At noon today the Presidential website changed. The differences are not just cosmetic, but promise new priorities: communication, transparency and participation. There is now a blog with an RSS feed and a weekly video address. Under the hood there are big improvements in how search engines can access the site.
There is also an as yet unfulfilled promise to post President Obama’s Inaugural Address. You can read it or view it here, and compare it to the other addresses here or here.
Juan Cole’s insights into events in the Middle East and the Islamic world are informed by his deep knowledge of their languages, culture and politics. He reads and understands the Arabic language media and often can correct the simplistic picture of events presented in the American press. He is a professor of History at the University of Michigan and his historical perspective is at its most incisive today in showing the complex links between Martin Luther King, African colonialism and Barack Obama.
fivethirtyeight
Thank you, Al Franken and Norm Coleman. The election of 2008 continues into the new year and so does the best of the election campaign analysis blogs–fivethirtyeight.com. Nate Silver comes from the world of baseball statistics which gives him a fresh approach to handicapping elections. Today he has Al Franken up by the enormous margin of 252 votes, and predicts that things will continue to get bleaker for Coleman if more absentee ballots are included.
Apostrophe -- Bert Collins's Blog 