Known for his hip-hop rants and pranks on Lady Sovereign, Jelly D has now come out with a new video to promote voteforchange.com.

One of the last projects I worked on at BBH/NY was to help the Commission of Presidential Debates figure out how to have an online presence for the upcoming presidential debates. MySpace became a partner for the project, and they recently launched MyDebates where you can review issues, watch video clips or watch the debates live. Once you log onto the site, you can even submit a question for the Town Hall Presidential debate between Obama and McCain, which is being moderated by Tom Brokaw on October 7th. This is a great way to include the questions from a wider community for the Town Hall session. Submission deadline is by October 3rd.

My friend Zeb decided to create a special video that shows how I’m an up and coming candidate for president. I must admit that the email I got from him was pretty compelling, with the following vague text:

Hey Amanda,

I went on this online community thing and everyone was talking about you… what is going on? There’s even a video about it on News3Online. www.News3Online.com

Let me know,
Zeb

and the linked video was fairly well done, but a bit long. I’m still not sure exactly who did this, or why…

Ken Auletta’s article on Google in this past week’s issue of The New Yorker is worth a read for a couple of reasons:

• It goes into depth about Google’s increasing involvement with politics (net neutrality, lobbying, etc.)
• It talks about an elegant concept of “crumbling cookies” that Google has been experimenting with in response to an increased concern regarding privacy and longevity of personal data online.
• It gives an inside view on how Sergey, Larry and Eric work together to drive the corporate strategy for Google

I was checking my Gmail account today when a little text ad appeared on the top of the page:

I rarely click through on ads that I see, text or banners, but for some reason this one caught my attention, so I clicked through to see a site that is selling two children’s books, one titled Why Mommy is a Democrat and one titled Why Daddy is a Democrat.

Here is an example of one of the pages from the books:

I guess I’m a skeptic at heart, but when I first took a look at the site I thought surely it must be some Republican joke targeted at Democrats, like those books that explain why Mommy or Daddy is gay. But apparently these are simply children’s books about being part of the Democratic Party.

I still think it is weird that we need books that explain politics in this way to children (and it definitely reeks a bit of discomforting propaganda - it assumes a universal underdog stigma is attached to being a Democrat, something I’d expect more of someone writing a children’s book about the Green Party, for example), but I definitely give props to the author for his creative use of Google AdSense. I clicked through.