It’s almost impossible to not have a conversation with anyone I know these days about the election. For most of my upper-middle-class, highly educated, liberal Bay Area friends, the Palin pick was a shot across the bow that maybe the Democrats wouldn’t pull this one out. (I’m still optimistic.) But I’m the first one to recognize that I live in one of the bluest of the blue areas of the country. My neighborhood is littered with Obama signs and bumper stickers (Full disclosure: I have one on my Corolla). In other words, I know that the Bay Area is hardly representative of the political views across the country. I read the news, I see the polls. It’s basically a dead heat right now.

But if you’re gunning for Obama, it’s easy to coast on the idea that Obama is doing better than he actually might be.

Let’s take online presence, for example. It’s been well-documented that Obama has been able to raise unprecedented amounts of money online, largely through many, many small donations. It’s also been shown that Obama is selling more ads online, and his online traffic is well outpacing that of McCain.

As the Boston Globe reported:

The poll numbers may be inconclusive, but John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as running mate gave him one measurable boost: in web traffic. According to Nielsen Online, traffic to McCain’s campaign website increased 242 percent during the week he named Palin to the GOP ticket. On the week ending August 31, McCain’s site drew nearly 1.8 million unique visitors, compared to 524,000 the week before.

Obama’s web traffic still vastly outpaced McCain’s that week, boosted by the Democratic National Convention. For the week ending August 31, Obama’s site drew about 3.4 million viewers, compared to 2.6 million the week before.

But let’s take things one step at a time. Online ads, I’d guess, largely are preaching to the choir. Pew’s most recent data on Internet users shows that those of us online skew toward the better educated, wealthier and younger. And guess what? Those groups tend to skew Democrat, and especially toward Obama.

Further, I’m not convinced that online traffic actually measures a whole lot on the political front. Again, I’m going to guess that most people visiting Obama’s site agree with him and are using the site to donate (probably repeatedly) to the campaign, to check out local meetup events or, my favorite, to download Obama ringtones. (No joke.)

Now, another item that’s gotten a lot of attention as of late is online customized T-shirt sites like Zazzle and Café Press. Just two weeks ago, NPR’s “On the Media” interviewed Fred Durham, the founder of Café Press.

Durham stated what we’d all suspected (that there are more Obama shirts than McCain), and said that the rally around Obama bodes well for him. Then he argued that it’s more representative than you might think:

BOB GARFIELD: Now, does this augur poorly for John McCain or is this just sort of a demographic quirk, Obama’s audience overlapping with the message t-shirt-wearing audience?

FRED DURHAM: If this was our first election, I may think maybe it’s a demographic issue. This is our — the third election we’ve been through. George Bush merchandise was very hot during the previous election. So unless George Bush skewed young and hip, which I don’t think was the case, then that argument doesn’t take hold.

When we still had Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee, t-shirt sales were much closer to neck and neck. Every time one of the alternative Republican voices dropped off, the sale didn’t go to McCain, but Obama’s grew by just about the exact amount.

The trends we’ve seen make kind of the t-shirt polls a very telling, perhaps even better than standard poll, view of what’s really happening and where the elections are headed.

BOB GARFIELD: Hm, I’ve just got to challenge you on that. Are you serious or just being glib when you say “better than a traditional poll”?

FRED DURHAM: Just like product research, asking people what they think of products, is a poor predictor of what people are actually going to buy, what we find with t-shirts, these aren’t your average people at home. These are the enthusiasts who are definitely going to show up and pull the pull lever. The election’s not about the mood of the nation. It’s about those who actually get out and vote.

Eh, I don’t buy Durham’s argument. I don’t think that those who were voting Huckabee and buying T-shirts were necessarily going to Obama, but rather that as the election progressed, interest in him grew. Further, I would also guess that Obama sales in 2008 are far outpacing Bush sales in 2004.

Still, though, there is one element that gives me hope about Obama’s candidacy from a tech angle, and that’s the notion that some of Obama’s cellphone-only supporters are being undercounted in national polling.

Last year, Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center, noted this phenomenon:

Twenty years ago the survey research profession — having grown comfortable with telephone interviewing as an alternative to personal interviewing for conducting surveys — worried mostly about the roughly 7% of U.S. households that could not be interviewed because they had no telephone. Today our concern is somewhat different, and potentially more serious. According to government statistics released last month, nearly 13% of U.S. households (12.8%) cannot now be reached by the typical telephone survey because they have only a cell phone and no landline telephone.

If people who can only be reached by cell phone were just like those with landlines, their absence from surveys would not create a problem for polling. But cell-only adults are very different. The National Health Interview Survey found them to be much younger, more likely to be African American or Hispanic, less likely to be married, and less likely to be a homeowner than adults with landline telephones. These demographic characteristics are correlated with a wide range of social and political behaviors.

A more updated version from July 2008 found that among cellphone-only voters, Obama is beating McCain by 61 to 32, and that when the cell and standard land-line samples were combined, Obama was up 48 to 40. But then again, Pew’s own data has a smaller sample size for the cellphone voters. (I’ve got a query in to Pew to ask about the methodology of this study.) So maybe there’s hope after all.

This election has been full of superlatives and firsts. I’ve never been prouder to be an American abroad than right now. The historic rise of this unlikely candidate, in the unlikely story that is America, fueled by this unlikely swelling of the online masses donating in unprecedented numbers, is nothing short of historic and astonishing.

Among the wackiest technologies that I’ve seen during this election night is CNN’s hologram technology — something that was predicted back in the Star Wars era.

There’s not much info as to exactly how this stuff works, other than what USA Today has reported:

At the risk of being a bit premature, I decided to poke around the Internet to find what tunes I could spin to spice up my Obama victory party tonight. After consulting Wired, About.com and this massive list on YouTube, I’ve come up with my Top 10 Obama songs:

1) Mariachi Aguilas de Mexico – Viva Obama

CBS screen shot

If you’re like me, you’re going to spend Election Night pretty much glued to the Internet, waiting for news to pop up wherever it might — on Twitter, blogs, YouTube and, yes, that good ol’ stalwart, the mainstream media. Usually I don’t watch television, but there are a few instances — like today — when I actually do want to watch something like CNN with the graphics, the analysis, the whole shebang. Further, I’m abroad, so it’s not like I can simply hop over to my local bar to watch election results (here’s a handy map showing when the polls close). So where can I go to watch live coverage online?

CNN is offering live coverage here and here. I’ve also found CBS‘s coverage to be working well so far — as of this writing, CBS has a camera trained (sans commentary) on a gym in Chicago where Obama is voting. (See photo at top.)

Oh yeah, and don’t forget about the ever-reliable C-SPAN.

Apparently ABC and MSNBC will be offering live coverage online as well, but I haven’t been able to find the respective sites yet.

There’s also this gray-market online streaming site, Channel Chooser, which offers both American channels and foreign ones, including BBC, France 24, Al Jazeera English and Sky News Australia.

Alley Insider has a bunch of live feeds from the McCain and Obama camps and some conservative Christian groups as well.

For live radio coverage, there’s NPR and CBC.

The New York Times has built a neat little election dashboard that updates every two minutes, and Google has gotten in on the action with its own map-based results page.

And finally, of course, there’s Salon’s own coverage.

Happy voting!

Continue Reading Close

• Comments
• Permalink
• Print
• Short URL

France flexes its tech muscle with pending bill, new policies

If Digital France 2012 passes, l'Hexagone could see a slew of new tech-related laws.

• more

  • All Share Services

• Comments
• Permalink
• Print
• Short URL

Page 1 of 16 in Cyrus Farivar