Ben Shoemate's Notebook

via http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5010

Nate Silver is a must-read. This is a fascinating nugget:

The CBS poll of undecideds has more confirmatory detail. Obama went from a +18 on "understanding your needs and problems" before the debate to a +56 (!) afterward. And he went from a -9 on "prepared to be president" to a +21.

The more it sinks in, the more I think Obama actually knocked it out of the park last night. He is, in some ways, the inverse McCain. McCain is all drama and explosions but then ... the air smells like damp, finished fireworks smoke. Obama seems calm and cautious but then ... you realize he cleaned your clock.

A few more morning after thoughts: the body language matters. McCain couldn't look at Obama as if he is offended by even having to share a stage with him. But Obama engaged him directly several times. Check the photo below. Even when shaking hands, McCain looks away. This is, in fact, a sign of insecurity.

The presidential factor:

Even Obama's critics will concede that he was McCain's equal last night. For a lot of undecided voters, the big question has always been whether this new and odd-looking guy could look like an American president, whether he passes Middle America's gut-check on how a president Obama feels in their psyches. I think Obama passed that test, as Reagan did in 1980 and as Kennedy did in 1960. We forget now how both those iconic presidents were regarded as iffy and perhaps not ready for prime time as candidates.

Lastly: the relating to ordinary folks. It has been Obama's greatest weakness. Yet he was far more focused on economic anxiety than McCain last night.

These people (the U.S. government) need to be stopped. Every time we get ourselves into an economic mess, there’s usually some milestone idiocy we can point back to as the government action that made the meltdown inevitable.

Take the current housing crisis that has now spread to the financial markets in general. The cause was too-easy credit that fueled a massive increase in housing prices as people bought houses they couldn’t afford with mortgages they weren’t able to pay off.

In 1999 there was roughly $5 trillion in total U.S. mortgage debt. That number ballooned to $12 trillion by 2007, and we know what happened from there (data is from the U.S. Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight). To put this into perspective, total U.S. GDP is about $11 trillion annually, and U.S. government debt is around $9 trillion. If the housing market really falls apart (meaning more than conservative estimates of a 20% drop), there’s no way the government can simply cover these losses.

Why did it happen? Let’s go back to 1999, when Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, was under pressure by the Clinton administration to find a way to get more loans to “borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans.” A pilot program was launched, which soon became general policy. Money flowed to people who couldn’t afford to pay it back.

These new policies came on top of previous changes in the 90’s that let consumers get zero-down payment loans.

In a 1999 article that now looks absolutely insane, the New York Times reported on the easing of credit terms. Fannie Mae Chairman Franklin Raines, who’s quoted in the article, was all sunshine and roses as he threw away the financial future of millions of Americans. But at least one person. Peter Wallison, had a good idea of how this would all play out:

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

Too bad nobody listened to that guy.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

According to the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, 93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85 percent believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers. Cone, a Boston-based consulting firm, also found that men are far more likely to interact with a company through social media than women are. 56% of consumers believe that a company is providing them with a better service by interacting with them on social media sites.

The numbers in this study are bit higher than those we have seen before (we assume that Cone uses a relatively broad definition of 'social media'), though the general trends do fall in line with the latest data from Universal McCann we wrote about last week.

As Michael Chin points out on the KickApps blog, social media first changed how we interacted with friends, family, and customers. Now, as consumers are getting more familiar with these tools, they also expect them to be a way to interact with companies - and based on this data from Cone, they want this to be a two-way conversation.

Here are some other interesting data points from the study:

• 60% of Americans regularly interact with companies on a social media site
• 43% of consumers say that companies should use social networks to solve the consumers' problems
• 41% believe that companies should use social media tools to solicit feedback on products and services
• Men are more likely to use social media tools to interact with a company than women (33% vs. 17%)
• 33% of younger consumers (18-34) and those with household incomes over $75,000 believe that companies should try to market to them through social networks

It would be nice to see Cone break these numbers down a bit more. What types of social media sites, for example, do users prefer? Are there any specific categories of companies and brands that they want to see on these sites? How exactly do they want to be marketed to? What do they think about implications for their privacy?

What is clear, however, is that social media is quickly becoming an important means for companies to reach consumers - and that consumer are also quickly changing their expectations about how, when, and where they want to be marketed to. As more users are embracing social media (and often to the detriment of traditional media), companies have no choice but to follow them.

Somehow, a 22-year-old University of Alaska student named Richard Millay got his hands on a videotape that's eluded the media since John McCain asked Sarah Palin to be his running-mate — original footage of her 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant.

Of course, this is all very frivolous and has nothing to do with the current campaign. But like Barack Obama's high school basketball footage, it's a little glimpse into the early life of a highly-visible national figure.

In the first part added to YouTube, he posted the portion from the swimsuit competition, prefaced by a brief introduction mentioning the demand for the "88 minutes of Alaska Gold."

As the future vice-presidential candidate parades on stage, an off-screen announcer reads her early biography: "Contestant #8, Sarah Heath. Sarah says that she wants to prepare for a career in television broadcasting by majoring in Telecommunications and Political Science. It's no wonder that she has also been recognized by Who's Who, since she has explained her leadership in all areas, from academics to student politics to athletics, having led her basketball team to the championship at the state tournament. Ladies and gentleman, contestant #8, Sarah Heath."

Richard's promised to post the video from the talent competition next, in which Sarah Palin plays the flute. YouTube currently lists only 2,173 views for the video, but I expect this will blow up soon. I'm tracking the growth stats, so will be able to see how quickly it spreads over the next few weeks.

I've emailed Richard asking for a brief interview, and will update here if he gets in touch.

Researchers report genetic evidence bolstering the socially contentious idea that polygyny--the mating practice where some males dominate reproduction by fathering children with several women--was the norm for sexual behavior throughout human history and prehistory. Because polygyny means other men father few or no children, the study, published today in PLoS Genetics, also shows that, on average, women bequeath more genes to their offspring than men do.  [More]

Last week we sought to uncover the truth behind the stereotype: Are Prius owners really just like Mac owners? In a non-scientific fashion, we quizzed our readers about several of the most common stereotypes that seem to follow these two trendy groups: They're arrogant, they think they're better informed than the rest of us, not to mention smarter, more attractive, and more concerned about the environment. They're Obama-supporting, latte-drinking, iPhone-toting snobs who always favor style over substance. Or are they?

Over 1,600 readers responded to our survey -- the most responses to a Casual Friday ever. We asked readers what kind of cars they drive, what kind of computers they use, and then we asked them to rate their agreement (on a scale of 1 to 5) with a few statements that are typically applied to Mac/Prius owners. This graph gives a snapshot of some of the results:

Prius owners were significantly more likely to say their personal decisions have an impact on the world than non-owners. The same held true for Mac owners -- and there's no significant difference between results for Prius owners and Mac owners. This same relationship held in several other categories: Concern for the environment, support for Barack Obama, and belief that humans can stop global warming. But there were also some differences. Prius owners thought they were significantly less attractive than both non-Prius-owners and Mac owners. But Prius owners felt they were significantly more successful in life than both Mac owners and non-Prius owners. So are Prius owners just more successful, less attractive Mac owners? Not so fast.

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Over the years, WordPress has consistently proven to be the most popular blogging system out there. Millions upon millions of blogs run on WordPress, and that’s not counting those that are hosted on WordPress.com, Automattic’s free, hosted blogging service.

But it’s not just a blogging platform; as many have discovered, it works really well as a fully-fledged content management system — it really comes down to how the theme is written, and often the plugins that are used.

Let’s take a look at some of the oddest uses people have come up with for a mere blogging platform.

WordPress, the Social Network

BuddyPress turns your vanilla WordPress MU installation into a basic social network — complete with private messaging, friends, groups, personal blogs and status updates.

WordPress, the Email Newsletter Manager

Some have gone as far as using WordPress to manage email newsletters—forget using it for building a website! The process is outlined here, but in short, you create a newsletter category, use some theme coding trickery to hide the category on the site, create an RSS feed from it and set it up with FeedBurner. Magic!

WordPress, the Word Processor

Are you one of those people who are queasy about Google having access to all your information? Myself, I’m not so worried about that—but I hate the Google Docs interface with a great deal of passion (to each his own, eh?). So much so that if I’m out and about without access to a desktop word processor I’ll simply fire up WordPress and do some writing in there.

And if you’re collaborating, the new revision histories allow you to reverse any bone-headed changes your collaborator makes. Because you’d never do that, right?

WordPress, the Workplace Chat Room

Back in January, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) released the Prologue theme. Prologue is inspired by Twitter and allows users to post status updates with tags.

Some companies have since used Prologue to help employees stay up to date with each other’s projects, which is important in virtual organizations where these things don’t always circulate naturally. More recently, people have been using it to start workstreaming sites — sites built, in essence, to convince your boss you’re actually working!

WordPress, the Contact Manager

Don’t like Address Book or the half-baked Google Contacts application? Turn WordPress into your personal contact manager with WP Contact Manager, or even a company intranet address book. You’re best off doing this on a private server or with authentication, of course, or you might find yourself running from a horde of rioters.

WP Contact Manager does have some advantages over regular desktop software. You can tag your contacts and search via tags (instead of the bulky “Groups” feature most apps use), and comments have been repurposed as user notes that you and others can leave for future reference, which seems better than the generic Notes capability in most contact managers.

WordPress, the Wiki

Heard of Blicki? I thought not. Automattic started developing this plugin years ago and suddenly stopped. It worked at some point, but when I tested it with the latest version of WordPress it didn’t do much.

But still, it’s a cool idea. Most wiki distributions don’t have the ease of installation and customization that WordPress has, which I’m sure you’ll know if you’ve ever set MediaWiki up and subsequently configured it. Hopefully, Automattic—or someone else entirely—will take this project up again in the future.

WordPress, the Task Manager

This list is about weird and wacky, and this is probably the craziest idea in the list, thanks to some deep and dark crevice within the mind of Dustin Wax: use WordPress as your task manager.

You can email or phone in posts as tasks throughout the day, which are then delivered to your inbox via FeedBurner at the end of each day. Once they’re in your inbox, you can use whatever processing system you’ve adopted to complete that tasks or process them into a task list.

As the man himself said, it’s a crazy idea when there are apps like Ta-da List and Remember the Milk out there, but it seems crazy is what WordPress is all about!

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One of my favorite artists, Evan Roth, is working on a project that will be released soon - the pictures say it all, it's a "carry on" communication system. These metal places contain messages which will appear when they are X-Rayed. The project isn't quite done yet, Evan needs access to an X-Ray machine to take some photos and document. If you have access to an X-Ray machine he's willing to give you a set of the plates for helping out (email fi5e [at] ni9e.com].