Want to get your politics when you want, rather than in the snappy 5 second soundbites you get from mainstream news?

You can subscribe to podcasts of both the 2008 Republican National Convention (iTunes link) and the Democratic National Convention and get the party line on demand.

Or – if you think that party rhetoric is a bunch of bunk – you could use the mp3’s to whip up a crazy remix.

Other political podcasts to check out include:

• Vote 2008 – NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Podcast
• CNN’s America Votes 2008
• PRI’s The World: 2008 Elections Podcast

Image: talkradionews

Several sources are reporting, unofficially, that Apple will be introducing a new version of iTunes next Tuesday.

While this is an unofficial rumor, it seems likely, since it’s been close to 2 years since iTunes 7 was released.

Here’s a rundown of expected features for iTunes 8:

Genius

iTunes 8 includes Genius, which makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together. Genius also includes Genius sidebar, which recommends music from the iTunes Store that you don’t already have.

Other new features:

With iTunes 8, browse your artists and albums visually with the new Grid view; download your favorite TV shows in HD quality from the iTunes Store; sync your media with iPod nano (4th generation), iPod classic (2nd generation), and iPod touch (2nd generation); and enjoy a stunning new music visualizer.

New iPods and an iTunes update are welcome – but I’d like to see Apple deliver some “Wow” with Tuesday’s introductions.

A big, juicy, Thickburger of “Wow”.

The company has been focusing on execution, and doing a fantastic job of it. Steve Jobs realizes that their technology is enough ahead of anybody else’s that they can work on incremental improvements and still have a huge lead.

Still, watching Apple secure its lead isn’t half as interesting as getting your mind blown by “one more thing” introductions like Apple’s switch to Intel or the iPhone.

I’m hoping that Jobs has years of one more things to come.

For the last three years, we’ve been wondering why Paris Hilton was the first celebrity podcaster.

You may recall that, back in 2005, when most people had no idea what a podcast was, Hilton was featured in The Paris Hilton Podcast, considered by some to be the worst podcast of all time.

Now a new survey – the 2008 Mendelsohn Affluent Survey – may offer an explanation.

The survey found direct relationships between income and media usage:

• The higher your income, the more likely you are to read magazines;
• The higher your income, the less television you watch;
• The higher your income, the less radio you listen to; and
• The higher your income, the more time you spend using the Internet.

In a nutshell, people with money are rapidly moving their attention to online media, and the more money you have, the more likely you are to spend your time online:

Paris Hilton, and high-income people in general, have moved their attention to Internet media and are leaving broadcast television behind. The rich spend nearly twice as much time online as they do watching television, and nearly three times as much time online as they do listening to radio.

This is a key trend for advertisers and those in new media; if you want to get the attention of people with money, you have to do it online.

Apple has sent out invitations for a Sept 9 event in San Francisco.

While the “Let’s Rock” event is sure to offer new iPods, there are two more important questions I’m interested to see answered:

• Will Jobs address concerns about his health? His last appearance has left people questioning his health, to the point that Bloomberg is polishing up Jobs’ obituary. People are looking for reassurance that Jobs is healthy and that he’ll be able to run Apple for a long time.
• Will there be “one more thing”? Apple has been doing a great job of delivering results this year, but it hasn’t made any surprising introductions. We’d like to see innovation around Apple TV and Internet media, a new form factor for tablet computing (ie a Kindle-killer) or something out of left field.

Rapid adoption of the iPhone 3G has led iPhone Safari’s browser usage share to jump 58% in one month, going from .19% in July to .30% in August. If the trend continues, iPhone Safari’s browser share is on target to see at least 500% annual growth.

To put the current numbers in perspective, about 1 out of 300 visits to an average site are now coming from iPhones. Tech sites and sites that appeal to Apple owners are likely to get a much higher portion of their traffic from iPhones.

Last year, we predicted that, if Apple met its sales goals for the iPhone, the iPhone’s browser share will hit 1% by the end of 2008. That prediction looks a little aggressive, with only 4 months left in the year. Apple’s is likely to sell a large number of iPhones going up the holidays that won’t be activated and being used to surf the Web until a month into next year.

No matter when Apple’s iPhone Safari hits 1% browser share, though, it will be an important milestone for the mobile Web. Mobile Internet use is being propelled forward by the iPhone, and the trend will affect how not just new media and social networking sites are used, but all sites.

Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, journalists with the syndicated news program Democracy Now, were arrested by the Minneapolis Police Department Monday and charged with conspiracy to riot.

According to a statement from Democracy Now:

Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers who were being unlawfuly detained. They are Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. Kouddous and Salazar were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman’s crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.

Ramsey County Sherrif Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting. They are currently being held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul.

Democracy Now discounts the idea that the journalists were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, saying:

The arrest of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar is a transparent attempt to intimidate journalists from the nation’s leading independent news outlet.

While incidents like this are common at political conventions, this is the one of the first times that new media has allowed almost instant exposure to them.

If Lord Vader, the dark lord of the Sith, were a high school math teacher, this is probably how he would explain the Pythagorean Theorem.

Via learnmegood – a third-grade math teacher in Dallas, TX.

At the Democratic National Convention, Rachel Maddow interviewed Google CEO Eric Schmidt on how the Internet is changing politics.

More videos from the Big Tent, the Google-sponsored facility for alternative media, are available on YouTube.

via JD Lasica

Dozens of people are being arrested in Minneapolis ahead of the Republican National Convention, apparently in a pre-emptive attempt to stifle protest and independent media coverage.

The people arrested appear to fall into two general group, liberal protestors and video bloggers.

The New York Times reports “Dozens Detained Ahead of Convention“:

On the weekend before the Republican National Convention, law enforcement agencies detained dozens of people and issued a series of search warrants aimed at groups believed to be organizing demonstrations while delegates and Republican officials are in town.

On Friday night the Ramsey County sheriff’s department, accompanied by the St. Paul police, detained people inside a building here that was being used as a headquarters to plan protests.

“They handcuffed all of us, said Sonia Silbert, 28, from Washington. “They searched everyone

A copy of a warrant at one house said the police were authorized to look for a laundry list of items, including fire bombs, Molotov cocktails, brake fluid, photographs and maps of St. Paul, paint, computers and camera equipment, and documents and other communications.

Attorneys for the National Lawyers Guild said the people who were detained and photographed included local residents as well as visitors in town to demonstrate at the convention.

Bruce Nestor, a lawyer at one house, said three people there were arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit a riot.

“In my mind it’s a classic preventive detention charge, Mr. Nestor said.

He said the authorities were permitted to hold those they arrested without charging them for up to 36 hours — excluding weekends or holidays — in essence detaining them for the length of the convention.

Eileen Clancy blogs at iWitness, a group of bloggers that “uses video to protect civil liberties.” She discusses their experiences in this statement:

Live from the I-Witness Video Residence

Saturday, 30 Aug 2008

by Eileen Clancy

This is Eileen Clancy, one of the founders of I-Witness Video, a NYC-based video collective that’s in St. Paul to document the policing of the protests around this week’s Republican National Convention.

The house where I-Witness Video is staying in St. Paul has been surrounded by police. We have locked all the doors. We have been told that if we leave we will be detained. One of our people who was caught outside is being detained in handcuffs in front of the house. The police say that they are waiting to get a search warrant. More than a dozen police are wielding firearms, including one St. Paul officer with a long gun, which someone told me is an M-16.

We are suffering a preemptive video arrest. For those that don’t know, I-Witness Video was remarkably successful in exposing police misconduct and outright perjury by police during the 2004 RNC. Out of 1800 arrests, at least 400 were overturned based solely on video evidence which contradicted sworn statements which were fabricated by police officers. It seems that the house arrest we are now under and the possible threat of the seizure of our computers and video cameras is a result of the 2004 success.

We are asking the public to contact the office of St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman at 651-266-8510 to stop this house arrest, this gross intimidation by police officers, and the detention of media activists and reporters.

Clancy later reported that five people from iWitness were detained all in all, but at least three had been released.

While there was a lot of discussion of censorship of dissent going on during the 2008 Olympics in China, the state of new media in the US is means that there’s video on the Internet of these events as they happen.

Here’s an example from Qik:

Here’s another video taken after a raid on peace protestors:

More coverage is available at Salon & Boing Boing.

On the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina‘s devastation along the Gulf Coast of the United States, another huge hurricane, Gustav, is howling around Cuba and heading for New Orleans, which was devastated by the 2005 hurricane. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is calling Gustav “the mother of all storms,” and has ordered the mandatory evacuation of the city’s residents.

The storm is picking up in intensity, and is expected to make landfall in the US on Monday. Fears abound about a repeat humanitarian catastrophe in the aftermath of the hurricane as in ’05.

One major difference this time around which gives us hope is the proliferation of social networks, and the coming together o highly connected users of social media to mobilize help.

Saturday afternoon, Tim Street, Executive Producer and creator of French Maid TV, asked on Twitter “#Gustav is not looking good. Are we going to be able to use Twitter to help people after Gustav hits? Can we brainstorm some ideas now?”

Around that same time, Andy Carvin, coordinator of social media strategy for National Public Radio, set up a Gustav website on the do-it-yourself social networking platform Ning to coordinate volunteers and list what needs arise.

Street sent lots of direct messages to other widely-connected Twitter users to please spread the word of the social network efforts to their friends and followers. He and Carvin, working from opposite coasts and far away from the storm’s path, asked for hurricane help, and received it by the bucketful.

Over the past few hours Saturday evening another Twitter user set up the script so that Twitter account @GustavAlerts would tweet the latest government hurricane alerts. Michael Bayer, who founded Utterz, set up a special Utterz widget for displaying “utters” about Hurrican Gustav. A collaborative Gustav Wiki is under construction by two others and will be available through the Ning site on Sunday. These efforts are meant to coordinate with the “older” new media like Craigslist and with traditional relief agency Red Cross, which organized massive emergency relief efforts in the aftermath of Katrina.

UPDATE 8/31/2008 – Podcasting News reader Christopher Carfi shares, “Since many in Gustav’s path will not have internet access, a mobile-based resource guide has been set up here: http://ventana.cerado.com/gustav08 .”

Of course, all the bandwidth and cool platforms and wikis in the world do not by themselves equate with alleviating human suffering. As one Twitter user put it, “hopefully, digital info converts to analog help.”

We hope so, too.

If you have other online resources for coordinating hurricane relief, please let us know in the comments below.

Image: GISuser.com