things were bustling, as maintenance staff was streaming in and out the front door, filling the downstairs lobby with dining tables and potted plants unloaded from two trucks parked outside. At so many of the Bay Area's tech brands that had launched election coverage, promotions, or other tie-ins, the attitude was the same: Nice job. Now let's keep moving.

"I was even joking the other day that I kind of felt like I have a bit of postpartum depression," said Randi Zuckerberg, who, as Facebook's marketing director, handles the social network's political-outreach efforts. "It was such a long, drawn-out, exciting election, and now it's just over."

But even for Facebook, at the top of Silicon Valley's pecking order, there is a sense that a quick turnaround is needed. "I'm definitely looking forward to jumping right into some of the international politics, international elections," Zuckerberg said, reflecting the company's dramatic overseas expansion and hope to tap into the same election fever abroad through voting-outreach initiatives. Its efforts proved successful in the United States, with 15 million people over the age of 18 logging into the site last Tuesday.

What's current at Current Media
The story is different at a company like Current, which was dismissed by some at its 2005 launch as a long-shot experiment. For Gore's company, the 2008 election posed an important street cred test.

Current's office looks more like a perky dot-com circa 1997 than a news media network. The space hosted a coffee beanery in the city's manufacturing era and a finance start-up during the tech boom, it's now a cavernous, servers-and-wires-filled space with exposed brick walls, post-industrial pipes, and blaring monitors. For Election Night, the office was transformed into "an election nerve center," Current's resident digital guru, Robin Sloan, told CNET News on Friday morning. "We had the Twitter room, the Digg room, the election control room," Sloan explained in a bubbly staccato. "It was totally electric. I mean, manic."

Current's ambitious election coverage came with plenty of risks: the potential awkwardness of working with Digg, which Current had unsuccessfully tried to acquire in 2006, and Twitter, which has had problems just keeping its servers running properly. The coverage had been planned in a matter of weeks, too.

"The idea to plug in the Twitters didn't really occur to us until we saw the way that people were using Twitter during the (Democratic and Republican parties') conventions," Sloan said. "We ended up getting a sponsor for this Election Day thing three days before it actually went on TV--from Microsoft."

But he says the company considers it to have been a great success, despite some critics' revulsion at Current's decision to use turquoise and magenta for its electoral map instead of red and blue. "This was like transplanting Web DNA into a Web-slash-TV project. To me, that was one of the big successes."

Like Facebook, Current plans to keep up the momentum and use it elsewhere.

"The question is, as we sort of recover, what is the next cool live event that we can construct something around?" Sloan suggested, adding that Inauguration Day is an easy pick but that it would be nice to choose something nonpolitical. Current, a 400-person operation, doesn't currently do much live coverage, and it was not yet able to provide concrete statistics on viewership or Web traffic.

The aftermath at Twitter and Digg
The election left both Digg and Twitter, meanwhile, at an inflection point: for Twitter, the political frenzy was its biggest chance yet to jump from digerati cult fame into the mainstream; Digg needed to prove to some that it's a potential media industry powerhouse rather than merely a hub of nerdy boys voting up and down on Apple rumors and wacky top-10 lists.

They're still, for the most part, in Barack mode. Several days after the election, Digg founder Kevin Rose taped a "Digg Dialogg" interview with Gore, who also signed up for a Twitter account that week. On Thursday, Twitter's blog highlighted a video clip of talk show hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert talking about the start-up.

That frenzy will die down sooner rather than later. And it goes without saying that in these economic conditions, regardless of President-elect Obama's potential, pre-revenue companies like Digg and Twitter need to get cracking on the money issue. That's another reason why there just isn't much time to relish a post-election hangover.

Some start-ups that were heavily reliant on election-related traffic or contracts have been hedging their bets. Liberal news outlet The Huffington Post, for example, spent the past year not only churning out a firestorm of election coverage but also launching new areas of coverage that wouldn't see a big drop in visits after Election Day. And representatives from a number of Web application makers that were commissioned to make spiffy election widgets for big media companies told CNET News late last month that they have their fingers crossed that those contracts and connections will lead to more high-profile deals after the election.

But onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday, a few hours after he met with potential advertisers and marketers at Current's offices, Al Gore put forth a different argument for maintaining momentum: the election was a stellar demonstration of how the likes of Digg, Twitter, and Facebook can be used for social change, and these times are too pressing to step back and return to that blissful age of zombie-biting apps and snotty Digg comments on wacky news stories.

"I do think that it's worth looking at the advantages of redesigning and rearchitecturing the context within which the activities take place--in other words, World 2.0," Gore said. "When there are changes that are needed, there's no timidity about going out and trying to make them happen."

That post-election, mid-November vacation getaway? Sorry. Maybe there'll be better luck after the 2010 midterms.

Former Vice President Al Gore onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News)

SAN FRANCISCO--The central theme of former Vice President Al Gore's speech, concluding the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday afternoon, was electricity.

He spoke of "the electrifying redemption of America's revolutionary declaration that all human beings are created equal," as emphasized through Barack Obama's election victory on Tuesday, and how it "would not have been possible without the additional empowerment of individuals to use knowledge as a source of power that has come with the Internet."

Gore reiterated what so many people have said before--that the Obama campaign was a vindication for how the new tools of the Internet can be used toward legitimate change.

"What happened in the election opens up a full new range of possibilities, and now is the time to really move swiftly to use these new possibilities," he said. "I made a talk earlier today about how the early uses of electricity 100 years ago were aimed at sort of specialized applications and gimmicks and do-dads and whiz-bangs that demonstrated the special qualities of this new conveyor of power."

He meant, essentially, throwing an electric sheep. (Apologies to Philip K. Dick.)

"Now we just take electricity for granted as everywhere, and it has empowered a whole civilization," he said. Gore said the analogy stands for Web 2.0 as well. "When people are displaying interactivity or user-generated content or social networking, that's kind of the gee-whiz stuff...We need to move past that."

Electricity, too, is key to Gore's urgent call to action, which he detailed with an immediacy that was needed at a conference where some panels drifted a little too far into the speculative future. America needs a "unified national smart grid" distributing renewable solar energy across the country, something he estimates would cost $400 billion in a decade. But it would create thousands of jobs, Gore said, and it would pay for itself within three years.

When Obama takes office in January, Gore said the new president ought to set "a national goal of getting 100 percent of America's electricity from renewable and noncarbon sources within 10 years. We can do that."

He continued: "The declaration from President Kennedy that we would land a man on the moon and bring him back safely was thought by many to be impossible."

Gore had come onstage at the conference to a standing ovation and so much applause that he had to tell the audience to quiet down. His story is familiar: he famously won the popular vote for the presidency in 2000 but lost the electoral vote to George W. Bush, and he went on to win both an Academy Award for his environmental-awareness documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

In 2005, Gore founded Current TV, a cable news network that he created with Joel Hyatt in response to his dissatisfaction with the television industry. "One of the main reasons why our political system has not been operating very well until this election is the deadening influence of the television medium as it has been operated," he said.

Gore encouraged the digerati in the audience to keep pushing forward as they face what he says is the most pressing struggle of our time, climate change--the subject matter of An Inconvenient Truth. The fact that the Web's candidate of choice won this time is no reason to rest easy, he said. Media democratization needs to continue evolving.

"Just as Barack Obama's election would've been impossible without the new dialogue and new ways of interacting--the Web--the only way (climate change) is going to be solved is by addressing the democracy crisis, and the country hit a great blow for victory this week, but we have to take this issue and raise it in the awareness of everyone," Gore said. "I think that it is very much in its infancy, barely beginning, and I think that we are not many years away from television sort of sinking into the digital world and becoming a part of it."

Cynics might say Gore, who calls himself a "recovering politician," is still bitter at a sterilized news media that didn't sufficiently back his calling in the 2000 presidential election. Needless to say, his views remain controversial. But onstage, Gore seemed plenty comfortable in his new role as a thought leader rather than an elected official.

"Who knew that you were the guru of Web 2.0, as well as global warming?" conference organizer Tim O'Reilly asked Gore jokingly after the former vice president had illustrated an analogy involving "crowdsourced" information and cloud computing, two of the decade's most buzzworthy digital talking points.

If the audience was any indication, Gore has gained resounding acceptance as an information-age guru, a bit of an irony, considering that 10 years ago, erroneous reports circulated that he had once claimed to have invented the Internet.

"When we have really had these great leaps forward has been when new information ecoystems have made it possible for individuals who are thinking and processing information, and who have aspirations and hopes...to connect easily with lots of voters around core ideas," Gore explained. His preferred analogy was the invention of the printing press five centuries ago, in which he connected general historical events to the rise of literacy and eventually the creation of democratic governments.

"The installation of a new sovereign, the rule of reason, and the emergence of a marketplace of ideas that was accessible to individuals--that really empowered this kind of collective intelligence," Gore said. "And the American constitution could be, by analogy, a brilliant piece of software that regularly harvested the results of that."

An audience member asked Gore how much he thought governments should regulate Internet use, and Gore fired back, "As little as possible." There was more applause, and as he left the stage, there was yet another standing ovation.

Gore might not have invented the Internet (or even claimed to do so). But if the Web 2.0 Summit was any indication, plenty of Silicon Valley's most loyal are more than happy to have him help reinvent it.

Social network Facebook hopes to replicate the phenomenal success of its 2008 U.S. presidential election outreach and coverage in other countries, outreach and marketing director Randi Zuckerberg told CNET News on Thursday.

"This week is definitely all the post-election aftermath, but I'm definitely looking forward to jumping right into some of the international politics (and) international elections," said Zuckerberg (who is, in case you were wondering, CEO Mark Zuckerberg's sister). "It's a little more fun to work on some of those because they don't draw out their elections for a year and a half."

It's a logical conclusion for the social network, as numbers indicate that three-quarters of the site's users are now outside its native U.S.

Right now, Facebook is in election heaven. According to its official blog, more than 5.4 million users clicked an "I Voted" widget that shared the news with members of their friends' list. Some 1.7 million used the "Causes" application to encourage their friends to vote. Out of Facebook's 125 million members, 15 million of those aged 18 or older logged into the site on Election Day. Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, members distributed 200,000 copies in a single day of a "virtual gift" advertisement created by The New York Times that depicted its election results headline.

Randi Zuckerberg said to CNET News that two of the countries where Facebook is hoping to jump into election media are the U.K., where Facebook actually has greater penetration than in the U.S., and Germany. It's going to be a learning process, Zuckerberg added. "There are legal restrictions that are different in every single country. I was even learning about the U.S. legal restrictions down to the last second, some of the things like with Ben & Jerry's and Starbucks giving stuff away for free on our site."

The two had launched high-profile campaigns, advertised on Facebook, in which free Ben & Jerry's ice cream or Starbucks coffee was offered to anyone who voted. Giving incentives in exchange for a vote is technically illegal in the U.S., something that most people were not aware of until Starbucks had to announce that it would give a free tall coffee to anyone on Tuesday, regardless of vote.

"In the U.K., for example, there are certain rules about showing advertising around political content," Zuckerberg continued. "We'll definitely have to get in there and learn the lay of the land."

It was a marathon evening for media buffs as Barack Obama beat rival John McCain to become the United States' first African-American president-elect. You couldn't miss it on Twitter, as the microblogging service exploded with election updates, commentary, and speculation.

Miraculously, Twitter's servers lasted the night, and had quite a lot of terrific, 140-characters-long election commentary (in messages known as "tweets") to serve up for hungry news hounds. Here are 10 of CNET News' favorites.

10. One of Barack Obama's most-buzzed campaign innovations was announcing his running mate choice via text message. It not only bolstered the young candidate's image as the nominee of choice for tech-savvy youth, but it also gave his campaign a huge repository of cell phone numbers--and nobody was surprised when Obama used them on Election Day. It even got on some users' nerves: Twitter user FinanceGirl expressed her frustration: OMG, Obama! Please stop texting me!

9. In the interest of shameless self-promotion, this one comes from CNET News' own Josh Lowensohn, who asked at the conclusion of Obama's music-filled victory speech, This remind anyone else of the end of Return of the Jedi? With CNN using holograms to bring remote correspondents into the studio, Princess Leia-style, he's got a point.

8. If you were following the election feed on Twitter during Obama's acceptance speech, at one point, the conversation turned entirely to puppies. Backstory: Obama had promised his two young daughters that he'd give them a puppy if he won the election, and as he thanked his family in the speech, he mentioned that, yes, they'd get the dog. From the twittering masses came plenty of OMGs and adorable-speak, but Twitter user Dennis Yang had a different thought in mind: obama, do I get a puppy too?

7. Los Angeles-based twitterer Bill Palmer noticed that literally everyone caught election fever: homeless guy on Hollywood Blvd with a sign that says "Obama aint the only one who wants change"--now that's clever. McCain supporters, insert your own potshot about "spreading the wealth around" here.

(Credit: Twitter; The Onion)

6. One of the funniest Twitter accounts to follow during the election was the account for satire newspaper The Onion, and it was in high gear. Members of Twitter were encouraged to tag their tweets with #twitvote to provide election updates; The Onion naturally started planting fake ones. The best of the bunch: #twitvote 9:39 a.m. Dr. Monopoly Pumpernickel was denied a vote after he was shown to be nothing more than 3 small children in an overcoat.

5. Another pretty sweet tweet from The Onion: #twitvote: 5:57 p.m. Donald Pauley of Pickerington, OH fled the polling station when his voting machine asked, "Shall we play a game?"

4. As voting lines reached record lengths around the country, CrunchGear blogger Peter Ha told everyone via Twitter to calm down: If you can wait three+ days to buy a damned iPhone then you can wait (in) line to vote, a**hats. Crude, yes. But he gets his point across.

(Credit: Twitter; jdmcleodjr)

3. One of the biggest success stories of the election cycle--you know, besides the guy who won--was FiveThirtyEight.com and its owner, Nate Silver. The election prediction site sprang up out of Silver's experience predicting baseball results, and twitterers were in awe when FiveThirtyEight's predictions turned out to be almost completely dead-on.

Twitter user jdmcleodjr has some ideas for what he should do next: Incidentally, Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com ought to take his act to Vegas. Well, if you've mastered baseball and national politics, there must be only one frontier left to conquer--poker!

2. It was a thrilling evening for Obama supporters, but some people have really been left out in the cold--namely late-night talk-show hosts and stand-up comedians who have said in the past that the now-president-elect simply isn't wacky enough for joke fodder.

Remember how thrilled comedians were when he learned that Obama was bad at bowling? They'll have to be more creative now, as Canadian comedian Peter Cianfarini twittered: Do you people have any idea how much more difficult you've made it for comedians? We needed McCain & Palin. I hope you're all proud! Defeated veep candidate Sarah Palin, after all, will be associated with Canadian comedy for years to come.

1. And our official "best election tweet" award goes to Twitter user JHix, who wrote about his voting experience: Officially just played the worst video game ever. You mark people with an "x" and then wait almost forever to find out who won.

The biggest hit on YouTube this week might not even be a video.

A couple of radio DJs from Montreal--Marc-Antoine Audette and Sebastien Trudel, who are known as the "Masked Avengers"--managed to get in a phone call to U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, claiming to be French president Nicolas Sarkozy. They then posted an audio clip of the five-minute stunt to video hub YouTube--and according to just about every major news outlet, this appears to be legitimate.

Does anything scandalous get said? Not really. Palin sticks to her usual talking points, but doesn't seem to pick up on the fact that "Sarkozy" comes across as quite the buffoon, even when he implies that a recent adult film depicting a Palin lookalike was a "documentary" and when he says (in French) that he would love to go hunting for baby seals with her.

The "Masked Avengers" have pranked heads of state before, including Sarkozy himself. But given all the fever about Tuesday's hotly contested election, in which Palin may or may not be elected as the country's first female vice president, this could be their biggest contribution to the history books of hilarious and head-slapping media hoaxes.

It'd be in good company: it comes almost exactly 70 years to the day after the legitimately freaky War of the Worlds radio stunt.

Among the digerati, there's already a clear winner in the presidential election: little Web "widgets" that can be dropped onto sites to carry everything from election results to user-chosen news headlines to slideshows of VP candidate Sarah Palin's fashion choices.

In 2004, the buzz about digital media and the election was all about a nascent form of news publishing--blogs. In 2006 it was online video, particularly YouTube, after the video-sharing site hosted a widely circulated amateur video of George Allen, then a Virginia senator up for re-election, using an obscure racial slur at a campaign rally.

In 2008, it's been all about the widgets. A Silicon Valley fad for two years running, they've officially hit a mainstream fever pitch with the campaign cycle. And if there wasn't enough already about this election to make your head spin, these might put you over the top.

The companies and Web developers who make applications for clients like media companies and political campaigns, from widgets to mobile-device downloads, are currently riding high. So are a ton of Web start-ups that let you vote, mash up, aggregate, or what-have-you with news stories and headlines. Media outlets have been decorating their Web sites with the digital equivalent of Christmas tree ornaments: countdown clocks, video players, tickers with headlines sourced from around the Web, and the trendiest of all, the clickable red-and-blue Electoral College projection map.

It's a far cry from 2004, when we were all marveling over "citizen news" at sites such as RedState and DailyKos, and campaigns' use of Meetup to bring supporters together.

With the electoral cycle drawing to a close, we'll soon see whether the endless parade of "election apps" is a lasting digital trend or whether the hype will fade. Widgets and gadgets and mash-ups are largely reliant on technology created by small Silicon Valley companies that could fall from favor as innovation speeds on, go belly-up in the face of a recession, or see their contracts trimmed from the budgets of cash-strapped media companies that have commissioned them.

Right now, though? They're everywhere. You can see election apps in action on TV, with cable network Current aggregating election-related messages from micro-blogging service Twitter along with headlines from social news site Digg. They're on newspapers' Web sites, like sharing start-up SocialMedian's partnership with outlets like the Washington Post and the U.K.'s The Guardian. They're on the iPhone, with downloads ranging from Electoral College maps to poll results to an official Barack Obama campaign app. And they're on social networks; both Facebook and MySpace have partnered with youth-voting organization Rock the Vote to entice more of their young members to register to vote.

The campaigns are in on it, too. Obama's campaign created an internal social network, an application to run on an Apple iPhone; used a text-messaging campaign to announce his choice of Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden as his running mate; and used the platform of a development company, Clearspring, to make a "Tax Cut Calculator" application. (Clearspring says it's had 1.3 million views in fewer than three weeks, half of which have been on MySpace.) Republican rival John McCain has been less proactive on the social-networking and Web app front, but Clearspring said that a third-party "McCain-Palin '08" application has been embedded across the Web 13,000 times.

For the news-hungry masses, in an era when headlines can emerge anywhere at any hour, widgets and mash-ups and Web apps--often described by their manufacturers with adjectives like "real-time" and "dynamic"--are like 24-hour access to popcorn. "People are gravitating, not just individuals, but actually the campaigns--they're seeing widgets as a way to get their message out and get their campaign message in front of people, particularly in the social-media space," said Bill Rubacky, Clearspring's director of marketing.

2008's election-app craze is as much about managing this frenetic news cycle as it is about galvanizing voters. Just check out MySpace's "Decision '08" page, which features nothing less than an NBC political news feed, a Google Gadget for locating polling stations, an MSNBC video player, a link to an interactive Electoral College map, and a poll from Flektor, a widget-maker that MySpace parent company News Corp. acquired last year--in addition to the usual MySpace networking features.

Some Web users might find it to be an efficient one-stop source for interactive political news. Others might scream "media overload." And if you look at fashion, an era of heavy accessorizing (read: the '80s) is often followed by a reactionary period of austerity. Will digital politics' equivalents of gold bangles and neon leg warmers end similarly? That's dependent on one huge factor: results. Should Obama lose the election on Tuesday, his social-apps-heavy campaign tactics may be seen as less effective than most pundits anticipated.

There's also a question of what happens after Tuesday, when the election hype ends and the reality of a likely recession sets in. One not-so-good sign: Silicon Valley venture capitalists are already expressing concern about the app industry's ability to make money.

"(Political news) is certainly something many people are passionate about, and when the election's over its unclear who they will turn to," said Amanda Michel, head of the "Off the Bus" political coverage hub for the Huffington Post, a political news outlet that has seen its traffic soar with the impending election.

In other words, many of the companies that have been responsible for the share-this, embed-that culture of the 2008 election's digital coverage might not be around to do the same thing for the 2010 midterms or the 2012 general election.

"I wouldn't be surprised if the Internet as a whole took a breather," said Mark Ghuneium, founder and CEO of analytics agency Wiredset. "You know what they say about a rising tide raising all boats? It might be true that (the election) is keeping things sustained."

A correction was made at 1:46 p.m. PT: Clearspring was the platform for the Obama campaign's tax calculator widget, but it was not officially commissioned to make it.

After broadcasting live Twitters during the U.S. presidential debate, Current TV had to go one notch higher for election night.

The cable channel, co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, has partnered with both Twitter and social news site Digg for the evening of November 4, during which it will feature a "multimedia dashboard" with live messages from Twitter, headlines from Digg, and video from both Current and "video status update" start-up 12seconds.tv. In keeping with the network's young target audience, electronica act Diplo will be performing DJ sets throughout the night, too.

The funny irony is that Digg reportedly once walked away from a $100 million acquisition offer from Current.

"The new pace of democracy is real-time," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint release. "Current is helping Twitter amplify the opinions, news, and trends that matter right now. Together, we're influencing more than media--we're evolving conversation."

Election night on Current will also feature (naturally) commentary, projected results, and a state-by-state map. So it won't be all fun and games and Kevin Rose, y'know.

DANA POINT, Calif.--When political pundit Arianna Huffington, along with a team of digital-media veterans, launched political news aggregator The Huffington Post in 2005, critics were skeptical of the left-leaning site. But it's turned out to be one of political journalism's great recent success stories, even amid controversy over the charismatic and opinionated Huffington and the site's business model, which utilizes thousands of unpaid bloggers in addition to full-time reporters.

Just over a year ago, The Huffington Post hired Betsy Morgan, head of CBSNews.com, to serve as its CEO, taking over from co-founder and former AOL executive Ken Lerer.

Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan

At the WebbyConnect summit this week, where Morgan was a featured speaker, CNET News caught up with her to find out just what the site plans to do after the presidential election that has carried it to the heights of digital fame.

Q: The Huffington Post has been riding high on the 2008 election, with ComScore numbers naming it as the top independent political destination on the Web. But everyone's acknowledging that traffic may drop significantly after the election. What is the company's strategy for this?
Morgan: That's a question that I feel like I've been asked a lot in the last couple of weeks. I think all news and information sites have been up this year. We look at our competitors' traffic really closely, too, and that political tide has lifted everybody's boats. I think a couple of things are going to happen after the election. One, what we've certainly seen over the interest in this election is that people are re-energized by the political process and they're very interested, particularly in light of the economy, in what a new administration will look like.

Because of that, you'll continue to see interest in that, in the new administration and who gets picked for what positions and what's the first thing they do and the second thing they do. Does the new president go abroad immediately and try to mend fences? Those kinds of things. I think there's still going to be a big interest in what's going on in Washington.

Do you have different strategies for if Barack Obama wins the election versus if John McCain wins?
Morgan: What's interesting about that is, that question assumes and even reading the headline in ComScore assumes that we are just a political site. Our tagline is "the Internet newspaper." So back to your original question, which I think answers the second question. We've worked really hard over the past year to grow all of our verticals, to launch a bunch of verticals. A bunch are new since this time last year...we have a lot of traffic coming to non-politics stuff, and prior to the most recent sort of frenzy of run-up and countdown, our traffic was sort of about 50-50, so 50 percent to political stories and 50 to everything else.

So we have really consciously grown and attracted an audience that's interested in a whole lot of things besides politics. I do think that one of the things that will be very interesting to see is the obsessiveness with which people are watching the election and being interested in the political process. We're also seeing that behavior on the business side with the economy every day: what happened to the Dow and what happened to the other economic numbers. We're seeing huge traffic for us in those areas so that in November and December, there may be more of a balance.

Have you been shifting resources to covering the financial crisis in more depth?
Morgan: Coverage of the economy folds into so many other parts of our verticals. The economy is tied so closely to politics that some of our politics writers and editors are writing about politics and also the economy: the impact, and what McCain thinks about the economy and what Obama thinks about the economy. The media vertical's another area. Media companies are laying off, their stock prices are getting hit, they're going through changes, they're prepping for the downturn, so that's business-related, too. So the economy is a big story across the board in many different areas, and that's how we're attacking it rather than, "No more style coverage! Start working on those Dow Jones charts!"

What's your election night tech strategy? Will Huffington Post have extra server power in? Will you be auto-refreshing the home page faster?
Morgan: Such a good question when you say auto-refresh. We turned off auto-refresh last December and we've got an AJAX dynamically delivered page. That was a decision we consciously made at the end of last year because we just felt that our page views were not authentic and that we wanted to see more authentic page view numbers, and the auto-refresh thing seems like a thing of the past, though a lot of news sites still use it.

In terms of election night coverage on the tech side, we did a pretty robust tech infrastructure overhaul over the winter in prep for a lot of fall traffic. The management team is in constant communication with the tech team. As we're hitting these record page view numbers daily, can our servers handle this? Can they handle 5x, 10x, 100x, whatever? Having come from a place that dealt with that stuff in spades, at CBS, I'm familiar with that super, super spike in traffic.

What was something that you wanted to do in election coverage and couldn't do for one reason or another?
Morgan: There isn't anything kind of top-of-mind. I think everybody feels like they've been pretty happy with the coverage we've done. I'd say, what could we do more of? We probably could've done a little bit more live blogging. But we feel like we've done a good job of engaging our bloggers.

What are some digital-politics features or applications that other media companies or Web sites have done that you think are really impressive?
Morgan: Yahoo's got a great electoral map that includes Huffington Post picks on who wins the electoral college in what states and what numbers that I think is pretty interesting. I think people like the kind of compare-and-contrast experience. We've liked working with them. AOL's done some interesting things with bloggers, sort of getting voices of bloggers and then getting real-time reaction, and they started that really, really early in the process.

On the mainstream news sites I've got to give everybody credit. I think everybody's evolved from this time last year, maybe having candidate pages, to experiences that are much more interactive where as a consumer you can add value and community.

People say that 2004 was the election where blogs took off and the 2006 mid-term elections were when YouTube took off. What will people be saying was the digital trend that took off in the 2008 elections?
Morgan: What you've seen now in this political cycle is, you've really seen the blogosphere and both individual and mainstream news affect the political process. With Off the Bus, our citizen journalism program with NYU, we've had 12,000 citizens contributing and covering stories across the country, going to rallies, sitting in on conference calls, and really being able to bubble up all that information for mainstream media. It's been fantastic. They've broken a bunch of stories. So I definitely think that it's the rise of the empowerment of the individual journalist or the citizen journalist.

Media is getting hit hard in this economic climate. Ad-supported companies are getting hit hard. And there's a chance that The Huffington Post, like other sites, will see a traffic drop after the election. Are you going to have to do any layoffs?
Morgan: We don't anticipate that. We've had a really good year, ad-wise. We're in the game at a different point in our life cycle than the other mainstream players. We've seen the brand really grow to top of mind with both agencies and clients and the response has been really positive.

I do think everyone's looking at 2009 and thinking, "Do the projections I did in July still apply in 2009?" That's true, totally, across the board. But Internet advertising is still hugely more measurable, of great interest to more and more advertisers, and the value proposition of The Huffington Post is a strong one. You get not just politics, you get a ton of other news and information. It's a growing site and in terms of the audience it attracts, and granted this will change a bit as we get bigger, but it's a real influencer, educated audience, which I think will continue to be attractive to advertisers.

On the flip side, as a recent New Yorker article about Arianna Huffington highlighted, to some critics that demographic is known as "limousine liberals." Are you going to be changing your strategy at all to appeal to, dare I say, average Americans?
Morgan: For any news site, as it gets bigger the demographics change. Our advertising guys look at our demographics very carefully, and I don't think ComScore has a category for "limousine liberals," but our profile, our average user looks like the average user for other news sites, and we feel that we are in that sweet spot along with the other guys like CNN and MSNBC.

Did you have to do any damage control after that New Yorker piece?
Morgan: I thought the piece was great!

True, it wasn't as scathing as some people had expected. So, obviously, The Huffington Post has taken great steps to differentiate itself from just being Arianna Huffington's site. But how central is she to the operation? Should she decide to retire, would you have a Steve Jobs sort of situation where the heart of the company would be gone?
Morgan: Arianna is the most tireless worker in this whole company. She's a total force of nature, and she is a huge, huge promoter of the site, obviously. And we're absolutely grateful for all of her great energy and outreach and she's a very hard worker on not just being an external face of the business but being hugely influential inside the company as well as editor-in-chief. If you look at the company and how it's grown over the last year, we have a really solid management team. It's very much of a business structure, it's very evolved from what was started three years ago as a blog and aggregated news site into something more mainstream and more comprehensive. We're growing. And Arianna's a living brand and she's fantastic, but the site does a lot more than just politics.

On that note, you made your first foray into local news recently with Chicago. How's that going? When will we see more?
Morgan: Soon! You'll definitely see the next local vertical soon.

Which one?
Morgan: We're working on it. I won't name the city. But what we've been able to see with Chicago, and this a hallmark of The Huffington Post, because the team is nimble and agile and we have a very small team dedicated to Chicago--one editor--we can tweak...being able to tweak fast and quickly, on the fly has been huge.