The pessimistic writer in me wanted to title this post “The White House wants you to think that it wants to know what you think.” But this vote at least appears to be a genuine effort to reconnect the government with the American people… even though it won’t actually solve any issues. There, got my pessimism in. More to come.

The White House has created a new sub at their web site called Open for Questions, where visitors can submit questions about the economy, and vote for questions already written. The most voted-on questions will be answered by President Obama personally, during an online townhall meeting at 11:30 AM EST, Thursday. So far, 58,788 people have submitted 60,901 questions and cast 2,308,620 votes. Nice idea to personalize the office of the president. No doubt the answers will be well-prepared, highly comforting, terribly vague and without actual action-items. Unfortunately all the web campaigns the Obama online team can think of won’t change that – it’s just how American politics work these days.

The structure is pretty much the same as Digg’s townhall webcasts, wherein users will submit and vote on questions, which are answered by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson during quarterly online townhalls. The difference here is that there are way too many questions for all readers to view, so once your question is at the top it’s pretty likely to stay there.

Submit your questions and votes by 9:30 AM EST tomorrow anyway. Who knows, maybe somebody will read it. The site will report back on how many votes and questions you submit. Note that you’ll have to create a WhiteHouse.gov account that requires your first name, e-mail address and ZIP code, which the White House will keep on record. Google will be hosting all of the questions and voting information.

[UPDATE] WhiteHouse.gov now has the full video of the town hall on YouTube:

What if PC and console gamers could be liberated from the cost of hardware upgrades? What if game publishers didn’t have to develop within the restrictions of console hardware and physical media? OnLive aims to do both with its cloud-gaming service, set to launch in Winter 2009.

Using a box about the size of a paperback book, or a lightweight web plug-in, OnLive will stream the gaming to you and do all of the processing at their three national data centers. That means you can play any graphics-intensive title (yes, including Crysis) on an HDTV or low-end PC or Mac. The demo above uses the OnLive box for HDTV play, a lowly Dell Studio 15 and a current-generation MacBook for laptop-based play. The only information that your home PC has to process is the 720p video it receives and the controls it has to send. Their box uses an HDMI and optional optical audio port on the back, and 2 USB ports on the front for game controllers or keyboard and mouse combos.

Of course, the crutch will be latency. OnLive claims to deliver video and control response at imperceptibly-low latencies, using 3 massively powerful GPU-centric data centers, on the west coast, east coast and midwest. Current broadband speeds in the US allow about a 1,000-mile range for the service. As fiber service expands, OnLive says its range will increase to about 1,500 miles, and can transition its services to the single data server in the midwest. In response to an Australian reporter during the Q&A session, OnLive also says they plan to expand their service internationally after the US market is established.

The last question in the demo was a great one: what about bandwidth caps? OnLive claims they’ve conversed with most ISPs and they’re “pretty good citizens.” OnLive is central server-based traffic, which isn’t the complex peer-to-peer cross-traffic that ISPs claim to have trouble managing. That doesn’t mean the traffic won’t count against users’ caps, however. OnLive requires a minimum 5 Mbps connection but they claim it usually uses a couple hundred kilobits at a time, putting usage well below caps. How quickly a beta tester will burn through their 250 GB Comcast cap is yet to be seen.

The service includes numerous other features, like community areas, multiplayer pairing, “brag clips” of your frags, renting schemes and real-time observation of your friends’ gaming. It’s all pretty slick, I recommend watching the demo to get the full picture.

More info is at www.onlive.com.

Artist: Army Navy

Track: Saints

Album: Army Navy

Discovered on:
KEXP Song of the Day

A pretty accurate portrayal of Twitter from a preview of SuperNews! on CurrentTV. I’m guessing they got most of the dialog from actual Tweets.  Sure, there’s lots of networking functionality in Twitter, but the vast majority of tweets are self-affirmation for people with nobody listening.

For those whose worlds just got crushed by this video, a word of advice: if you’re following 100,000 people, and those 100,000 people are following you back, then nobody’s actually reading what you say.  Stick to your own friends and follow a few influencers.

Part 2:

Part 3:

The recession backlash has been particularly articulate and harsh from the desk of the Daily Show, from which Jon Stewart has assumed his regular role of the people’s prosecutor. Here’s a bit of background on the event.

Over the last week, the Daily Show staff has brilliantly manifested a controversy between Stewart and Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money. The initial attack wasn’t anything unique to the Daily Show – Stewart just called out an offensive statement by CNBC’s Rick Santelli, who from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange basically said “to hell with homeowners, Wall Street doesn’t give a shit about you losing everything by investing with us.” That’s not an exact quote – you can see the original footage here. Santelli was invited to the Daily Show, but cancelled his appearance following the controversial statements. And then Stewart went off.

Stewart accused financial news networks, CNBC particularly, of kowtowing to the financial industry instead of responsibly reporting on its vast abuses of the people’s hard-earned money, which drove the entire globe into recession and may have wiped out the American dream for millions. Jim Cramer’s wild antics on Mad Money were obvious ammunition for Stewart, and so Jim Cramer became the personification of all that was wrong with the news networks that average American consumers go to for daily financial advice.

Always hungry for controversy, CNN, Fox News, and the entire NBC family – from the Today Show to MSNBC to CNBC itself – leaped at the story head-first, without really looking toward the end-game. And we all know the networks don’t have the wits to stand up to Stewart, his writing staff, and their massive underground bunker of TiVos. Cramer defended himself on all of the NBC networks, calling Jon Stewart the host of a “variety show,” which just fed Stewart more material. What a bunch of predictable suckers. The Daily Show carried the “feud” on every episode for the next week, until it finally came to a head last night, as CNBC got its due via Jim Cramer himself.

So will it change anything? I’m hoping to catch Cramer’s Mad Money tonight at 3 PM PST on CNBC, to see if he makes any statements, or even apologies on behalf of the show and his network.