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I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that election day is next Tuesday. Whether you’re observing or you’re breaking out the campaign gear for some hardcore get out the vote effors this weekend, here are some tools to help you keep up with the news and your efforts:

Google Earth

You can download a KML file that lets you search results from past elections, since 1980. The data is broken down and can show you how different regions of the country voted - even by county. I used to work as a political consultant, and let me tell you - this kind of data is heavily relied on. It’s a bit of a late release for campaigns, who already have this data. But it’s great for political junkies.

Google News

Trying to remember what a candidate said on an issue? Just type their name into Google News. If Google has indexed a quote by that person, it will appear on top of the search results in the one box.

Google Mobile

Want to know your precinct location? The Google Mobile team has created a special tool just for that purpose. Go to m.google.com/elections on your mobile phone, type in your address and you’ll be directed to your precinct.

The tool did not point me to early voting locations, which in my state are not the same as Election Day precinct locations.

As cool as that is, always verify with your local elections office. Google even helps you do that. They have a box where you enter your state’s abbreviation, and it will pull up relevant links to voting information.

Yahoo Elections Hub and Political Dashboard

Yahoo makes the most of its successful portal platforms with its Elections Hub and Political Dashboard. The dashboard is a super slick map showing the latest poll results. Hopefully they update it with real time results on election night. I can totally see myself keeping the dashboard open while watching results come in on the tv.

Microsoft Live Search xRank

xRank, Live Search’s buzz tool, has a politician section. It’s no surprise that the Rep and Dem presidential and vice presidential candidates take the top 4 spots today. The rest of the top 20 is filled with senate and gubernatorial races, with Hillary Clinton and George Bush thrown in for good measure.

MSN Election Live Q&A

Q&A is Live Search’s answer product, and over at the MSN Election Guide, you can find the Election Live Q&A. It’s pretty straightforward. You can ask and answer questions about the election in real time.

AOL Elections Toolbar

AOL has a toolbar for IE and Firefox that can keep you up to date with election news. If you like to surf the net while watching TV - this could be an ideal toolbar for you come Tuesday night.

Well, hopefully that’s enough to keep you busy and up to date.

Got any tools to share? Leave your suggestions in the comments.

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When writing a eulogy for a grandfather it can be very difficult to find the right words. A eulogy, in essence, is very different from other types of writing. You can’t grab a bunch of words out of th…
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how to write a respectful and insightful eulogy for a grandfather

Lawrence Lessig, a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, will be giving the opening keynote at Search Engine Strategies Chicago on Monday, Dec. 8, 2008. The title of his keynote is “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.”

And, if you read the description of Professor Lessig’s keynote in the conference agenda, it says: “The content industry has convinced industry in general that extremism in copyright regulation is good for business and economic growth. That’s false. In this talk, Professor Lessig describes the creative and profitable future that culture and industry could realize, if only we gave up IP extremism.”

What is he getting at?

Well, “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy” also happens to be the title of Professor Lessig’s new book, which just went on sale on Amazon.com.

And, according to the editorial reviews on Amazon.com, “The author of Free Culture shows how we harm our children — and almost anyone who creates, enjoys, or sells any art form — with a restrictive copyright system driven by corporate interests. Lessig reveals the solutions to this impasse offered by a collaborative yet profitable ‘hybrid economy’.”

It goes on to say that Professor Lessig, who is the reigning authority on intellectual property in the Internet age, “spotlights the newest and possibly the most harmful culture war — a war waged against our kids and others who create and consume art.” It adds, “America’s copyright laws have ceased to perform their original, beneficial role: protecting artists’ creations while allowing them to build on previous creative works. In fact, our system now criminalizes those very actions.”

How does it do that? Well, Professor Lessig argues that “biting” riffs from films, videos, or songs shouldn’t be crimes. Why? It makes felons out of some of today’s most talented artists.

Professor Lessig argues that the way to end this war is to embrace what he calls the “read-write culture,” which allows its users to create art as readily as they consume it. And he can already see glimmers of a new hybrid economy that combines the profit motives of traditional business with the “sharing economy” evident in such websites as Wikipedia and YouTube.

Wow. That’s strong stuff. And, if we play buzzword bingo at SES Chicago 2008, then there are a couple arcane business concepts that we can use on our bingo cards.

But, this short blurb may not do justice to Professor Lessig. So, I emailed him some questions about the topic of his opening keynote. And he emailed me his answers — quickly, I might add.

Here is our Q&A:

Q: Who benefits and who is harmed by extremism in copyright regulation?

A: Benefits: Lawyers (certainly). The record companies (maybe). Harmed: Artists, businesses, consumers — and a generation of (criminalized) kids.

Q: What are the “read-write culture” and the “hybrid economy”?

A: A RW culture is one where ordinary people are empowered to participate in the creation and recreation of their culture. Every culture in human history has been RW, save for a few dark years in the 20th century.

A hybrid is a commercial entity that tries to leverage value out of a sharing economy, or a sharing economy that tries to use a commercial entity to support it. Either way, two radically different cultures need to learn how to work together with each other.

Q: When will this war on our kids stop, the “read-write culture” be reborn, and the “hybrid economy” start to flourish?

A: When policy makers are woken up to the extraordinary cost this war is imposing.

Q: Where can we already see glimmers of a new “hybrid economy” that combines the profit motives of traditional business with the “sharing economy”?

A: I think everywhere around us. All of the interesting Internet businesses today are hybrid: Flickr, Second Life, Yelp!, even Amazon builds much of its business from the sharing activity of its customers.

Q: Why is IP extremism bad for business and economic growth?

A: Practice moderation. When the lawyers in the room start insisting that the licenses you create must impose perfect control over everything you have, ask them to prove it. Ask them to demonstrate that the business return from that relationship of antagonism is higher than its cost. Don’t give over your business’ future to those who don’t think like a business man or woman. Keep focused on the only undeniable truth: IP is an asset. Like any business asset, it should be deployed to maximize the value of the corporation.

Let me add that I’ve watched the 19-minute-long video of Professor Lessig speaking at last year’s TED Conference as well as the 4-minute 35 second video from OpenSourceCinema which is embedded below. So, I am confident that he will rock the house at Search Engine Strategies Chicago.

Lessig Remix

Professor Lessig was also named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing “against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online.” He’s on the board of the Creative Commons project has served on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was also a columnist for Wired, Red Herring, and the Industry Standard.

In other words, he’s a speaker worth coming to SES Chicago to hear. And, yes, I do think I’ll put some of his arcane business concepts on a buzzword bingo card.

Google is finally starting to learn that the Schoolhouse Rock song, “I’m Just a Bill,” forgot to include the part about lobbying.

Google opened up a Washington, DC office a few years back to handle the minimal lobbying it was doing. But according to a story in the New York Times, Google has been learning the ways of Washington through the school of hard knocks.

And they may not have graduated in time to address the current regulatory concern over their search advertising partnership with Yahoo.

Perhaps Google is just a tad too used to being the big dog in Silicon Valley. But DC is a different culture. Every industry is represented there, from sugar growers to plastic surgeons to the nuanced niches in tech.

And despite an increasingly digital culture, face time is crucial in DC. The NYT article says Google is getting poor attendance marks for its presence at political events.

Meanwhile, Microsoft knows how the machine works, and they’ve been keeping it well oiled in order to influence groups to opposed the Google-Yahoo deal. Even the Latino Farmers and Ranchers have climbed on board the opposition bandwagon.

Microsoft is now suggesting that Google is losing the debate and resorting to calling out lobbying as the reason why instead of regulation.

Of course, when it comes to antitrust regulation, Microsoft calling anyone out is like the pot calling the kettle black.

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Google Webmaster Central has released a couple of updates: one to the API settings and one to the crawl errors feature.

Here’s the sparkling new things you can do with your API settings:

• Crawl Rate: You can request that Googlebot crawl your site slower or faster than it normally would (the details can be found in our Help Center article about crawl rate control). If many of your sites are hosted on the same server and you know your server’s capacity, you may want to update all sites at the same time. This now a trivial task using the Webmaster Tools GData API.
• Geographic Location: If your site is targeted towards a particular geographic location but your domain doesn’t reflect that (for example with a .com domain), you can provide information to help us determine where your target users are located.
• Preferred Domain: You can select which is the canonical domain to use to index your pages. For example, if you have a site like www.example.com, you can set either example.com or www.example.com as the preferred domain to use. This avoids the risk of treating both sites differently.
• Enhanced Image Search: Tools like the Google Image Labeler allow users to tag images in order to improve Image Search results. Now you can opt in or out for all your sites in a breeze using the Webmaster Tools API.

For the crawl error feature, you now get to see the URL of the inbound link that is linking to an error page.

Related Reading:
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After a year of slow but steady growth, Ask.com has redesigned, incorporating Google, Yahoo and Microsoft design elements along with it. Changing things up has helped Ask in the past, so we’ll have to keep an eye on whether this gives Ask.com a nice little boost.

The first noticeable change is the front page. It’s minimalist in nature, but you can change the skin to create a different background.

In the results, the dualing sidebars are gone, and only one on the right remains. The organic results are flush with the left, similar to Google and Yahoo. And there are related searches similar to what you’ll find on Microsoft.

An interesting feature is the AskEraser. It addresses privacy concerns that people have about search.

What do you think of the changes? Give us your first impressions in the comments.

h/t Rafe Needleman @ CNET

In Google’s quest to make sure its search advertising deal with Yahoo goes through, it has added yet another defense to its arsenal: a new facts site. If it sounds political, that’s because it is. The Department of Justice opened an official investigation into the deal months ago. It turns out that when the largest search engine teams up with the second largest search engine to combine advertising, it raises antitrust issues!

On the homepage, Google doesn’t waste any time getting to the three major talking points it touts in support of the deal:

• This is a non-exclusive deal that will strengthen Yahoo!.
• Ad prices will continue to be set by competitive auction.
• The deal is win-win for consumers, advertisers and publishers: more and better ads.

On the right hand side is a link to an in-the-tank New York Times article that drinks extremely potent Kool-aid by practically copying and pasting a previous Google blog post supporting the deal.

Underneath that are quotes from rather large advertisers who also support the deal.

But those who have the most to lose from the deal are small businesses and web entrepreneurs who, rightly or wrongly, have built their success on Google. They fear a sharp increase in prices once the deal goes through.

Google assures that hardly anything will change, save for Adsense ads showing up on Yahoo. They also point to their relationship with Ask.com as proof that the marketplace will remain competitive.

But Ask, despite its slight growth, is not Yahoo. And when it comes to politicking, people have been burned far too often by broken promises. Plus, websites have also been burned by changing algorithms and vague policies.

Right now, in the midst of a significant economic prices, people are looking for stability. And they’re not finding it in huge companies with enormous, quick growth. The housing market is certainly different from the search market, but with sensitive emotions running high, Google just seems insensitive right now, another characteristic of companies “too big to fail.”

I don’t know what they hope is the outcome of this site. Do they hope for a groundswell of support and grassroots letter writing campaigns on their behalf? I just don’t see that happening.

Google needs to continue its lobbying and legal advocacy with the Department of Justice. But unless Google wants to suddenly become more transparent on their algorithms and site penalties, then they should just leave the little guy alone in this effort.

AOL’s Platform-A is planning to launch a new self-service marketplace exchange for advertisers. Dubbed BidPlace, the platform will allow advertisers to dynamically bid and manage inventory for display ads across Platform-A’s network. BidPlace will launch in the first half of 2009.

The platform will include:

• Pricing – Change bids at any time
• Creative Gallery – Manage creatives in a central repository for easy access
• Price Volume Analysis – Get forecasts for expected volume at different price points and targeting options
• Budget Allocation – Maintain complete control over how budgets are allocated across campaigns
• Campaign Management Controls – Ability to have full control over campaign delivery
• Reporting – View detailed reporting on campaign and creative performance.

“BidPlace unleashes the industry’s most powerful advertising technologies and puts them in the hands of advertisers,” said Lynda Clarizio, President of Platform-A. “This is the next step in Platform-A’s efforts to provide marketers a unified solution for brand advertising at scale and performance advertising across multiple media. BidPlace gives advertisers what they’ve been asking for — a more accessible and transparent approach and an ability to adjust the dials to get the best results.”

Related Reading:
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The real Emmy story last night came near the end, when Tina Fey arrived on the stage for last time and received the 30 Rock team award. She reeled off all the places where the critical hit could be seen online, including Hulu and NBC, and then said something like “and occasionally on TV” as well.

Perhaps Fey sounded a bit promotional but it seemed, well, normal. We definitely live in a video-on-demand world and TV shows are viewed when they are convenient for viewers. In her acceptance speech, Tina was shining the light on all the online access points.

However, we’re not searching with a video mindset yet. When googling “30 Rock,” you first see an NBC paid ad that directs searchers to their network portal. In the organic results, the program’s homepage comes up first. There’s no Hulu or other video access points in the results, only information about the award-winning program.

We’re still in that 500-channel universe, without an easy or standard searching mechanism. In this 30 Rock example, visitors are directed to channels containing their programs or else to the program homepage, rather than to specific episodes they might really want to see.

The TV shows aren’t directly accessible unless you are consciously refining results for videos or deciding to use a video search engine. When all the results are videos, at least you can save a few clicks. Still there tends to be duplication based on the different outlets and, even then, you may not land on the exact episode that interests you most.

On the video destinations, the searching mechanisms are somewhat lacking as well. For videos, the assumption is that you will know which episodes you have missed and browse what’s available until you find the right date and description.

At this point, people are trained to navigate through menus and directories, and don’t really know what they are missing. With search, they would be able to find what’s interesting within an episode or discover moments they want to see again. If there’s social inputs, then visitors would also benefit from what others have found interesting too.

In the search world, we know there are some real opportunities ahead. Now that viewers know their programs are available online, consumption can be increased with better searching and discovery mechanisms.