As President Obama spoke at an unprecedented Town Hall in China, he fielded questions from students in the room and from submissions sent online, opening up on his thoughts on everything from terrorism to what it takes to affect global change. One question stood above the others in its meaning...

I moved to California in 1995. Within a few months, I was versed in some of the problems in the state, such as homelessness in Berkeley, tight budgets in the University of California system, and soaring real estate prices vs. rent control problems.

One day, I was driving across...

For a while now, cybersecurity has been a buzzword used in hopes of making national computer network security sound sexy, but there's been little legislative backbone behind measures to support federal departmental efforts. The position touted as Cybersecurity Czar has been fraught with problems in both the recent Bush administration...

I recently read the book Womenomics, by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay, which focuses on how women can take charge in the workplace and negotiate for more intangibles that we need in order to balance our busy lives. I was excited to see what these two seasoned reporters would...

President Obama announced the creation of the White House Council on Women and Girls on Wednesday, to "provide a coordinated federal response to the challenges confronted by women and girls." It's a great step, recreating an office that existed during the Clinton administration but was dissolved under Bush. But the...

As the tech community poured over the new whitehouse.gov site, one of the first subterranean changes noted was that of a file most people would never notice called robots.txt. This file serves as a notice to search robots informing them of what files they should or shouldn't survey....

Since Howard Dean's unprecedented fundraising success online in 2003, a lot of speculation has gone into how the technology of the Internet might transform politics and when we might have our first "Internet President." Over the course of the 2008 election, we witnessed a phenomenon that could never have occurred...

The bottom line: vote early, request a paper ballot, and report any problems immediately. HAVA (the Help America Vote Act) -- well-intentioned legislation meant to prevent the voter problems from 2000 of repeating -- gave too much power to technology, has been poorly applied and the results are mixed....

I couldn't have been more geeked to receive a tweet via text to my iPhone yesterday morning from 'BarackObama' announcing the launch of the campaign's official iPhone application, 'Obama '08'. Thanks to the Twitter-SMS combo, five minutes later, I had downloaded the app and begun using it. I was...

Live blogging debates has become commonplace, finely tuned in the stream of primary debates. This week, bloggers are taking it up a notch with social networking and video tools. Virtual debate-watch parties just got easier. Twitter and Current TV are working together to tweet the debates on TV....

The hacker group 'Anonymous' claims it broke into Sarah Palin's private Yahoo! email account and published it on the Web to WikiLeaks early Wednesday. The Wikileaks postings include screen shots that show lists of e-mail subject lines, specific messages, and photographs of Palin's family as evidence of the validity...

In response to an Obama campaign ad that reminded viewers of John McCain's computer illiteracy, bloggers circulated reports that war injuries may prevent the Republican presidential nominee from using a computer keyboard.

On Friday, the Obama campaign's new ad called "Still" criticized McCain for being "out of touch" and...

Internet watch dogs have sniffed out an online snafu in terms of Governor Sarah Palin's biographical credibility. According to a story that broke on NPR Friday, 30 "favorable changes" were made to Palin's Wikipedia biography. The changes, discovered by a Wikipedia editor, and laid out side-by-side on a...

First to know? Not quite. The best new media campaign in history botched their attempt to keep a lid on the VP pick in order to announce it via text messaging. It turned out to be just too difficult to keep quiet. However, although it was - technically speaking...

One day soon, we may wake up, bleary-eyed, before the morning coffee, to a message on our mobile device of choice: "VP 2 B Bayh" or some other similarly terse but meaty digital-era code. It may not pack the power of a rousing speech, but leave it to the Obama...

"Are You Pumped?" asks Exxon-McCain, a website dedicated to underlining John McCain's relationship with Big Oil, the latest in a series of sites that take aim at the presidential candidates. The DNC released Exxon-McCain Wednesday, posting video and text on the $2 Million in contributions "Exxon & friends" have...

Although hanging chads may be a thing of the past, concerns with voting machines and election processes more generally abound. Analysts say there remain significant problems, like a lack of paper records and audit trails, voting machine "sleepovers," prohibitively long voter wait times, and piecemeal government policies.

In...

One thousand women bloggers met in San Francisco this week for the annual BlogHer conference, while Netroots Nation was rocking Austin. The two things attendees most wanted to know were how to be successful in the political blogosphere and whether their candidates are up to the challenge.

Last year,...

It's like an LSAT question: if bloggers W, X, Y and Z from publications A, B, C, D, and E apply for passes 1, 2, and 3, the bloggers to receive the three passes must have Technorati stats equal to the circumference of the sun divided by pi times .003...

Picture for a moment what the official White House website, would look like with a President Obama at the reins: there would be the usual news, issues, photos, but also perhaps an interactive blog, a policy wiki, video feeds from meetings, a tracking tool to see whether we're on...