del.icio.us tags 01.27.07

In the world of politics . . .

• Jesse shared this great post from Blog P.I. about Senator Jim Webb's Facebook profile. What's your theory on why Webb has lost his faith?
• Hillary Clinton has taken the health care debate to Yahoo! Answers. Tell her what you think, she might just be president some day. As of this writing, 3,480 people already have.
  
• Micah Sifry at Personal Democracy Forum gives us his take on social media in the 2008 presidential campaign. The good news is that the Democrats are kicking a** and taking names if you go by the number of MySpace friends, inbound (web site and blog) links and Flickr photos they have.
• James Boyce at The Huffington Post uses Alexa to come to the same conclusion: Dems are ahead in the social media battle.
  
• Cristen Perk at EchoDitto has something to say about campaign sites as well. She admits to being a nerd due to her love for John Edwards' Mac OS X widget, but, Cristen, I think you landed in nerd-land when you used the term "blatantly Drupal" when she made reference to Dennis Kucinich's site.
• Speaking of EchoDitto, they pointed me in the direction of ThinkingBlue Search, a Google-powered vertical search engine "of all major politically progressive ideas and discussions on the web."

Digital Influence . . .

• No two ways about it, your company needs to monitor its brand. Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim speaks the gospel, "A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious. It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company." His toolbox is full.
  

More digital influence in Asia (John Bell leaves for Asia this week) . . .

• MySpace launches a version in China without any attempt to make it culturally appropriate, including leaving on a Japanese version of the user agreement. Seriously sloppy stuff.
• MySpace may be heading east, but Anastasia at YPulse says that Popteen, "the number one magazine for teen girls in Japan," is coming our way.
• China is trying to purge the Internet of all the bad stuff. Good luck.
  

Rock n' roll, hootchie coo . . .

• Coming to me to via PSFK, this post from CScout TrendBlog has an amazing list (with profiles) of music recommendation sites. So many to choose from. I've tried MOG, but it screwed up my computer. I've tried Pandora, but the recommendations didn't rock my world. I've been checking out Hype Machine lately, but I think I'm going to try out Last.fm, ILike.com and Music Favor. I'll get back to you on this one.
• Discord has a new web site. I've suggested that they equip it with an RSS feed. Let's see if they follow my suggestion.
• Speaking of Dischord, Ian MacKaye is doing his part to save all ages shows in DC. Just like the folks in Seattle did. (I wrote about it in How to Get Stupid White Men out of Office, if you're interested.)
  

And other stuff, just 'cause . . .

• Tastespotting has amazing photos for foodies. Yummy.
• My friend Tim started a blog this month called Just a Minute, featuring "occasional ramblings and rants on international health development". Tim knows how to rant (and how to make me smile), so I'll be a regular reader.
• Fellow Hampshire grad Josh Rubin over at Cool Hunting posts about Globarati, a new "luxury travel" site.
• Teachers are blogging, says David Krug at 901am. Another great example of how blogging technology can be used.
• Lee at Marketing.fm has been keeping a list since October of mobile-friendly web sites.
  
• Donald Crowdis is a 93 year old Canadian and Don to Earth is his blog. Maybe reading Donald will help me to remember to look at the tops of trees . .