“And This Is How You Send a Direct Message. Whatever You Do, Don’t Do That.”

The veep gets on the Twitter. Probably should wait a bit for Instagram, though.
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JibJab Picks Puppets and Politics for 2010 Recap

JibJab went for a bit of a narrower focus on American politics in its annual original music video recap of the year, constructing a regretful duet between U.S. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

QOTD

“Piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing [merchandise].”

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden

BoomTown Decodes Google CEO Schmidt's Shut-Up-You-Whiny-News-Folk Op-Ed (So You Don't Have To)!

Google CEO Eric Schmidt did one of his patented throat-clearers in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal today and it pretty much begs for translation. Well, BoomTown shall not tarry from the task of decoding the extra-long rumination from the head of Google, who was responding to the recent spate of aggressive attacks by traditional media publishers. They have blamed the search giant for everything from their current business woes to the destruction of journalism to Tiger Woods’s dicey marital troubles. Okay, not that! But the rest for sure.
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Fiorina’s First Act as Senator: Merge California and Nevada

Her dreams of heading up the World Bank dashed, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, the architect of one of the worst tech mergers in history, has turned her attention to California politics. After months of speculation, she officially announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate today.
fiorina

As Traffic Booms, Is HuffPo Ready to Make Some Real Dough?

For the past few months, the Huffington Post has been on a bit of a tear–both in terms of traffic gains and in its hiring of some big talent for key positions. Now, those execs are focusing on using that consumer momentum to achieve what has eluded the Huffington Post thus far: Making some serious bank from the privately held news and media site. Here’s a chat I had with new President and Chief Revenue Officer Greg Coleman about how he is aiming to do just that.
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Amazon’s Kindle 2 Improves the Good, Leaves Out the Bad

Walt finds that Amazon.com has fixed the worst design flaws in the Kindle, its popular electronic-book reader, while maintaining the excellent book-buying experience that made the first model tolerable despite those problems.
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Microsoft's Steve Ballmer Bubble-Pops at Democratic Policy Confab: The Full Speech

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made an appearance at the three-day U.S. House of Representatives Democratic Caucus Retreat today to talk about innovation and, let’s be real, the very bad economy and the impact on businesses like the tech giant. The confab has already seen an appearance by President Barack Obama yesterday and one by Vice President Joe Biden this morning. Ballmer got the lunch spot today. Ballmer’s message was a bummer, appropriately: “In my view, what we now have will be a fundamental economic reset.” Here’s his whole speech.

Weekend Update, 11/8/08

It was an eventful week–a new President-elect, Yahoo still playing the field with no takers, and the hovering recession beginning to hit a little harder, a little closer to home. It was hard to keep the storylines straight, so let’s approach it thematically. Election 2008 Whether or not those voting machines malfunctioned or miscounted votes, Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States, much to the chagrin of comedians like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who–since the beginning of the McCain/Palin partnership–were handed once-in-a-lifetime material. Between the brilliant Saturday Night Live parody sketches of (and by) both Palin and McCain, and Obama’s victory speech, the other big winner (by a mile) was YouTube.

Voices

Election Day 2008

Thanks to the Web, 2008 marks a high point in the level of engagement between American voters and their presidential candidates. As Arianna Huffington declared yesterday, “I am ready to declare a winner in the 2008 race. The Internet.” On Election Day itself, that statement is more apt than ever. Sites like fivethirtyeight.com and politicalwire.com will provide virtually up-to-the-minute numbers on every race. It’s a level of immediacy that was hard to imagine before now–but it’s also hard to imagine we ever had it any other way.

Kung-Fu Election: Biden Versus Palin!