Blogs About Sarah Palin: Who’s For Her, Who’s Against?

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Sarah Palin is the first woman ever to run on the U.S. Republican party presidential ticket. If Americans elect John McCain on November 4, Mrs. Palin will be the first female Vice President of the United States.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, both BlogPulse and Google Trends show more – a lot more – discussion in the blogosphere about Palin than about either Obama or McCain (see charts after the jump).

But what are the underlying causes for all the Palin talk? Why the fuss?

Is it because blogs may actually be responsible for John McCain’s selection of Palin as his running mate?

Is it because Palin came seemingly out of nowhere to get picked ahead of several other contenders?

Or is it just because she’s a woman? [Read more…]

I’m still waiting for my Obama text message

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Much was made of the Obama campaign’s plan to release the name of their VP nominee via text message before the mainstream media published the message.

That’s why, of course, I was reading about the nomination of Joe Biden as Obama’s Vice Presidential candidate on CNN and nytimes.com long before the text message was sent out from the Obama campaign at 3:00am.

The Washington Post reports the issue:

It was the text message read round the country — for those who got it.

Many of those who signed up to receive a text alerting them of Sen. Barack Obama’s vice presidential selection had to wait minutes, if not hours, to learn that Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. was the pick. The problem was most likely a scaling issue, mobile experts said, with carriers’ messaging systems overwhelmed by the number of people receiving the text.

“It was one message that had to reach any number of devices,” said Stephanie Vinge-Walsh of Sprint Nextel. She added that traffic on Sprint’s short code for the Obama campaign — 62262, which spells O-B-A-M-A on cellphone keypads — rose more than 250 percent within an hour of the announcement.

The message was sent out at 3am, at least 5-6 hours after the mainstream media had already published the message. And – 2 days later – I’m still waiting on my message to arrive….