Democratic bloggers made a lot of noise today about a "robo-call" tactic being employed against a number of Democratic candidates.  I already don't answer the phone on the principle that I don't like a plastic box telling me when to jump, but if you're being driven to insanity by these calls, Josh Marshall has some advice on what to do (not much but publicize the tactic and get the vote out).  Of course, in New Hampshire, where they're a little sensitive about their phones, there appears to be some abatement.

Speaking of vote suppression, VideoTheVote.org is set up as a repository for evidence of vote suppression.  (Keep in mind the lesson we learn in this next item.)

Speaking of citizen activists, now that every device you can buy has a camera built in and professional grade photography equipment is available to non-professional grade pay scales, the question of camera ethics comes up occasionally.  One recent issue I recall was when someone ranted (with considerable popular support) about going to a concert and finding a dance floor full of camera phones and PowerShots.  Yesterday's New York City Marathon has raised another issue: sticking yourself in places you don't belong just to get a shot.  I'll allow the link to do the work from here.  (via Matt Law in a NYC  photoblogger news group to which I subscribe.)

(P.S.  For the record, while this woman makes for a good lesson for everyone, I don't agree that we need to know her name or exact some kind of mob justice.)

Speaking of mob justice gone awry (again), if you're going to distract the punditsphere with a hoax, leave out the names of real people who aren't part of your hoax.

"Michael [Badnarik], candidate for US Congress in TX District 10, speaks against the Military Commissions Act at UT Austin on November 2, 2006."  Whether you agree with this guy or not, I would have expected this type of ad to be more common in this "YouTube Age."  How is it that the TV industry is still able to make hundreds of millions of dollars every political cycle on ads that everyone hates?  (Not that I think YouTube or the Internet generally would save us from dirty political tricks.  Just ask Jim Talent (no, even I won't link to that one).

Absolute moral authority cards

Beck on a recent Saturday Night Live.  I tried to find this on the NBC site so I could emphasize my point about YouTube as an unnecessary middle man but ...

UFO The Greatest Story Ever Denied - An hour and a half long.  I didn't realize there was a line of UFO study that says that UFOs appear on infra-red scopes.  I much prefer UFO conspiracies to 9/11 conspiracies.

Quarters guy uses his girlfriend as a prop.  I'm not clear if he picked up the body spray sponsorship or if he's making some kind of parody ad.  I hope the former because they should totally pay the guy for that.  (Is it this quarters guy?)

WhoToTalkTo hopes to be the insider's job search tool.  I'm not sure why this is supposed to work.  If I were looking for a job, I'd appreciate an inside track, but why would anyone I didn't know give me one?

GoogleTorrents searches BitTorrent sites so you don't have to do it manually.  (Doesn't change the legal aspect of downloading copyrighted material, however.)

Who is this former child star?  NOTE:  Give yourself a chance to see the "now" picture before you scroll.  The answer is on the same page.  OTHER NOTE:  Be prepared to feel old... very... very... old.

Before I leave the office today I'm joining Second Life too.  After reading all week last week about rising virtual real estate prices and then talking this weekend to a friend of mine at Reuters about their Second Life bureau, I'm starting to feel not just out of the loop but left behind.  UPDATE:  I registered but couldn't connect.  I'll try again from home.  The hardest part of the whole thing so far is coming up with a name.  Have you ever tried to rename yourself?  Damn hard.

P.S.  The reason I'm not already into Second Life is that I promised myself after wasting a ridiculous amount of time on Riven, the Myst sequel, that I would never again squander my life learning about a place that doesn't actually exist.  So much for that.

Deceptive pictures - NOTE:  One of the photos involves bodypaint and one and a half naked boobs.  Also, don't click through to Skoopy at work.  Content aside, it has dating and girlie ads in the margins.

Will the new "Digg socialism" discourage participation?  One of the holy grails of the Internet is the secret to user participation.  What makes people participate in online communities and who are the most active participants (and most importantly, how do we market to them/get them to shill for us/make money from them)?  Are people discouraged from participating when they feel like the system is locked up by a few elites?  Or will artificial efforts to level the playing field discourage the "power users" and sap the energy of the whole community?  (P.S. "Power users" are the new 18-34-year-olds, pass it on.)

What is Will talking about?  A beginner's guide to Digg.

Speaking of the hunt for the next big thing, one manifestation of the effort to bridge the gap between your computer and the Internet is widgets.  We've got one on our Politics page (third item on the right under the ad) but I'm wondering if many people know what it is or how to use it.

The Vloggies were this weekend.  There's lot of coverage of the video blog awards, but I like this link for the photos.

Dave Sifry has a new State of the Blogosphere report.

Gays vs. Environmentalists, Lesbian Seagulls vs. Al Gore:  Liberals rally against science  In short:  If homosexuality was caused by pollution in the environment, how would that change the political landscape?  Apparently some are making that very claim.

There's a lot of talk about a new poll from the Pew Research Center that shows Democrats not as far ahead as they looked in last week's polls.  You can see the results of that poll without subscription here.  NBC News has a nice state-by-state poll round up here.

You can listen to the audio of the chat with the Welches here.  I was a little nervous about how it was going to come out, but as it happens, they do a weekly podcast, so they were used to answering questions and not talking over each other.  I thought it was odd that they weren't familiar with the question from the boomer who resented being pushed out by younger, cheaper new hires.  I thought that was a common complaint.

Some people had written in especially frustrated that the Welches didn't seem to understand just how hard it is to get a job sometimes.  It reminded me a little of the chat we did a while ago with Barbara Ehrenreich.  I didn't make an issue of it in the chat though.  You can either accept their answers or not.

Naturally, bloggers have been talking about the big stories that are consuming the mainstream media's attention; the publishing of Iraq's nuclear instructions and that prominent pastor buying drugs from his gay prostitute masseuse.  But there were other stories that resonated in the blogosphere that didn't (to my viewing) make as much noise in the mainstream.  Warbloggers were outraged at the student dressed as a suicide terrorist for Halloween.  (Here's the student's apology.)  On the left, I was amused by the TalkLeft headline, GOP declares Iraq war over.  That blog wasn't alone in having a strong reaction to the termination of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

Speaking of that prominent pastor, "With a rise in the popularity of Christian-style weddings in Japan, some Westerners are finding they can make a lucrative living by acting as priests."  Funny, here in America there are apparently a number of people trying to pass themselves off as men of the cloth as well.

Speaking of making a mockery of religion, Evan Almighty is a Bruce Almighty sequel featuring Steve Carell in a Noah role.

Speaking of Old Testament comedy, I also watched this animated telling of the story of Job.

Speaking of God turning His back, 300 unanswered prayers wash up off N.J.; Letters to God — anguished, humorous, some decades old — found in ocean.  It was probably one of my colleagues who wrote that headline, but I'd like to know how they know the prayers weren't answered.  Maybe those were the answered ones.

U.S. presidential speeches tag cloud - The page is a weird layout because the top is all graphic and navigation.  What you want is the middle of the page.  The timeline dragger is above the word cloud on the right.  It reminds me of the State of the Union word count interactive timeline.  (And the State of the Union parser.)  The really early speeches are the most interesting I think.

Speaking of early America, Ben Franklin on why older women make better lovers.

Mass culture turns on the Republicans -- but why?  This takes the unexpected twist of criticizing fair-weather Bush critics.

Speaking of the election, Election 2004 site flashback:  electoral-vote.com is back in the online discourse with its mouseover map.

Soros Bumped as Top Political Giver by Swift-Boat Group's Perry ... in case you thought this election season had a familiar feel.

Still speaking of the election, how much different would campaigns be if voters had to pass a test to vote?  How much different would government be?

Long piece in Fortune Magazine about Diebold, the voting machine maker.

Speaking of our fragile democracy, 12 smartcards go missing in Tennessee; Control electronic voting machines.

Top ten non-Google map innovations - It's interesting to see the MSNBC News Map listed at the end.  It's not new, but I'm pretty sure you won't find it on our site.  I'm not even sure who made it.

Speaking of maps, Map of hate groups in the U.S.

Machine gun sentry robot.  Includes video of the death robot's view.  Also quasi-A-Team soundtrack.  Find Sarah Connor.

I clicked the headline to Newsweek's video game blog when it was on the cover today.  Not only does he reveal that the commercial with the Tears for Fears cover is by a guy named Michael Andrews but he offers a link to a YouTube playlist of different songs set to the same video game commercial.  It's pretty elementary, but still an interesting presentation.

Speaking of video games, you may be familiar with Dance Dance Revolution, the arcade game that requires a player move to dance steps on the screen.  Imagine playing that game in a flame retardant suit and being blasted with fire when you lose.  If you don't feel like imagining it, click here and have it described to you.  Why does this not have video??

Stephen Colbert on the issue of having his show's clips removed from YouTube.  He seems to be saying that the people who contribute the videos should be the ones making the money.  I wonder what he thinks of the item we saw yesterday about Google paying for high traffic videos.

How to roll Maki

What's better than a laughing baby?  I can't think of anything.

"The Xenoturbella does not seem to have a brain, gut or gonads, making it unique among living animals."  It's part of a new phylum discovered.  Earlier: New sea creatures found in Hawaii - I'm trying not to let my imagination get carried away with headlines like this.

A quick trip to the mailbag:

I want one of these.  The Meteor style is nice, but the Chalet would be stylish anywhere in the house...
- Eric

Elephants and Evolution - How the Landscape is Changing for Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Adobe - "The days of purely desktop-based applications are clearly numbered, but so are the days of exclusively web-based apps..."  It seems like everywhere I look lately I see commentary on bridging the gap between desktop and Web.

More here about how Blake Ross, "the Firefox kid," is working something called Parakey.  "Parakey is an application you download to your PC, which effectively becomes your personal operating system. It turns your computer in[to] a hybrid Web site-hard drive, where you can choose what to make public online and what to keep private."

That post is in response to this feature piece on Ross. (Commuter Click)

These are a little long, but if you don't want to be playing catch up later, you might as well pay attention now.

Yahoo is about to launch a big food section.

"Das Rad" (The Wheel) - It's an animated short from 2003, but since I don't do a very good job of keeping up on animated shorts it's new to me.  Plot:  Two stones watch the evolution of man.  8 minutes long.  Outstanding.

Looking ahead to Christmas, (w)rapping paper.

Cool robot vehicle transports man around Tokyo - "You act as thought you've never seen Buzz Lightyear Tetrapodal robot out for a Sunday roll before!"  The description of the guy not acknowledging anyone makes it sound like he accidentally arrived from the future.

Will it blend?  A take-off on Letterman's Will It Float? it's one of a series of videos in which a guy puts things in a blender to see what happens.  I'm pretty sure this is part of an ad campaign for this particular brand of blender.  Is this the future of advertising?  Works for me.

Speaking of the future of advertising, "Amazon ... ranks books based on their sales over the previous 24 hours. This means that it is possible, through coordinated action, to hack the system by getting a large number of people to buy the book at the same time."  I didn't see the post until it was too late, but it's a clever idea for getting exposure.

Primary and early e-voting problems point to gathering storm - A nice round up of problems with electronic voting machines.  Also makes mention that "BlackBoxVoting.org has released "push this, pull here" instructions for multiple voting on a Sequoia DRE, no hacking skills necessary."  That's here.

Plus, 35,000 Questionable Registration Forms

Plus, Jefferson County Voters Continue To Raise Concerns About Voting Machines (more of that automatic party switching)

While we're on election links, "In the YouTube era, stupid stuff a candidate did on tape four years ago doesn't remain in the past. Instead, it becomes part of the campaign narrative, in this case showing how Mary Parker, Democrat nominee for the state Senate in Tennessee, was willing to abuse her power position as a lawyer to get out of a speeding ticket in ways that a normal person couldn't."

Speaking of campaign ads, with all the buzz and hype going on I totally forgot to check in periodically with FactCheck.org.

"Now we learn that one of the first female soldiers killed in Iraq died by her own hand after objecting to interrogation techniques used on prisoners."

Speaking of members of the military finding themselves in tough positions, this compelling account of a Marine Navy (he's tending Marines) medic in Iraq is drawing a lot of link attention.

Flickr's best photographers

The Kerry corner:

• The AP gets more specific in pointing out Kerry's baggage on the question of the composition of the U.S. military.
• John Cole points out a curious picking-and-choosing when it comes to being offended on behalf of the troops.
• Keith Olbermann wants President Bush to apologize, and does some of that disparaging that NBC reportedly wouldn't allow him to say in a commercial.
• I didn't know that Kerry's grades at Yale were worse than Bush's.

The 91st Carnival of Education - A regular round up of education bloggers.

Transforming Transformer Costume - It actually transforms, sort of.  NOTE: This site may contain unsafe material if you look around enough.

If Aaron Sorkin wrote a show about baseball - This is a pretty good fake Sorkin script, but also it's interesting to read a blog by an award winning TV comedy writer.

Speaking of TV writing (and I cast no aspersions on Mr. Levine in making this segue), the Digg folks share a bootleg of a recent episode of the Simpsons.  What made me note the link, however, was a comment that does a clear job explaining the decline of the Simpsons and the problem with most TV scripts.

Mark Glaser writes an open letter to Stephen Colbert asking him to resist efforts by Comedy Central lawyers to wall off video content from sites like YouTube.  He points out why YouTube is better than the current offerings at ComedyCentral.com and updates his post with a lot of relevant links.

I can certainly envision a future where content creators offer their own video on their own sites in a way that actually works for consumers and video sites that share copyrighted material shrivel up and die.  I think we see it beginning to happen with TV networks practically begging their audience to log on and view shows online.  To be clear, I agree with Glaser that content providers aren't actually at that point yet.  The Comedy Central video player is terrible.  I tried to watch Grey's Anatomy on the ABC site and it was all choppy.  I did have a good experience watching Heroes on the NBC site, but I didn't notice any fan generated material while I was there (the way I see it on YouTube).  And I point this out from a site that sees more of its content distributed virally through sites like Crooks and Liars than from its own video player.  But to return to my point (and what I was trying to say with my question about the Dove video), if content providers like Comedy Central do get their acts together, forward thinking shows like Colbert's don't really need YouTube as a viral middle man, do they?

Related:  Google shares ad wealth with videographers - The part you care about: "It will pay $5 to video creators for every 1,000 times their video is watched."  Five thousand bucks for a million views is pretty good if you're the Numa Numa kid, but it's not much of a budget for any ambitious productions.

Speaking of Comedy Central clips, the first South Park ever.  Interesting to see there are no identifying markers on it that would show up in a search for stuff to delete.  NOTE:  Curses are NOT bleeped on this.

Scott Adams points out that elections rigged by nerdy hackers can't have any worse outcomes than elections rigged by corporations and special interests.

Speaking of problems that haven't been solved, Airport Screeners Still Aren't Any Good.  But to be fair, as Schneier points out, "We can't keep weapons out of prisons. We can't possibly keep them out of airports."

Remember that headline about St. Louis being the most dangerous city?  Here's the fuller list of the results of that survey.

Here's a new twist on the intellectual property issue:  Writer Neil Gaiman tells us about a writer who died without a proper will and the rights to his "literary estate" ended up taking a turn he probably didn't want.  The solution Gaiman offers is a simple will that creative types can download from his site and follow the instructions.

This is too late to be worth anything for this year, but if you're the kind of person to plan ahead for holidays, here are some great/gross ideas for Halloween.  I like the guacamole in the baby doll.

Internet simulator game  NOTE:  plays music as soon as the page loads.  I scored a 128.

Rock Hotel in Cappadocia, Turkey carved in the face of a cliff.

It's the content, not the icons - I'll be interested to see if this is a sign of a coming backlash against all of those "Digg this" type buttons you see everywhere online lately.  I'm not a fan of those buttons except when I see an icon I don't recognize that leads to a cool aggregating site I'm not familiar with.  But the argument in this blog entry is that they don't help traffic and only look ugly.  In the comments you'll find a few objections making the case that "build great content and they will come" is an elitist argument that ignores the real difficulty of growing an audience.  If it's not elitist, it's at least over-idealistic.  Even if having a Digg button doesn't get a blogger the tens of thousands of clicks that come from front page Digg placement, a few extra clicks can be an exciting  achievement for an XYZ-list blogger.

Eleksen's fabric keyboard / UMPC case in the wild - It's a case for your PocketPC that then becomes the keyboard.  It's a neat idea, but I'm not sure how comfortable I'd feel typing on something so flimsy.

Speaking of buttons, A petition to bring back buttons on phones?  It explores the merits of physical buttons versus touch screen buttons in gadget design.  New vocab word:  haptic.

How to save a wet cell phone.  I don't know anything cell phones, but these look like some really great instructions.  (Great = I wouldn't have thought of them.)

Who the heck is Wee Shu Min and why is she the most searched name on Technorati?  The Wikipedia entry explains the story of a political scandal in Singapore that is hard to imagine happening here in the U.S.  (On second thought, this probably could happen in the U.S.  If one of the Bush twins had a blog and made disparaging remarks about poor people or the working class or something, that would probably cause a scandal.)

Speaking of names in the news, I don't care about Marcia Cross but... (my standard gossip item opening phrase) did you see this item about her having 200 naked photos of herself in the garbage and now the garbage remover has them and is looking to make some money?  Of all the forehead-smacking things to do...

I got a laugh out of the new Moby/Debbie Harry video.  The song's a little repetitive though.

Book Review: The No @!$%# Rule by Robert Sutton  - Includes tips on how to avoid being one and how to deal with one.

I keep reading of him described as "liberal blogger" but I had to do my own search to find out that he's the guy from Calling All Wingnuts.  You may recall reading about him previously because he's had some acclaim for getting onto call-in shows.  He doesn't appear to have posted anything since this particular event, though he has reportedly written a letter.

In a couple of hours I'll be hosting a chat with Jack and Suzy Welch for the Today show.  Let me know if you have any questions you'd like included.  I should have the transcript up by the afternoon.