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.
Long lines, broken voting machines, and citizens who can't vote because their names don't show up on the registration rolls. A group of software developers and designers have teamed up with the blog techPresident to make it easier for voters to broadcast such issues far and wide--fast.
The Twitter Vote Report, as its name suggests, lets voters share experiences and resources via the popular microblogging service. The messages will then be aggregated and mapped so followers can "see" voting problems in real time via state-specific Google Maps, like the Colorado map at the top of this blog.
Twitterites can post to the Twitter Vote Report in a few ways:
• By Twitter: post a tweet that includes the hashtag #votereport and then other predetermined tags ("#wait:90" means that the wait time is 90 minutes, for example; #machine would indicate machine problems).
• By text message: send a text message starting with #votereport to 66937 (MOZES).
• By phone: call the automated hotline at 567-258-VOTE (8683) or 208-272-9024 with any touch-tone phone.
• By iPhone/Android phone: download the iPhone App or find the "votereport" app in the Android marketplace.
Of course, the Twitter Vote Report is only one of many online election tools. From polling widgets to iPhone-based countdown clocks, election apps are more plentiful than California electoral votes.
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.
Meebo is getting into the real-time election chatter game that Current and Twitter (story) have been in with the debates. The company is announcing that it will power the chat rooms for Comedy Central's Indecision2008 Election Day coverage. Comedy Central will also be live blogging the election.
I am a big fan of Meebo's products, although its chat service does have limitations. Only 80 people can enter a chat room, after which the service opens up additional rooms for the overflow crowds. Meebo can handle an indefinite number of these shadow rooms, but they are all separate parties: if you and a friend both log into the same crowded chat, there's no guarantee that you'll end up in the same room. On the other hand, limiting the number of users in a room does keep the conversation manageable; a single chat room with thousands of Comedy Central wannabe pundits would be not just unbearable, but physically unreadable.
Although I like Meebo's services, I've been skeptical of its business model. So I took this announcement as an opportunity to talk with Meebo COO Martin Green (a former CNET employee) about it. The executive summary: Volume. Here's how Meebo works:
First of all, the Comedy Central thing is a branding play. There's no money changing hands. Meebo makes its money by selling performance-based (click-through) advertising, like Google does. And like Google, Meebo works only if it has a large volume of users. Through its embeddable products and its partner deals, it reaches "tens of millions of users," Green says, which is "big enough to matter." (Twitter, please pay attention to this.)
Meebo also learns about its users, both by watching keywords and by gathering demographic information. So if the company wants to package a group of users to advertisers that are, say 18- to 24-year-old males who like action movies, it can do that. And those ads drive engagement, not just passive viewing. "This is where most social networks fall down," Green says. "They have tremendously low click rates. We've just started and we have a very high engagement rate. Our average click rate across all our products is just under 1 percent. And we haven't turned on targeting yet."
Meebo sells performance advertising: clicks, not impressions. It is, in a nutshell, the Google advertising model. At scale, it works.
So I have to admit that it's a good story, and that's not counting the social network effect (where users actively share ads with other users; Green says it happens thousands of times a day) nor Meebo's relatively lean cost structure. It has fewer than 50 people.
If there are things to worry about in Meebo, I would say they are maintaining the clickthrough rates and dealing with big properties that want to use Meebo but don't want Meebo's ads appearing on their sites. But overall, I found Green's business model pitch compelling, especially in an economy where many advertisers should be moving to trackable, measurable ad vehicles over standard image advertising.
PBS and YouTube are encouraging U.S. voters to take something more than a sense of civic duty with them when they head to the polls on Nov. 4: they want them to take video cameras, too.
The Google-owned video site has partnered with PBS for "Video Your Vote," a project that encourages voters to videotape their polling experience and upload it to the Web. Select videos will be shown on Jim Lehrer's The NewsHour on PBS.
"Voters have documented each step of the 2008 election on YouTube and this phenomenon will culminate on November 4 as people head to the polls to determine the forty-fourth President of the United States," Steve Grove, YouTube's head of news and politics, said in a release Wednesday.
"This partnership with PBS, an organization known for offering rich perspectives, will help voters examine all aspects of voting from the registration processes, to reforms, to technology and election administration, to the actual casting of ballots." Grove elaborated in a video interview with blog Beet.tv.
Gadget company Pure Digital Technologies has agreed to give away 1,000 of its Flip Video cameras to participants who agree to make nine short videos for Video Your Vote: three before voting, three at the polls, and three afterward. A few start-ups, like user-contributed news site GroundReport, have jumped on board as well and are also offering free Flip cameras to readers who participate.
YouTube has a separate campaign, in partnership with the U.S. Department of State, called the "Democracy Challenge." That's geared more toward aspiring filmmakers rather than voters armed with handheld cameras.
The video-sharing site already has a track record for political influence. In the 2006 mid-term elections, a widely circulated video of then-Senator George Allen using a bizarre racial epithet at a campaign rally made the rounds on YouTube, and according to some critics, it cost him the election.
But be careful: Some states have laws governing cameras at the polls. We don't think "Google said it was O.K." will be adequate defense.
Update at 5:55 a.m. PDT: Additional TV stations airing the debate live have been added.
This is Hulu's new election hub.
(Credit: Hulu)Last year, it was all about "remixing" debate footage. But this year, it's about seeing it live.
Video content hub Hulu has secured the rights to stream the remaining two presidential debates live on the Web. The next debate is set for Tuesday night.
The news was first reported by PaidContent that Hulu has launched Election '08 hub for the live debate, as well as past election-related footage. That includes footage from political satire talk shows The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the only two MTV Networks shows currently on Hulu.
This is the first-ever live broadcast for Hulu, a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.
Cable channel Current, co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, is streaming all presidential debates live on the Web as part of its "Hack the Debate" partnership with Twitter.
Most major television broadcasters and news channels are airing the debate live, of course, including ABC, CBS, CNBC, CNN, Fox, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, PBS, and Telemundo.
Hulu will also, according to PaidContent, also be the venue for the debut of Crawford, a documentary about the town best known for President Bush's ranch.
Joost, the video content site that everyone thought would be a runaway success, began offering live TV for the first time this past spring, starting with the NCAA "March Madness" basketball tournament.
The new Yahoo News beta.
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo News has realized that there's a lot of information out there on the Web and that people just don't have time for all of it. That's why the new opt-in beta of a revamped Yahoo News, which went live on Thursday, tries to cut to the chase.
"Essentially, we've found that news consumers want only the first few paragraphs of a news story, and then they move on," an e-mail from Yahoo representatives explained. "Given the short attention span of today's audience, we modified the site to present only the first five paragraphs, and we're now offering relevant links to other stories much higher on the page."
The interface of the new Yahoo News is also wider, fitting in more without the need to start scrolling. And in anticipation of the upcoming election, Yahoo has enhanced its "political dashboard" for 2008 election news headlines and poll tracking. As with many current politics sites, the centerpiece is a red-and-blue electoral college map--and Yahoo users can create their own scenarios. The latest update allows a given candidate's poll performance to be tracked over time.
In February, Yahoo debuted its Buzz social news site, which propels the most popular headlines to the main Yahoo News page. The main Yahoo News site has more than 40 million users, the company said.
This post was updated to clarify what's new with the Political Dashboard.
(Credit:
Twitter)
Now live, from the team behind Twitter: a site for tracking "tweets" pertaining to the fast-approaching U.S. presidential elections. Enter an election-related post on the page and it will appear in the continually-updating feed, which also aggregates other Twitter posts that contain election-related terms like the candidates' names.
In July, Twitter announced that it had acquired Summize, a popular search tool based on the Twitter application program interface (API). Now called Twitter Search, the Summize technology appears to be behind the filters on the election site.
If the 2004 elections hailed the debut of bloggers and the 2006 mid-term elections were when YouTube popped onto the scene (just ask former Virginia senator George Allen), it's looking like 2008 will be the election cycle where Twitter sped to the forefront of the political Web. The campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain have created Twitter accounts for up-to-the-minute news and updates--the most recent updates are featured at the top of the Twitter election site--and the micro-blogging site has proven to be a must-use tool for opinionated news junkies and aspiring pundits.
But Twitter is still small enough so that it's possible to generate a simple "election feed" without encountering too much noise or irrelevant banter.
Twitter has also partnered with experimental news network Current TV on its election coverage, and selected live "tweets" will be displayed on-screen during its coverage of the presidential debates. Those are slated to start on Friday night, but Republican candidate John McCain's participation is still up in the air due to his announcement that he would suspend his campaign to focus on the ongoing Wall Street calamity.
Will he debate or not? Check that nifty new election page on Twitter. They're talking about it.
