Before Google ever was there was Archie – the first Internet search engine – conceptualized and implemented by Alan Emtage while he was working as a systems administrator for McGill University’s School of Computer Science. Alan, a friend and colleague from my years at Mediapolis, is a Barbados native. He told the story of Archie in The Nation Newspaper Sunday: Professionally, Archie is Alan’s greatest accomplishment to date. “That was a once in a lifetime opportunity. It was...

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo says Obama’s SMS text messages are this campaign’s secret weapon. He looks at work done by Donald Green and Alan Gerber, two political scientists at Yale whose book, Get Out the Vote: How To Increase Voter Turnout, is considered the bible of voter mobilization efforts: Green and Gerber estimate that a door-canvassing operation costs $16 per hour, with six voters contacted each hour; if you convince one of every 14 voters you canvass, you’re paying $29...

Earlier I quoted Sadie Fields of the Georgia Christian Alliance turning out conservative Christians for the McCain/Palin ticket in Georgia with the threat of a “liberal tsunami”. BooMan Tribune spells out the anatomy of the tsunami: Take a look at the Republican members of the powerful tax-writing Ways & Means Committee. Do you see how many of them decided to retire once they found themselves in the minority? Rep. Jim McCrery (REP-LA-4th)- retired Rep. Wally Herger (REP-CA-2nd) Rep....

Motherlode: A report released today by ComPsych Corporation, a provider of corporate employee assistance programs, found that 92 percent of the 1,137 workers polled between Oct. 6 and Oct. 17 are losing sleep because they are worrying about their finances. Specifically, Compsych found, the worries break down like this: Cost of living: 30 percent Credit-card debt: 29 percent Mortgage payment: 14 percent Retirement account: 13 percent Kids’ tuition: 3 percent Healthcare costs: 3 percent The other...

From the Times Online: The financial events of recent weeks have filled many of us with shock and panic. Surely no one could have predicted that we would be in this mess? Well, actually, they did. Here are ten people who saw the financial meltdown coming… Only one American pol makes the list. At number 10: Ron Paul – Republican Congressman Back in September 2003, Mr Paul told a House Financial Services Committee that: “Ironically, by transferring the risk of a widespread mortgage default,...

Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies Library says the combatants in the California battle over Prop 8 have raised formidable war-chests: Nearly $60 million has been raised on both sides of the debate. According to the Los Angeles Times, as of Friday, “supporters of Proposition 8 had raised $27.5 million, with about 19% of the money coming from outside California. Opponents have raised $31.2 million, with 34% of the money coming from outside the state.” The total money raised by...

Sadie Fields of the Georgia Christian Alliance is in charge of turning out conservative Christians for the McCain/Palin ticket in Georgia. Over the weekend she put out this message which she urged conservative Christians to print out and distribute at church. A short excerpt: While we have failed in many ways to preserve the vision of our Founders, if Obama is elected their vision of this wonderful “experiment in ordered liberty” will truly disappear. He will be aided and abetted in his pursuit...

The AJC brings the good news: The federal appeals court in Atlanta on Friday stayed the execution of Troy Anthony Davis, who was scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection Monday evening. “Upon our thorough review of the record, we conclude that Davis has met the burden for a stay of execution,” the court said in a ruling issued by Judges Joel Dubina, Rosemary Barket and Stanley Marcus. Davis, 40, recently lost an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. Davis is on death row for the Aug....

Michael Pollan was making his case for food as a national security issue Monday on Fresh Air. Terry Gross asked him about Obama being mocked for liking arugula instead of iceberg lettuce. Pollan said he would have advised him not to talk about it: Dukakis did the same thing. He talked about endive in Iowa, and these…candidates get to Iowa, and the farmers are complaining about their low crop prices, and the [candidates talk] about specialty crops that get really good prices. But you know, it...

The NYTimes’ Floyd Norris is blogging through much of today, as the world fears the worst. Right now: strong>11:42 a.m. | Rally: The Dow is down less than 200 points for the day, which means it is up 300 points from the low. But earlier: 10:40 a.m. | October Blues: Here are some October performances, through a few minutes ago. In each case, I took a major index from the country in question. All figures are in U.S. dollars. U.S., down 26% Canada. down 37% Mexico, down 44% Argentina, down...

Even before this morning’s new low, Elizabeth Warren was suggesting we could see an old-fashioned, new-wave lay-away Christmas: With Mastercard and Visa cards handed out like cheap candy, layaway plans had nearly disappeared. The old-fashioned method for budgeting–pay a few bucks each week on your purchases–made no sense to millions of customers who could take the goods home and pay a little each month forever after. For more than a decade, when I have taught 507(a)(7) priorities,...

Barack Obama, from an interview with Joe Klein: Whatever else we think is going to happen over the next certainly 5 years, one thing we know, the days of easy credit are going to be over…. And what that means is that just from a purely economic perspective, finding the new driver of our economy is going to be critical. There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy. I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen...

Freakonomics: Sarah Palin’s favorability ratings dropped slightly among independents, Democrats, and Republicans who viewed Tina Fey’s impressions of her on Saturday Night Live, according to a study conducted earlier this month by HCD Research and the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion. Another study by the same group said the real Palin’s appearance on SNL last week boosted her ratings — though not by much — according to an HCD press release. SNL’s ratings, on the other...

Jacqui Cheng describes a couple of new web services Google has launched to help us find registration information and voting locations: First up is Google’s US Voter Info site, which is just a version of Google Maps with integrated voter information. Users can enter their addresses in order to find their designated polling place, and even get directions right from the map. If it can’t find a polling location for your address (which, curiously, it could not for mine smack dab in the middle...

A couple weeks ago Wired ran an Obama vs. McCain Tech Scorecard. McCain earned a D; Obama a B. [See comment below, thank you BBQ for correcting my error.] Nicholas Thompson then contacted the two campaigns and asked for representatives to debate over tech issues. Obama offered up former FCC chair Reed Hunt. Here’s Thompson’s tale of the McCain campaign response: My first choice was Carly Fiorina. She’s a smart McCain supporter and she’s very articulate on these issues. I was...

Just yesterday I pointed to Andrew Sullivan’s insightful Why I Blog in which he compares blogging to jazz and argues effectively that blogging heralds a golden age of journalism. Then today I find Paul Boutin in Wired arguing that blogging’s heyday has passed. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004: Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug. Writing a weblog today isn’t the...

While Google is officially neutral, CEO Eric Schmidt is campaigning this week on behalf of Barack Obama. This will be his “first time on the trail;” he says this is a “natural evolution” from his role as an informal adviser to the Obama campaign. At The Machinist Cyrus Farivar notes: Schmidt is the second high-ranking Googler to make such an endorsement, with Vint “I actually co-invented the Internet” Cerf making a similar endorsement last week. But the question...

The Politico’s Daniel Libit thinks we have so many different fact-checkers that they might be drowning each other out. They appear to have little effect on keeping the campaigns honest. What we really need now says Libit: …is a way of kind of consolidating the fact-checking, and this gives an opportunity, maybe even for a website, to do what websites like FiveThirtyEight.com or Pollster.com or RealClearPolitics have done for polling. You have all these different polls, and you need sites...

When it comes to blogging, Andrew Sullivan is an old hand. And an indisputable expert. In the (redesigned) November Atlantic he has written a 5,000 word “dead-tree” essay, Why I Blog. In it, he tells of those early days grappling with what to write for an audience of only a few hundred back in the spring of 2000. He recalls how he was “technologically clueless” and used Blogger for its simplicity. Right off he found directly broadcasting his own words to readers “exhilarating...

Click here for Interactive McCain family tree Douglas A. Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name – The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, is the Atlanta Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal. Over the past 20 years, he has written extensively about race, exploring the interplay of wealth, corporate conduct and racial segregation. On Friday, Blackmon wrote of the descendants of slaves held at the Mississippi plantation owned by Sen. John McCain’s...

On Meet the Press this morning (after the Colin Powell endorsement) Joe Scarborough offered up some advice to Obama, “Go to Florida. Go to Ohio. Get out of North Carolina…” He says we’re not a 60/40 country and later suggests that the only reason for Obama’s lead is the economy. Do we agree? RELATED: Earlier in the segment NBC News political director Chuck Todd’s numbers included the observation that, “McCain’s path now is solely an electoral college...

The cover asks: Do you think that after eight years of George W. Bush this country is in good shape? Do you feel the U.S. Constitution has too many Amendments? Do you often dream of George Bush in a flight suit? If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, it’s time to seek help. And Gene Stone’s new book, The 12 Step Bush Recovery Program, is a vital guide to post-Bush era wellness that’s coming out just in time! My old colleagues Carl Pritzkat and Tony Travostino...

CNet News Webware: Google’s personalized homepage, iGoogle, is getting an update today. Widgets on the page can support a new “canvas view,” which expands the widget to the full iGoogle window. The sixteen new or updated widgets that Google is promoting today support this feature. There are over 40,000 iGoogle widgets available, iGoogle group product manager Jessica Ewing told me. 40,000??? That’s a lot of widgets… The Official Google Blog: Not all of our gadgets have...

Martin Eisenstadt says Joe the Plumber wasn’t vetted: John McCain did great tonight in the debate. But every time John mentioned “Joe the Plumber,” some of us in the campaign banged our heads against the wall. If Steve Schmidt had any hair left, I hear he would have been pulling it out tonight. He reportedly screamed at John’s debate prep team tonight (out of earshot of reporters, of course). “You idiots – he’s related to Charles Keating… of the Keating Five scandal!” They...

ATask: Hottest costume this halloween: Joe the Plumber Kevin Drum: Is “Joe the Plumber” going to be the new “Joe Sixpack”? seldo “Joe the Plumber for Obama” hat now available on Zazzle. Already? [link, t-shirts too link] Paul Carr: I reckon McCain has absolutely nailed the plumber and autistic children vote… McCain finishes on a little dance. Nice touch. But perhaps a bit gay for Joe the Plumber. mattfromseattle: The real question Mr. McCain, is what are...