Barack Obama has introduced a new tool for catering to his wired backers – the Obama ’08 iPhone app (app store link).

Features:

• Call Friends: A great volunteering tool that lets you make a difference any time you want by talking to people you already know. Your contacts are prioritized by key battleground states, and you can make calls and organize results all in one place.
• Call Stats: See nationwide Obama ’08 Call Friends totals and find out how your call totals compare to leading callers.
• Get Involved: Do more. Find and contact your local Obama for America HQ.
• Receive Updates: Receive the latest news and announcements via text messages or email.
• News: Browse complete coverage of national and local campaign news.
• Local Events: Find local events, share by email and get maps and directions.
• Media: Browse videos and photos from the campaign
• Issues: Get clear facts about Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s plan for essential issues facing Americans.

YouTube today announced YouTube Alive, “a celebration of the site’s vast user communities; everyone from bedroom vloggers to world-famous rock stars, musicians, comedians, athletes, artists and more. Part concert, part variety show and part party, the event will bring to life many of the amazing videos and talent that YouTube viewers have already made popular on the site.”

The two-hour event is scheduled to take place on November 22, 2008, in front of a live audience in San Francisco and will be streamed live on the site.

The variety show is expected to include:

• Akon
• Soulja Boy Tell’em
• Will.I.Am
• Planet B-Boy
• Beardyman
• Esmee Denters
• Sick Puppies
• LisaNova
• Funtwo
• Michael Buckley
• William Sledd
• Julia Nunes
• Mythbusters
• Tay Zonday
• Mike Relm

YouTube will be posting updates on the event at www.youtube.com/live.

This promises to be the most vlogged event ever.

There’s a lot of buzz today about a new window into the blogosphere, Google’s updated Blog Search. 

Here’s what Google Product Manager Michael Cohen has to say about Blog Search:

Today, we’re pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere. Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we’re now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event.

Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you’ll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere.

Sounds a lot like Techmeme – except that it’s from Google and it has 11 categories. 

Blog Search may bring TechMeme-style news aggregation to the mainstream, but it may have trouble challenging TechMeme for the tech world’s attention. Here’s why.

Netflix today announced an agreement with Starz Play that adds around 1,000 choices to what you can watch instantly today, and will add another 1,500 by the end of the year.

Movies include “No Country for Old Men”, “Ratatouille,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” “Superbad,” and more. A list of all the newly available choices is available here.

Netflix ready devices include the Netflix Player by Roku, which is available now, the LG BD300 Blu-ray Network player, which will be available in a few days, or the Xbox 360, which will instantly stream movies from Netflix later this fall.

Netflix also announced that Mac support is expected before the end of the year.

The Boing Boing TV video podcast is featuring author, PC, and minor internet personality John Hodgman in a new show segment, SPAMasterpiece Theater. 

Hodgman describes the first episode as the dramatization of “true tale[s] of romance, adventure, infamy, and low-cost prescription drugs, all culled from the reams of actual, unsolicited emails, received here by us and people like you — what we call SPAM.”

Need a reminder about how quickly technology changes?

Check out the search results for “podcasting” from Google’s 2001 index of the Web:

Zilch!

Google has published a search page based on its 2001 index as part of its 10th anniversary. 

Don’t bother looking for “YouTube”, either. And, back then, “iPod” was just an abbreviation for things like “Image Proof of Deposit” and “IPO disorder”!

Google today announced updates to YouTube Insight’s analytics, adding a new feature, “Hot Spots”, that shows you the hottest scenes in your videos and also what’s not so hot. 

The Hot Spots tab in Insight plays your video alongside a graph that shows the ups-and-downs of viewership at different moments within the video. Google determine “hot” and “cold” spots by comparing your video’s abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards.

When the graph goes up, your video is hot: few viewers are leaving, and many are even rewinding on the control bar to see that sequence again. When the graph goes down, your content’s gone cold: many viewers are moving to another part of the video or leaving the video entirely.

In the example above, you can see that many viewers are not impressed with the dance moves of Michael Rucker, Associate Product Marketing Manager at YouTube; they’re leaving the video at a faster than average rate almost immediately after the video begins. But the longer the video goes on, the more people tend to stay, generating a hot spot at the end of the video.

This features should be a useful tool, especially for people that post videos frequently, because it will let you figure out which scenes are the “hottest” and edit future videos to keep people more engaged.

It could also be used to A/B test different versions of videos. If you’re not sure which edits are more effective, you could upload two versions of a scene or entire video and see compare drop off rates.

Fortune reports that Apple is threatening to kill the iTunes Store over music royalties. 

The Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, D.C. is expected to rule Thursday on a request by the National Music Publishers’ Association to raise royalty rates on songs purchased from online music stores, like iTunes, from 9 cents to 15 cents per track. 

“If the [iTunes music store] was forced to absorb any increase in the … royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss – which is no alternative at all,” notes iTunes vice president Eddy Cue. “Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate [the iTunes music store] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably.”

At this point, Apple’s stance seems to be little more than saber rattling. Apple is quickly moving to diversify the iTunes store beyond music. While the digital video market is slow to take off, Apple has another hit with its App Store.

John McCain’s supporters prefer to get their news and entertainment from television, while Barack Obama’s supporters tend to be “media generalists” who get their news and entertainment from assorted media platforms.

A new study by media agency MediaVest found that 65 percent of voters are paying more attention to the presidential election campaign than they did in 2004 and that 50 percent plan to increase their election-based media use through the election.

Other interesting, but puzzling factoids:

• 96 percent want “fair and impartial news and information”, while
• 75 percent want the media they use “to fit their own political viewers and outlook.”
• 91 percent want their news “detailed and in-depth,” while
• 60 percent want it “quick.”

Overall, the study found that the Web is still not trusted for political news and information as well as traditional media. 

via AdWeek 

Image: Steve Rhodes

Ever wish there was a PodCamp in your area?

PodCamps are fun, free or inexpensive events for people interested in blogging, social media, social networking, podcasting, video on the net and new media, in general. 

They’re also a chance to meet a lot of other cool podcasters. You might even end up in the greatest photo ever. 

The idea of setting up a conference for dozens of hundreds of people is daunting, though. To help, Chris Brogan, who along with Chris Penn pioneered the PodCamp unconference concept, shared his tips for setting up your own PodCamp, calling it the Quick Podcamp Starter Kit:

1. Are there more than 10 podcasters or videobloggers or bloggers in your area? If yes, then you can probably do a PodCamp.
2. Make a wiki. We use http://pbwiki.com . Easy cheesy to edit.
3. List your PodCamp with a tentative time frame up on PodCamp.org 
   • Remember that there are six rules listed on the page to make it an official podcamp.
4. Blog that you’re going to do it.
5. Ask for co-organizers. Assign them very specific tasks.
6. Find a venue. This is way harder than you think. 
   • Room for ___ people (it’s your event. How many do you want?) 
   • Wifi
   • A/V gear (unless you can get a sponsor to give you some)
   • Food costs – Some places charge 3x the venue costs for meals
   • If you can get a corporate venue, that often works the best
7. Seek sponsors to cover costs. 
   • Be very clear on what they get back for their money. 
   • Make sure this includes link love on the web. If you can, ask others to also blog about the sponsors.
   • Be very open about who will come, what type of people, and how the sponsors will interact.
8. Decide whether to charge for attendance (something nominal).
9. Delegate to the volunteers such that everyone knows what they own.
10. Hold a great event and write about it for years.

If you’re not sure about doing your own PodCamp, you can go to one of the upcoming events and see what they are all about. There’s a list of planned events at the PodCamp site.