The U.S. election is heating up, and we’re not just talking about the humidity in Tampa. Since April 2011, when Romney officially entered the race, close to 600,000 videos mentioning Obama or Romney have been uploaded to YouTube, and these videos account for close to 2 billion views.
Topping the list of these videos is baracksdubs’ “Barack Obama Singing Call Me Maybe,” which has racked up over 24 million views in just a few months.
Political pop song parodies are on the rise in general. In the past month, this Gotye parody titled, “Obama That I Used to Know” and a more humorous One Direction parody about Romney have both crossed the million view mark and hit the YouTube Trending Videos list.
It’s not just light-hearted fare that have people tuning in. Since the primaries began, there have been more than 100 million views of official presidential candidate videos on YouTube.
In fact, in just the last 30 days, people have spent more than 20 cumulative years watching official videos of Obama and Romney (that’s two years longer than Justin Bieber has been alive).
And new uploads from Obama and Romney’s official YouTube channels are gaining traction quickly, with videos receiving hundreds of thousands of views within a few days of upload. The latest video on Obama for America’s YouTube channel has received over 217,000 views in just 24 hours. And since Mitt Romney announced Paul Ryan as his running mate, he has seen a surge in both channel subscribers (a 300% increase since the Ryan announcement) and views. Their first video together, “America’s Comeback Team” has racked up over 1.1 million views in two weeks and is the second most-viewed video on the Romney channel:
We’ll be tracking the political trends on YouTube until Election Day. To keep your finger on the pulse of political video, and to watch up-to-the-minute live and on-demand coverage from the campaign trail, visit the YouTube Elections Hub at www.youtube.com/politics or follow YouTube Politics here.
Social media is our most recent progression in the history of our communication and yet, some people are still unaware of what social media entails.
Many people get hung up on social networks that they think that is all there is to social media and nothing more… they could not be more wrong.
Interacting in a public forum is a form of social media, I would even go as far as saying that MSN Messenger and AOL were early adapters to the shifting within our communication, the one on one chats to the chat rooms of Yahoo.
Social media began in small spurts and progressed into social bookmarking sites and the social networks we know today. However, communicating long-hand is still a part of social media, so I must ask.
Why aren’t you blogging?
I totally get the whole 140 characters and how we like to keep it short, sweet and to the point, but that is not all there is, surely there is still room for lengthy conversations that exceed limitations.
Blogging is a form of social media since it gives a blogger a place to spew thoughts, opinions and ideas and in return a forum for people to respond through comments, their thoughts, opinions and ideas. Everything has not all been said, it has not all been done and conversations that are not compacted lead to provoking thoughts.
We still need to think, to take a moment and dissect what another person is saying and that is not always going to be provided to us from a tweet or a SMS.
This does not mean that you have to be a deep thinker to write a blog post, but you do have to keep in mind that people will want to engage with you or connect with you more than what a social network can provide. An audience is broad and want to know more about what they would consider investing time into, whether it is a business or a person, your persona is of interest to somebody.
Therefore you do not need to squat your thoughts, instead, create a blog and share your thoughts freely, you may be surprised at how many others feel the same.
Don’t put a cap on connecting, find a topic, TV show or Tech piece you are passionate about and share your thoughts through your keyboard. There is always some pair of eyes on the other end of the screen to read it and perhaps make them think “Why am I not blogging?”
They may not make an appearance on The Iin a way that people ron Chef any time soon but the “Robot Chef” is able to slice noodles quickly, efficiently, and in a way that hasn’t turned off patrons of noodle houses in Beijing. Perhaps most importantly for business owners, they are cheaper and don’t complain as much as human employees.
When Cui Runguan came up with the idea to make the robot chef in 2006, the idea was that it’s the type of job that most people cannot do long term. It’s tiring, repetitive, and simple enough for the windshield-wiper technology of the robot to duplicate. At less than $2000 a machine, they’re less expensive than their human counterparts. Check it out in action:
It is not too early to start planning for Christmas is it? I know, it might be too soon, but not in the instance of wanting to get gifts you actually want right? This is right around the time when people start buying holiday gifts in preparation for the Holiday season, which my friend truly is not that far away.
The upside is that you are able to share with your friends using the Thinking of U (TofU) app, which allows you to be able to show others exactly what you wish for and can even upload a photo if it is spotted in the store. Using social media to let your friends and family to see your ultimate wish list, whether it is for your birthday or Holidays, if your friends and family members want to view your full list of gift suggestions or vice versa.
The app is free and only currently available for the iPhone; however there is an Android app in the works.
Show your favorite sites how the small screen is done. (testing responsive sites with Adobe Shadow). Photo: Adobe
Responsive Retrofitting is a fun little project that allows anyone to create a responsive design for any website.
All you need to do is head over to GitHub and install the bookmarklet in a WebKit browser. Now visit one of the supported sites, like Apple.com. Resize your browser window to be very narrow and click the bookmarklet. The result is what Apple.com might look like were the company to create a responsive website.
Responsive Retrofitting was created by developer Ben Callahan, who cautions that it is “very much in alpha form.” (As such it, regrettably, only supports WebKit browsers for now.) The bookmarklet is an experiment in responsive retrofitting, writes Callahan, adding “it’s a positive response to more negative (but still much needed) critiques of the mobile web like Brad Frost’s WTF Mobile Web.”
Alpha or no, you can contribute your responsive redesigns for your favorite, non-responsive sites — head on over to the Github repo for more info on how to add your own designs.
JSTerm, an experimental Firefox add-on for JavaScript developers, has hit version 2.0.
The JSTerm Firefox add-on — not to be confused with the HTML5 Telnet Emulator by the same name — adds a “jsterm” button to Firefox’s Developer Toolbar. Click the button and you’ll get a JavaScript terminal for live coding, prototyping and quick JavaScript experiments. JSTerm behaves like a typical shell terminal with history, tab completion and plenty of key bindings.
Version 2.0 offers performance improvements, a new option to undock the terminal into its own window, global history shared across sessions and support for OS X’s fullscreen mode.
To try out JSTerm you’ll need Firefox 16 (currently in the Beta channel) since JSTerm uses the new Graphical Command Line Interface we covered in our Firefox 16 beta review. JSTerm also takes advantage of the built-in Firefox Source Editor to highlight JavaScript and a sandbox to eval JavaScript.
If you’re thinking there are already several tools for Firefox that cover this ground, well, you’re right. The built-in Scratchpad and WebConsole both offer similar tools, though neither is quite as nice for quick prototyping and experimenting. Developer favorite Firebug also has a Console for JavaScript developers, but it lacks the nice syntax highlighting you’ll find in JSTerm.
For more details on JSTerm and a changelog of everything that’s new in this release, check out Mozilla developer Paul Rouget’s blog. To have a look at the code behind JSTerm, head to GitHub.
Adobe’s CSS Shaders proposal, which will bring high-quality cinematic effects to the web through some new CSS tools, has been accepted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
That means CSS Shaders will become a web standard, though not on their own; instead the W3C is going to roll CSS Shaders into the CSS Filter Effects specification. The feature formerly known as Shaders will now be referred to as Custom Filters
The original name “Shader” has its roots in the 3-D graphics world and roughly describes what “Custom Filters” will do, namely create 3-D effects, like the rippling motion in a waving flag, by “shading” regions.
In the end the name isn’t that important; just know that Custom Filters will allow web developers to easily apply cinema-style filter effects to any HTML content. Think grayscale-to-color transitions, animated shadows, photo-realistic warping and other mainstays of the 3-D animation world.
You’ll still need a special build of WebKit that Adobe put together to see Custom Filters in action. You can grab the experimental browser from the GitHub page, where you’ll also find plenty of examples and sample code that show how shaders, er, Custom Filters work. Also be sure to check out Adobe’s earlier write-up on how Filters work and how you can use them.
Now that Shaders are an official part of CSS, hopefully web browsers will begin adding support.
[Update:The original title of this post was Adobe's CSS Shaders Now an Official Web Standard, wherein I intended "Official Web Standard" to mean "a part of the web standards process", not actually a published W3C recommendation. Judging by the comments that's how most of you took it, but of course it was definitely possible to read it as something more than it actually is, so the headline has been updated to clarify that point.]
