A new website called Politweets is displaying the political tweets posted on Twitter. The tweets are seperated into by party with tweets mentioning Democratic candidates on the left side and tweets mentioning Republican candidates on the right. It’s a fun way to track news and people’s opinions of the candidates as we watch to see who is going to get the nomination for each party. Politweets was created by Character140, the people who created Twittertale.com. An article on WriteNews.com lists some of the political news Twitters such as @politics and @RedState. The article also lists Twitter accounts that are for the Democratic and Republican candidates themselves. Here’s a list of some of the candidates’ Twitter accounts and how many followers they each have. Barack Obama (6,667 followers) John Edwards (4,148 followers) Fred Thompson (816 followers) Ron Paul (685 followers) Hillary Clinton 2008 (209 followers) (not active) Keith Sprankle (167 followers) Joe Biden (120 followers) Huckablog (unofficial for Huckabee) (57 followers) Blogs4McCain (unofficial for McCain) (4 followers) Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani don’t appear to be active on Twitter. Posted in Politics Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

Matthew: Shirtless Bachelor
PEOPLE’s Bachelor of the Year continues getting caught without his top on in Malibu. Plus: Ben & Matt’s reunion, Tom & Katie and more

Celebs Without iPhones: See Their Favorite Gadgets!
Heidi and Mischa don’t have Apple’s new toy yet, but see the PDAs and cameras they love

The Week’s 10 Best Celeb Quotes
Paula reveals her intimidation tactics. Plus: John Krasinski, John Stamos and others

The Queen Launches YouTube Channel
The Queen of England and the British Monarchy have launched a YouTube Channel. The Channel will features The Queen’s Christmas message as well as current and historical footage of the monarch and other members of the Royal Family. The site contains a number of videos already including this video clip of the Queen’s Christmas broadcast from 1957. Among the older clips is footage from a film by Lord Wakehurst called Long to Reign Over Us, which has never been released to the public. The former Tory MP, who died in 1970, was a keen amateur film maker and charted many key royal events, including the death of King George VI, the Queen’s accession and her coronation. The site also has footage of Queen Alexandra’s West End tour among the rose-sellers in 1917, and silent newsreel of the 1923 wedding of the Duke of York and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon – the Queen’s parents. Announcing the launch of the channel, a spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace said the Queen “always keeps abreast with new ways of communicating with people”. “She has always been aware of reaching more people and adapting the communication to suit,” she said. “This will make the Christmas message more accessible to younger people and those in other countries.” The BBC says this year’s holiday address will appear on the site at about 1500 GMT on Christmas Day. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

Paris’s First Day of Freedom
See how Hilton spent her first moments out of jail as she headed back to Bel Air

Gizmodo Pulls Prank at CES
Gizmodo bloggers pulled a stunt at CES where they used a device to turn off many of the tvs and displays at the electronics show. The stunt has perturbed some tech bloggers – see here, here, here and here. Some bloggers are also concerned that the stunt could cause a backlash against bloggers attending electronics shows. But not everyone feels the stunt is a serious problem. Mathew Ingram asks What’s the Big Deal?. Puh-leeze. Not surprisingly, Denton is unapologetic (although Lam says he’s sorry about disrupting the poor Motorola guy so many times during his presentation). Most of the events in the video are completely harmless, with TVs winking out as people are staring at them in the big hall – so what? I find it hard to get too excited about the whole thing, and much like Nick I find it refreshing that someone is standing apart from the slack-jawed and drooling coverage that CES gets in other places. ZDNet’s Between the Lines also thinks the Gizmodogate outrage is overblown. The prank itself is clever and the video is funny but the Gizmodo bloggers may have taken the stunt too far when they repeatedly turned off some of the same TVs disrupting CES presentations. In a business situation a funny prank can very quickly become annoying. As Zoli notes these people “worked hard to prepare, stage and deliver” their presentations. This is unlikely to have any impact at all on tech blogging in general as some are suggesting. If any bloggers are barred from future tech shows it will probably just be the Gizmodo bloggers and not all tech bloggers. At any rate the video sure shows that the TV-B-Gone devices that Gizmodo used at CES are very effective at turning off TVs. Maybe it is these disruptive devices that should be banned from tech conferences. CyberNet says everyone will be covering up the infrared ports on their displays at next year’s CES — probably a good idea. Update: Portfolio reports that the Gizmodo blogger has been barred from any future CES events. They are also reviewing possible sanctions against Gizmodo and Gawker. “The Gizmodo staffer interfered with the exhibitor booth operations of numerous companies, including disrupting at least one press event,” the C.E.S. said in a statement. “The Gizmodo staffer violated the terms of C.E.S. media credentials and caused harm to C.E.S. exhibitors. This Gizmodo staffer has been identified and will be barred from attending any future C.E.S. events. Additional sanctions against Gizmodo and Gawker are being reviewed.” Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

What’s Going to Happen in 2008?
2008 is going to be a year of political intrigue, depressing economic news, annoying web filters, weird weather, crappy television, newfangled gadgets and green hybrid vehicles. That’s the short of it and some of it is bound to be true. But no one really knows what 2008 is going to be like yet so here’s a closer look at some key issues. Australia gets a big giant filter for 2008. Duncan Riley has more on the Great Firewall of Australia here. Let’s hope filters do not become a global trend for 2008. Quality over frequency? Gawker CEO Nick Denton thinks having fewer posts with lots of pageviews is the way to go in ‘08. That could result in posts that are either very informative or very sensational or both. Robert Scoble frowns on the practice and reminds us of the popularity of his Kindle asshat post. On a positive note maybe Gawker bloggers will try to link out to other blogs more in order to get more links and traffic to their posts. Speaking of the Kindle. Some folks like that for a hot gadget in 2008. The Kindle does have some hidden easter eggs that may help it win kudos from gadget bloggers. Some more obvious forecasts are that the 3G iPhone and Google’s Android platform will be popular this year. Another hot 2008 gadget may be the Chumby. Some gadget forecasts can be found here, here, here, here, here and here. The RIAA apparently thinks in 2008 you shouldn’t be copying your music from one device to another. Some suggest that in 2008 the mainstream music industry will end. Note: It isn’t going to end but the big music labels will continue to struggle with CD sales in 2008. U.S. President: It is an easy prediction to say that U.S. politics will be a hot topic in the blogosphere this year. The polls are all over the place. The BBC calls it the “nobody knows” election. Part of the reason for the uncertainty is the lack of an incumbent. Vice President Dick Cheney could have run but he has never polled well and has health issues. The Democrats appear to be better off than the Republicans at this point. The Democrats have raised far more money and they have been polling better but the elections are still a long way away. Grist is only 98% sure we will actually get a new president in 2008. The BBC has an article about some new technologies that could be making the news in 2008 including IPTV and Wimax. They also mention there will be more of the “web to go” with technology like Google Gears. Predictions posts on Google Operation System and Google Blogoscoped also mention Google Gears. 2008 may not be an exciting tech year. There could be much iterbore says Damien Mulley: “2008 is going to be the most boring year in tech ever. Everything is about iteration. Yawn yawn yawn.” Damien could be wrong and he knows it. The subject of his post is “Complelety Wrong Predictions for 2008.” Writers Strike: We certainly hope that WGA writers is ancient history by the end of 2008 but it looks like lots of reality tv shows is a given for at least the first few months of 2008. The number of scripted shows remaining is quickly shrinking. The striking writers have won the battle for public opinion but the AMPTP is still holding out on cutting a deal. It has been depressing to watch but there have been a couple postive signs. The fact that some of the networks are already losing ad revenues is a sign the networks may need to return to the bargaining table. The Worldwide Pants side deal was also a positive sign. Despite these positives some analysts are saying the strike could last until the SAG’s deal with the AMPTP expires in June. NewTeeVee has some thoughts on the strike from insiders here. Ongoing updates on the strike can be found here and here. At least the strike brought us the Writer Boi video. Online Video: That there will be continued growth in online video was a sure thing even without a writer’s strike. That there is a battle over it between the writers and the giant media companies is a good example of just how important web video is. There will be serious growth in online video in 2008. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb sums it up this way: “Online video will become so ubiquitous, including live and mobile, that everyone will wonder how the internet existed without it. It won’t feel like a big deal, though.” NewTeeVee has some short video interviews about what will happen in the online video world this year. Marketing Shift thinks 2008 will be a big year for Joost. Paris Lemon expects Flickr to launch a video service this year. Download Squad offers five video predictions including one that Seesmic will die. Mike Elgan is forecasting a 2008 Beijing Olympic Disaster. B.L. Ocham predicts that social networks will turn to subscriptions starting with small fees. “The fees will be small, but they will replace conventional advertising as a revenue model.” Rev2.org kills off some 2007 buzzwords including AJAX, The Long Tail and Folksonomy. Economy: A lot of how 2008 goes depends on what the economy does. There are some indications that the economy in 2008 might be unfun and possibly even scary. See here, here, here and here. Some of these stories contain the dreaded stagflation word. If these dour economic forecasts pan out than we could lose some of our social media friends in 2008. At a minimum there are likely to be many more Web 2.0 shutterings in 2008 than we saw in 2007. Blogs: AdesBlog.com is predicting a slow down in blogs about blogging and blogs about making money online. DailyBlogTips sees some consolidation in the blogging industry in 2008 but expects “2008 will be another big year for blogging and new media in general.” Rex Dixon predicts there will be less blogs. Facebook Fatigue: Facebook ended 2007 by finally allowing users to turn off the invasive Facebook ad beacon. John Batelle doesn’t think 2008 will be kind to Facebook. Business Week is also forecasting Facebook fatigue. WebMetricsGuru predicts the continued growth of content aggregators. The more content there is the more we need tools we need to filter it so that we do not become overwhelmed. Green: There is no reason why green won’t get even hotter in 2008. Especially if tech companies can come up with green ideas that also save you money. GreenTech Pastures has some green predictions for the new year. Digital Urban predicts the launch of Google’s own Virtual World system. IP Democracy has a useful table that provides summaries of sixteen prediction articles. The Crunchies has a “Most Likely to Succeed” category. Companies listed include Kayak, Mint, Slide, Wordpress and Zivity. Robin Good has a two part predictions post that covers a number of subjects. His predictions include an increase in live-blogging and online collaboration tools. He also predicts that some small publishers will move away from Google AdSense. Twitter. Twitter is the still the leading microblogging service even though Google now owns Jaiku. One of the trends that emerged in 2007 with microblogging was a drop in blog posts. On this blog there were less posts in 2007 than in 2006. It’s easier sometimes to do “hey look at this” type entries on Twitter than to write up an entire blog entry. Some bloggers are predicting Twitter will be acquired in 2008. It will be interesting to see what happens. A good question is When will any of these microblogging services ever let you host your microblog account on your own domain? Maybe that will happen in 2008. Celebrities: Unfortunately, you should expect more celebrities to find themselves in the gossip blogs in 2008 for not wearing underwear or for getting a DUI. There are some forecasting celebrity turnarounds for a couple of 2007’s troubled female stars. One blogger predicts a big turnaround for Britney Spears. Defamer has excerpted some celebrity predictions from this ET Online article. If these predictions are accurate then it looks good for Lindsay Lohan from July onward. Epicurious says farmers will become the new celebrity chefs. Can’t really see a Top Farmer show but the networks may try anything if the writer’s strike continues much longer. Celebrities will also jump to online video even more in 2008. Trendwatching has a prediction post that includes some acronyms and phrases you may not have heard of like premiumization, nethoods, MIY and crowd mining. Start using some of these terms early in 2008 and you might be able to fool people into thinking you know a lot more than you actually do. Still need more predictions? Try a search on Google News or Technorati for predictions and you will find many. There’s a few hundred 2008 prediction videos on YouTube as well. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

Hammer Time: MC Hammer to Launch Video Sharing Website
Here’s a new web launch that didn’t make anyone’s list of 2008 predictions. The BBC is reporting that MC Hammer plans to launch a video website that will challenge YouTube. The site will be called DanceJam and will let people share dance videos. Famous in the early 1990s for his hit song “U Can’t Touch This” and very baggy trousers, Hammer is launching a website that hopes to rival YouTube. Due to debut later this month, DanceJam will allow users to share and watch their own dance videos. If the website is a hit, it could help Hammer’s finances – he went bankrupt in 1996 with debts of almost $14m ( 7m). The BBC article says the website will launch later this month. It will be advertising based. MC Hammer reportedly told the AP that he is well informed on Internet technology. Hammer said, “”There is no high-tech lingo or business strategy that you can talk that is above my head. I breathe this stuff.” There is truth behind his bold statement. MC Hammer has been actively blogging at mchammer.blogspot.com since he launched his blog in February, 2006. He has blogged about the power of blogging to connect with others. YouTube is likely too large and powerful for even the Hammer to overcome but he may be able to get something going with a niche video sharing website. Posted in Videos Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

Britney’s On-Set Visit to Mom
Spears smiles and waves for the cameras after handing her mother a reportedly upsetting letter. Plus: Paris Hilton, Katie Holmes and more

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 5:04 am and is filed under Celebrity Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.