Barack Obama

Features

• 10 IT agenda items for the first US CIO

  Obama's appointment of Vivek Kundra marks an important first step for rectifying the nation's concerns about IT.

• Obama can't have a BlackBerry. Should your CEO?

  The press has been all over President-Elect Barack Obama's addiction to his BlackBerry and the possibility that he might have to give it up for reasons of national security. But no one in the media seems to be asking the most logical follow-up question: Is the cybertechnology that can compromise the future chief executive's BlackBerry also a threat to mobile devices being used every day by thousands of senior executives in corporate America?

• FAQ: Why Obama may give up his BlackBerry

  Could Barack Obama ever expect to continue using his BlackBerry once he officially becomes president?

• E-voting '08: Problems, yes, but it could have been worse

  Despite reports all day long about an assortment of e-voting machine problems in several US states, no massive systemic meltdown occurred.

• Hot search terms: Joe the plumber, 'lipness test'

  Google Trends provides some great insight into what people are thinking about, even if they don't always help us to understand what this insight means in terms of the candidates' positioning.

• Palin piques the blogosphere

  Blog mentions are, like search terms, something of a special case. They probably show the least conclusive representation of candidate support, because there is no way to assess whether such mentions reflect a preponderance of positive or negative evaluations of the candidates. Anecdotal evidence suggests that negative mentions of candidate A by blogs supporting candidate B, and vice-versa, are very common indeed.

• Friending Obama

  When you take a close look at the traffic patterns within the Web 2.0-based community, the popularity gap between the two presidential candidates increases. Obama's favored by a 4-to-1 margin compared with the 2-to-1 margin when we looked at other Internet Web traffic trends.

• US Election: What's in a domain name

  The tale told by other Internet traffic trends, also rings true when taking domain registration into account. Using DomainTools to query for domains, we saw 2,357 domains for Obama and 1,431 domains for McCain.

• Can the Web predict the next president?

  IT professionals have historically monitored network traffic patterns to better understand network usage, to expose security events, and to generally promote overall network health. Traffic analysis can likewise be applied to the Web to understand a wide range of behavior patterns ranging from social media networks to suggestion systems in e-commerce to even the current hot topic: the presidential race.

• Where the US presidential candidates stand on tech issues

  The 2008 presidential election gives CIOs and other IT executives a choice of two major-party candidates who are interested in technology-related issues. While the US economy and the war in Iraq have dominated the debate between Republican nominee Senator John McCain and Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama, they have also hit on such IT hot buttons as telecommunications and tech jobs.