Schwarzenegger and Google Earth Team on Climate Change

Climate changes could eliminate skiing and snowboarding? That's the way to go after climate change.

Obama: The Hot Startup

in the atlantic, joshua green tells of obama's money making prowess and how he's seen by silicon valley as the hot startup. in the the technology world, youth isn't seen as a disadvantage. the story is a great read but i'd make a stronger argument-- that yes, the obama camp is raising boatloads of money because of the campaign's superior use of technology, but it's obama's progressive thinking that is attracting the money.
excerpts:

The story of Obama’s success is very much a story about money. It provided his initial credibility. It paid for his impressive campaign operation. It allowed him first to compete with, and then to overwhelm, the most powerful Democratic family in a generation—one that understood the power of money in politics and commanded a network of wealthy donors that has financed the Democratic Party for years.

What’s intriguing to Democrats and worrisome to Republicans is how someone lacking these deep connections to traditional sources of wealth could raise so much money so quickly. How did he do it? The answer is that he built a fund-raising machine quite unlike anything seen before in national politics. Obama’s machine attracts large and small donors alike, those who want to give money and those who want to raise it, veteran activists and first-time contributors, and—especially—anyone who is wired to anything: computer, cell phone, PDA.

Here’s another thing: he is doing it almost effortlessly. That is to say, in an era when the imperative for campaign dollars demands more and more of a politician’s time and lurks behind so many recent scandals (including the auctioning-off of the Lincoln Bedroom), Obama has raised more money than anybody else without plumbing ethical gray areas or even spending much of his own time soliciting donations. During the month of February, for example, his campaign raised a record-setting $55 million—$45 million of it over the Internet—without the candidate himself hosting a single fund-raiser. The money just came rolling in.

Obama’s campaign is admired by insiders of both parties for its functional beauty—not just admired but gawked at, like some futuristic concept car leaking rocket vapor at an auto show. Obama’s campaign has made a similar leap in how it has applied technology to the practices of raising money and organizing, and it is already the clear model for everyone else.

To get a better sense of why it has succeeded, I opted to undergo the full tech immersion while reporting this piece, and soon had Obama ring tones on my phone, new networks of online “friends,” text-message updates from the campaign, and regular e-mails from its manager, all gently encouraging me to give money, volunteer time, bring in new friends, and generally reorient my life in ways that were made to seem hip and fun—and inexorably aimed at the greater glory of Barack Obama. How Obama arrived at this new model for campaigning is a tale of foresight and circumstance, his campaign’s enterprise and his opponent’s shortsightedness, and it has as much to do with Silicon Valley as it does with Washington politics.
.....

Barack Obama was new to most Americans when he entered the presidential race, in February 2007. But he was familiar to Silicon Valley in at least one way: like a hot Internet start-up in the glory years, he had great buzz, a compelling pitch, and no money to back it up. He wasn’t anybody’s obvious bet to succeed, not least because the market for a Democratic nominee already had its Microsoft.

This being Silicon Valley, however, Obama was quickly embraced. A few days before Obama declared, John Roos hosted a fund-raiser at his home, attended by Gorenberg and many other prominent figures. This sent an important signal to the community and added to Obama’s local mystique. “There is a lot of good feeling for the Clintons in California,” says Peter Leyden, the director of the New Politics Institute in San Francisco, a tech-focused think tank that is neutral in the presidential race. “But once the community here experienced Obama, that started to break up really quickly.”

........

Furthermore, in Silicon Valley’s unique reckoning, what everyone else considered to be Obama’s major shortcomings—his youth, his inexperience—here counted as prime assets.

I asked Roos, the personification of a buttoned-down corporate attorney, if there had been concerns about Obama’s limited CV, and for a moment he looked as if he might burst out laughing. “No one in Silicon Valley sits here and thinks, ‘You need massive inside-the-Beltway experience,’” he explained, after a diplomatic pause. “Sergey and Larry were in their early 20s when they started Google. The YouTube guys were also in their 20s. So were the guys who started Facebook. And I’ll tell you, we recognize what great companies have been built on, and that’s ideas, talent, and inspirational leadership.”

This was the dominant refrain as I traveled around the Valley. From a policy standpoint, there are many reasons for tech-minded types to support Obama, including his pledge to establish a chief technology officer for the federal government and to radically increase its transparency by making most government data available online. “Barack recognizes that people in Silicon Valley are not just talking about a set of technical questions,” Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and noted Valley demigod, told me. “It’s a broader generational issue of how to architect and orient the government on important issues, from privacy to security to competition, in ways that open up the process to everyone.”

Obama's Social Networking Technology

last minute work in Arkansas

this from the Star of Canada, the day's news below

The Obama campaign's use of technology, particularly social networks and the Internet, make Canadian political parties' online activities appear positively primitive by comparison. The campaign's website, which can be individually customized, includes supporter blogs, videos, local events and myriad ways to contribute or participate.

Obama has also emerged as a powerful presence on social networking sites. The official Obama Facebook support page has more than 300,000 supporters. A similar presence has nearly 250,000 MySpace friends, and on YouTube, the Obama channel has been viewed nearly 12 million times.

The cumulative effect of this substantial online presence is to connect with youth
on their terms and in their environment, fostering a new generation of politically active supporters.

Not only has Obama actively used technology to campaign, but he has also prioritized technology policy, adopting detailed positions on issues that have been largely ignored by most politicians in the past.

For example, he has promised to support net neutrality legislation, which advocates argue is needed to stop Internet service providers from establishing a two-tier Internet. His technology plan states that "network providers should not be allowed to charge fees to privilege the content or applications of some websites and Internet applications over others." It continues by focusing on several other key Internet issues including strengthening privacy protections in the digital age as well as increasing enforcement actions against spammers, spyware creators and phishing websites.

The same policy also emphasizes access concerns. It promises to update universal access to telephone service and electricity by providing for universal access to high-speed broadband networks. The plan also commits to having government serve as a model for Internet use by improving Internet access to government documents and by appointing a chief technology officer for the U.S. federal government.

Digital copyright concerns have also become part of the campaign, with Obama emphasizing the need for balance, acknowledging that "as policymakers, we are in a constant process of examining our laws to ensure that the protections we place on intellectual property are sufficient to encourage invention without hindering innovation that builds on previous work or unfairly limiting consumers from using the goods they purchase in a way that is fair to creators."

read the rest.

the rest of the day's news:
Obama Closes On Clinton In National PollsU.S. News & World Report

Obama surge heightens Super Tuesday dramaMarketWatch

Battle of Clinton, Obama Surrogates Heats Up in CaliforniaFOXNews

Why I'm Supporting Barack ObamaYahoo! News

US: Indian voters split between Hillary, ObamaNDTV.com - New Delhi,

Feminist leader sides with Obama over ClintonBaltimore Sun

Clinton, Obama Neck And NeckHartford Courant

How Obama using tech to triumphToronto Star

Winfrey to women: Feel free to support ObamaSan Jose Mercury News

Obama's ability to inspire gets under Clintons' skinIndianapolis Star

Why I Canvas For Barack ObamaBy William White

Big Endorsements Come Out For Barack ObamaUSA Today

Celebrities Pitch In for Barack Obama Campaign

Q-Tip endorses Barack Obama, and my thoughts on this ongoing ...

La Opinion Endorses Barack Obama/ John McCainLa Opinión

Google asks obama