While I do have very distinct political views and opinions probably stemming from my undergraduate political science background, I try to keep them from influencing my blogging preferring to keep my focus intellectually and technologically focused. However, ever now and then I come across something too good to pass up that allows me to talk about politics from a completely intellectual and/or technology-related perspective. This is one of those occasions.

My co-workers and I were discussing the Democratic National Convention and the closing event held last night one topic that arose was who John McCain would select as his running mate. For one reason or another we ended up going out to McCain’s website and we noticed something interesting (at least for a bunch of web application developers) and it’s a true study in contrast. If you take a look at McCain’s site in IE7 and Firefox 3.0.1 you will notice a pretty extreme contrast, especially when compared to Barack Obama’s First, here are screenshots (from today) comparing the two sites in the two different browsers both running on my Windows XP machine.

First in Firefox 3.0.1

Obama - Firefox 3.0.1 - Resized

McCain - FF3 - Resized

Now in IE7

Obama - IE - Thumbnail

McCain - IE7 - Resized

Notice how poorly McCain’s site renders in Firefox?

So what does all this tell you about the two candidates? Maybe something, maybe nothing. For me it tells me that Barack Obama has more astute developers who made sure that his site was usable and visually appealing to users on all platforms and all browsers. McCain’s not so much. Upon looking more closely at the two sites I also noticed that Obama’s site is written in PHP and MySql (both open source technologies) while McCain’s is written in Microsoft’s .NET (hence the .aspx extensions). The lack of support for open source technology by McCain and the use of it by Obama makes me think that one candidate is simply more in touch with technology (and probably has better technologists on his campaign staff).

So while this is a totally random and not related to anything scientific or definitive I think it is a perfect study in contrasts for our Presidential contenders. What other lessons can we glean from this? Especially from an association technology perspective?

Hat tip to my friend and fellow blogger Maddie Grant for pointing this effort out to me (here and here). I have been keeping close tabs on the emerging disaster brought about by an obscure federal panel that ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies since the beginning, but it’s looking especially grim now. For organizations like Pandora, the price would be crippling and as a result they may be forced out of business simply due to the cost of doing business and providing a very valuable service while absolving traditional radio from the fee.

It’s a bad situation in general and even worse if you are a proponent of freeing information like I am. Take a look at this article: “Giant of Internet Radio Nears Its ‘Last Stand’” to get the background and then do your best to get involved and make some noise about this. And if you want a cool badge or banner to show your support you can find them at I Heart Pandora.

Information wants and needs to be free and it also needs our help to make it/keep it that way!

So what do the three topics listed in the title have in common? In a nutshell: there is a whole lot going on with each. Beijing appears to be prepared to host the Games of the 29th Olympiad. For a great slideshow on Beijing and China in general, take a look at this:

The Olympic opening ceremonies have already begun and here in the states we will get a chance to see them tonight at 7:30 PM (EDT). For a sneak peek take a look at the photo gallery on NBC. I’m not normally a huge Olympics fan, but I do enjoy watching the events and hearing about the competitors and what they had to do to reach this elite position in the sporting world. Of particular note I am keeping a very close watch on Dara Torres, the 41 year old swimmer (50m free, 4×100m free relay) who is making a comeback after shoulder surgery. Torres is already the oldest swimming gold medalist, and she could raise that record from 33 to 41 by winning gold again in Beijing. She is also the oldest American swimmer to qualify for the Olympics and the first to make five teams. Pretty amazing story.

For those of you who are really “into” the Olympics, here are a few video sites worth keeping an eye on:

• The Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games - Videos
• CCTV.com - Official Internet/mobile phone broadcaster of the Beijing Olympic Games
• NBCOlympics - Official US online broadcaster of the Beijing Olympics
• International Olympic Committee’s cahnnel on YouTube™
• Universal Sports YouTube™ Channel

I will also be watching cycling a bit more closely than usual - road, track, mountain, and BMX - and pulling for some hometown favorites: Bobby Lea of Topton, PA and Giddeon Massie of Bethlehem, PA, both of whom are track cyclists. I wish the two of them and all of Team USA the best of success in bringing home the gold for the US.

Internet

A rather obscure fact but nonetheless worth mentioning, the idea of networking computers is 40 years old this week, marking the delivery of the technical paper which coined the phrase “packet switching”.

Donald Davies was working at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex when he delivered a paper in August 1968 which detailed how distinct packets of data could be sent over public telephone and later dedicated networks. Davies then set about actually building what is claimed to be the world’s first local area network (LAN) at the NPL, which consisted of approximately half a dozen nodes each with three or four machines attached.

Additionally, 17 years ago, on this week (August 6) in 1991, Englishman Tim Berners-Lee, an independent researcher at the CERN institute in Switzerland, published a summary of the World Wide Web project and this date was taken as the day when commercial Internet (WWW) became available to the public. The project started out as a philosophy stating that scientific information should be available to everyone. The goal was “to enable the exchange of information between internationally dissipated groups and spread information among support groups”, Berners-Lee wrote in his summary.

Pretty exciting stuff, especially considering how entrenched the Internet has become in our daily lives.

Me

Finally, with regard to where I have been and what I have been doing, all I can say is that I have been exceptionally busy and in the midst of some significant changes. Many of you saw my tweet stating that I had left PMI and begun a new gig this week. That’s part of the story and I will dedicate a full post to where I have moved to and what I am doing. As for the rest of my activity, most of it is related to Jeff DeCagna’s recent blog post. If you haven’t see it, you can read it here: Ready or not….

More to come soon. I promise. Until then. Happy Friday!