Tag Archives: 2008

Election Day 2008

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Election Day 2008

Voting is still underway but the outcome is already clear – Obama will win our US presidency by either a modest or large number of electoral votes and probably about 54% or more of the popular vote. Many Americans are breathing a sigh of relief that the outcome today is clear and uncompromised by the many flaws of our counting system.

Election and electoral irregularities, negative campaign strategies, and the flaws of Democracy aside, all Americans should be very proud that our nation will once again make our qaudrennial peaceful transition of executive leadership from one administration to another after a national vote.

The Obama victory, combined with large gains in congress for the Democrats, will likely be viewed for centuries as one of the most significant transformative events in American history. This will be one of the largest swings from “conservative Republican” to “liberal Democrat” leadership in all of history.

In a decision based overwhelmingly on political rather than racial considerations, Obama’s rise to the US Presidency will also demolish the pervasive-but-misguided mythology that has suggested for over a generation that America could never transcend our history of prejudice and elect an African American to the highest office.

Yet Americans can transcend the challenges of our past.

We just did.

2008 will see a tidal wave of social online activity and applications

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My prediction about the evolution of the internet in 2008 is that we will see a lot more excellent applications like Flickr and Picasa to store, organize and share stuff as well as a lot more Twitterfeeds and Tumblrs which allow you to more easily share and assemble content you have stored or created elsewhere.

I don’t think there will be more huge breakthroughs in search or social applications, rather we’ll see people increasing and refining their use of social applications (and to a lesser extent search aps) and we’ll seee a huge number of new programs arise to accommodate the tidal wave of online social activity.

We’ll see blogging go much more mainstream and probably show signs of levelling off in the affluent world as those of us who are compelled to write all get blogs.    People in tech who like to write already have blogs, and people out of tech who like to write are mostly in the process of “getting blogs”, and I mean that in both senses of the word “get”.    In the developing world, with the advent of One Laptop Per Child and other great technology enabling projects, blogging will begin to take off in extraordinary fashion as everybody with something to share will soon have the means to … share it with everybody.

These are exciting times for those of us fortunate to be on earth and online.   Let’s not screw it up, OK?