Chris Cillizza with the Washington Post reports that the McCain web team prematurely declared debate victory in a series of web ads appearing all over the internet:

"McCain Wins Debate!" declares the ad which features a headshot of a smiling McCain with an American flag background. Another ad spotted by our eagle-eyed observer featured a quote from McCain campaign manager Rick Davis declaring: "McCain won the debate-- hands down."

See the screenshot!

Governor Tim Kaine  just announced that the government of the Commonwealth of Virginia will now host an ideas forum online for citizens and government to come together. This is a smart tool that is a giant leap towards connecting citizens with their government and vice versa through an online community. 

Take a moment to join the Virginia Idea's Forum and offer your innovative ideas to the commonwealth's leaders.

PS- This site runs on Drupal Content Management System! SWEET!

For days I predicted Obama would text message his VP selection during the hours of 11 AM - 4 PM EDT. My assumption was based on:

• A Text Message is similar to a telephone call and sending a text message before 11 AM EDT will likely wake up/disturb PDT supporters.
  
  
• After 4 PM you miss a lot of evening news opportunities. If I were Obama's campaign I would want CNN's situation room discussing my selection and not non-stop coverage of when the textmessage would arrive.

The Obama text message was received by most around 3 AM which raises a number of significant issues:

• "There was too much build-up for Biden," says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "He lacks a ‘wow' factor. I don't think anybody is bowled over after all this drama. And to have a text message go out and disturb many people in the middle of the night?" --  Campaigns & Elections
  
  
• "Barack Obama didn't pick Hillary Clinton as his running mate. No surprise here. But the timing of his announcement -- early Saturday morning at 3 a.m. -- has some in the Clinton camp downright angry." - Newsmax
  
  
• What precedent does this set for campaign usage of the text message medium? Will campaigns feel that procrastinating, postponing and pushing latebreaking news via text message at all hours of the night is socially acceptable?

Patrick Ruffini weighs in with:

"The bottom line: by stringing everyone along, Obama's camp waited too long," Ruffini writes. "They didn't coordinate the logistics of securing the nominee with the actual notification process." -- Campaigns & Elections

I concur. This whole process hyped and distracted Obama's campaign message and destroyed a very effective line of attack he had last week with McCain's housing debacle. Every minute spent speculating about Obama's text message on the evening news is a minute not spent discussing how out of touch John McCain is.

The SEO Blog has a great article on the Top 10 Fatal URL Mistakes and includes this great list of tips for doing URLs right:

 My 10 URL design rules are quite simple:

1. Make the URLs clean
2. Make them simple
3. Make a URL human and machine readable
4. Use one URL per page
5. No special characters besides a minus/hyphen “-” ideally
6. Use slashes like real directories
7. Enhance URLs with numbers but don’t rely on them
8. Skip the date, it’s not the most important info
9. Do not ever change URLs once set
10. If you have to change URLs move them with a “301 permanently moved” redirect

I'm on a search engine optimization kick as of late and this article from SmileyCat web design blog hits one of the important subjects in Search Engine Land: The Meta Description.

Certainly, the <title> tag, as it forms the clickable link for a search engine result, is key to get right.

However, the snippet provides an opportunity to deliver a targeted call-to-action to the searcher that supports and builds on the text of the main link. It can also differentiate your result from those around it.

Not writing a good meta description — one that at least summarizes the content on the page — means that you're giving up free traffic from organic search engine rankings.

Read More About Meta Descriptions

Josh Levy at TechPresident has this great observation on hits v. site attention:

Data digger Matthew Hurst has another update on Compete.com’s tracking of visits to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s websites. Starting with a deceptively simple chart showing that, since December, Obama’s site has received more traffic than to Clinton’s, he explores something more interesting. More people may show up at Obama’s site, but the trend has been to spend more time at Clinton’s. And Clinton also has a bigger share of “attention” — Compete’s way of measuring online engagement. It’s tough to say what this all means without analyzing more data, but while Clinton may not be scoring social media points, voters are getting deep on her site.

This makes a lot of sense to me as someone who spends a lot of time on the presidential candidate's sites looking for new ideas. Obama has a spiffy site and a trendy design, but it's really short on substance. Clinton's site, while conforming to traditional political styles is heavy on substance and innovative ideas. Yes I am biased on what constitute innovative ideas since I am a Clinton supporter, but take a look for yourself and decide which site is more compelling when reading. Content is King or in this case Queen!

Sad news today, my Microsoft Comfort Mouse is broken. My left mouse button sticks ever so slightly which for most people wouldn't be a big deal but in applications like Photoshop and Illustrator the rebound time of a mouse button is critical. With this in mind I'm taking this opportunity to upgrade my mousing technologies! The decision? The Logitech MX Revolution. Check out the below video and review.

You may know it from CNN's primary election coverage as the "Magic Wall", an 8 by 3 foot touch sensitive video screen. The magic of this video display is the ability to manipulate graphical information, scale, rotate and get the big picture of a concept.  According to a report from the NY Observer the jumbo pricetag on this jumbo technology is $100,000 with only a handful of units in existence.

This presentation format will decrease in price eventually and arrive in businesses, government, educational institutions and even the home. The beauty of this technology isn't that its a giant touchscreen, it's the ability to mashup data from multiple sources and form useful displays of information. The hand manipulation boosts our cognitive abilities to absorb and process this information into knowledge. 

Sean Hodge at PSDTuts has a practical guide to getting into the creative flow. I know from my experience there are times when its difficult to get the creative thoughts flowing from mind to mouse. Here's his four steps:

1. Create your optimal environment for working on your creative projects. For me it's my office, mine is like a cave, or a big closet. It's as removed as possible. Situated in a far corner of my house. That way external distractions are minimized and I'm able to focus.
2. Each day prioritize your tasks. Arrange them so that you have time to focus on the creative part of a project. Schedule this time of day during your peak performance hours. For me that's in the morning. Fully commit to this time. Turn off your email, your phone, and your feeds. Don't allow anything to break your concentration. Lock the door if you have to and turn on some music.
3. Start creating. Fully enjoy this creative time and be in the moment. Allow yourself to ignore your internal needs. Let time and worries drift away from your conscious. Focus deeper and become completely absorbed in your work.
4. Continue to push and challenge yourself in your work. If a problem presents itself that is to complex. Quickly break it down into manageable parts and keep working, keep flowing, and keep creating.

I recommend reading his full guide to finding your creative flow.