blacksundae

The campaign didn’t customize heavily and it didn’t look for bleeding edge technology. It used the same stuff the rest of the blogging world does–Movable Type, PHP, MySQL with a dose of community. The competitive advantage came from using social networking to “empower a highly decentralized, largely self-organizing, network of volunteers,” reports Carr.

[...]

Can these systems hold up in a general election? Carr noted that data management will become a problem for Obama now that his campaign will have to hook up with the Democratic national campaign. One software and quality assurance pro said that she sees flaws in the Obama systems that could become a problem in the general election. The biggest issue: The campaign switches between two or three different systems to track voter contact. Bottom line: Data integrity will be an issue.

But like any other startup, Obama’s campaign will have to figure out how to scale quickly and handle peak loads.

Obama: the Twitter of candidates? Read on. [via YatPundit]

This is just about the only way I could ever keep plants alive (I have what you might call a black thumb). [via osen]

“We have some people at Google (who) are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale,” Page said to a packed Hilton ballroom of scientists. “It’s not as far off as people think.”

Read on. [via 901am]

Fortean Times:

October 1853, on a hilltop in Lynn, Massachusetts, a group assembled to create the New Messiah. They had not come to pray or to praise God: they were actually going to build Him out of metal and wood under the supervision of spirits. When the body was complete, they believed it would be infused with life to revolutionise the world and raise mankind to an exalted level of spiritual development.

The spirits gave their instructions through John Murray Spear, a former minister of the Universalist church and recent convert to spiritualism. Born in Boston in 1804 and baptised by his namesake John Murray (the founder of the American branch of the Universalist church), Spear has been described as a “gentle, kindly, ingenuous” man who possessed a beautiful simplicity and an idiosyncratic mind 1.

Read on. He sounds like he was a really cool guy before he went bat shit.