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.

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.

Ya, I quoted my own joke for this post. That’s my privilege. Suck it.

This could practically be a twitterverse blog for all of the Twitter-related posts, but damn this thing is exploding. At this rate, I’ll be telling my kids about being an early adopter of Twitter almost a year before today, in April 2008.

As if prophetic, last Friday Jeff Cannata, (@jeffcannata) co-host of the Totally Rad Show, made the following comment during his review of Watchmen: “We won. We as geeks have officially inherited the earth.”

Now to find out whether that will lead to our savior or our doom. Cannata’s co-host Alex Albrecht guested on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday, with co-host of this other show, Kevin Rose, of Diggnation. Alex, Kevin and Jimmy decided to do a little experiment while taping the show at around 6:15 EST. They instructed their followers, of whom they have many hundreds of thousands between them, to follow @bryanbrinkman, an animator living in New York. At first sight, after their announcement, he had 196 followers. Within an hour he had over 8,600. It’s still climbing, and the show hasn’t even aired yet. That’s a small fraction of any of the experimenters’ numbers, but certainly one of the fastest rates in Twistory. Colbert Bump, eatcherheartout.

Everybody in their circle, from the show’s writers, to Quest of the Roots, to Evan Williams, founder of Twitter, were RT’ing the instructions to follow Bryan within minutes. My favorite quote of the night was Quest’s tweet during the taping: “Russ Brand needs jesus.” Jeff Cannata was collecting evidence of who bought bryanbrinkman.com. They may have just launched Bryan’s career instantly, before the show was even broadcast. That remains to be seen, yet it demonstrates yet another unforeseen use of Twitter that Evan Williams and Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey hadn’t expected.

So what happens when Twitter starts mutating out of the founders’ control? Spammers, hackers, phishers and the like have all hit Twitter, but to little success. It would appear that Twitter as a service has such clarity of purpose and simplicity of architecture that its only weakness is the server crush of its popularity.

Kevin, Alex and Jimmy’s hype power proved finite, at least, as they still couldn’t break the trend that penalties had caused in Europe during an Arsenal futbol game. That could probably change when the show actually airs on the east coast, followed by the west and the remainder of the world online, but it’s still just late night – Jimmy’s ratings are doing well but the numbers for late night aren’t all that great. Still, it’s an ideal audience for Kevin, Alex and all of Revision3 to promote Diggnation, especially by piggy-backing the Twitter explosion. I’m more interested in seeing how mainstream the Rev3 stars will become after Late Night airs.

I’ll update this post after watching the show air tonight at 12:30 AM PST.

[UPDATE]

Well it wasn’t quite as wildly hilarious as I’d hoped, but it was still the highlight of the whole show. Catch a clip:

The rest is on Hulu. The Wall Street Journal picked up on the trend with an article titled “Diggnation and Jimmy Fallon: The New Conversion.” Crazy. There was no wiser decision ever made than to pair these two brands up to promote each other. Brilliance in promotion and marketing at hand.

Most users have known Twitter’s breaking-news capability is almost immediate, ever since the Mumbai attacks of November ‘08, but mainstream media is slowly catching on. Proven again tonight, Twitter is the first on the scene for breaking news, at least in first-world countries. But in the latest major Twitter-trending incident of a plane crash in the Netherlands, was it a Twitter user who actually broke the story? Did it complement the accurate reporting of the incident or hinder/compete with it?

Just minutes after the crash of Turkish Air Flight 1951 at Amsterdam’s Schiphol International Airport, @nipp was… tweeting, from the scene. (There really should be a more serious term for that when the event might involve numerous deaths) It was 10:39 AM local time.

One of the earliest tweets I can find on the incident was at 10:32 AM local time, from user @M0rrighan, simply: “airline incident at Schipol airport.” (As roughly translated from Dutch) No info on where she heard it – although I can try to ask when the dust around her settles. User @lrs later posted one of the first photos by @diederikm as he was driving by. @nipp, who I’m assuming was living, driving or working nearby when the crash happened, was within “a few hundred meters” of the downed plane. First reactions were that the plane looked “shredded” and in “very bad condition.” Ambulances didn’t arrive until minutes later, and clearly nobody could’ve gathered any details before the initial tweets started rolling in. @nipp claimed he could see nothing from his viewpoint, and called bullshit on channels like CNN for reporting any figures on casualties.

But sure enough, as is the inaccurate nature of any breaking news, seemingly sourceless figures were streaming in. Initial reports from @BreakingNewsOn, which appears to be an independent start-up, claimed “dozens dead and injured.”

The claims from other users later narrowed to 7 deaths. Nearly an hour later, the figure fluctuated from 7 to 9, to none.  Media outlets like the BBC were attempting to gather facts, but they were sourced from eyewitnesses who claimed to see “bodies under white sheets.”  We may learn our news from the Twitterverse first, but the facts we accept are still confirmed by journalists. I doubt the twitterverse will mature to the point that it is independently confirming information with officials like a traditional news outlet, but the community has surprised us before.

By now it’s hard to tell who was the first to actually post news of the crash, how they heard about it, and how the news spread through the twitterverse. At the time of reporting, @nipp was a relatively low-key user, with only 30 updates and a few dozen followers. (At the time of posting he now has over 700) So even if he was the first on scene, we could assume the people who would’ve seen his first report within the first few minutes of the incident must have been few. Location-based features may have contributed to his tweet’s spread, as his message at 10:36 AM was soon RT’d by users like @jaapstronks, who currently has 1,485 followers. If he had nearly that many at the time of the RT, @nipp’s exposure may have exploded. @BreakingNewsOn caught onto the story and sent their first tweet to their 28,384 followers at 10:46 AM, a full seven minutes later. It appared to be another 10 minutes after that before we started seeing Breaking News scrollers on the BBC News site. So it’s unclear whether the twitterverse actually broke the story, but at least the news reached thousands more people in Twitter, in the same time it took for major media to post the news on their sites.

The twitterverse did gain some more mainstream recognition for its reporting. WCVB Boston posted a brief story soon after details emerged, crediting Twitter users as being first on the scene:

“A photo shown by the NOS showed the plane in three pieces in a muddy field. It doesn’t appear that the plane caught fire after the crash. Allowing anyone who could to simply walk out the holes in the plane. Passengers and passers by used Twitter to report the crash and upload pictures moments after it crash, long before local media.”

@nipp, at least, was impressed.

Soon after his reporting, @nipp claims to have received numerous calls from TV and radio stations, proving Twitter first-responders can be valuable assets to the media who track Twitter trends.

The functions of the twitterverse in the news cycle are manifesting constantly. It’s a great tool for eyewitness reports and gathering quick community opinions – see the anchor I love to hate @ricksanchezcnn for more on that – but can the twitterverse ever really be the first on scene? In other words, if a tweet is posted on the interwebs and there are only a few dozen people to hear it, how long does it take to… make a sound? Perhaps not long at all. It’s the accuracy that hinders Twitter from growing independent from traditional news sources. If anything, Twitter is still a complement to major media, not a competitor.

No reliable facts could be compiled from rampant re-tweets, or even @nipp’s eyewitness reports after hundreds of emergency crew members descended on the crash site. So that value of speed is circumstantial – hearing unconfirmed reports about a plane crash 4 minutes earlier than normal probably won’t change anything, perhaps least of all cable news ratings. For now, we’ll still have to rely on traditional media entities for our facts, and holistic interpretations of news stories.