On a historical day in the history of this nation, much of the talk in the tech blog world was about how Robert Scoble, a prominent tech blogger, lost access to Facebook while testing a beta version of Plaxo pulse, which is a script that will allow you harvest contact information of all your friends to store them elsewhere. Too see how many other bloggers beside Scoble that covered the story, just Google "Robert Scoble and Facebook." I was really disappointed to find the day of the Iowa primary this was much of the talk in the tech blog world. The result of this presidential election will affect the future of the Internet will greatly affect the future on the Internet and how technology as a whole will be viewed/used in this country and by the government. Aside from TechCrunch, none of these other tech bloggers have interviewed any of the dozen of presidential hopefuls on either side of the isle. If these candidates can pander that to every other constituency in the country to get their vote, why isn't the geek community, with the exception of the Google, Microsoft and Yahoo of the worlds, also demand the attention of the future president. Net Neutrality, Identity Theft, Use of voting machines, How to address the technology divide in our public school system, media consolidation, upgrading federal government IT infrastructure are just some of the few issues that the next president will have to address. Without the bloggers and the rest of the tech world exercising any pressure or forcing the candidates to be better educated about these issues, big tech companies will be only ones to have a say on how these issues unfold.
Moreover, since this election has be dubbed the "technology election", I would imagine on the day of the first caucus the tech blogging world would be a conversation about creating objective measures that could be used to examine exactly what affect technology will have and has had on the election. More frustrating than not being able to vote in this election, to no fault of my own, is people squandering the opportunity to bring important issues to the light before it's too late. Today's coverage of "Scoble-Facebook gate" was would be equivalent to something like CNN covering Britney's latest night of debauchery instead of covering Bhutto's assassination.
Sorry Scoble but I really don't care that Facebook banned you for breaking the rules that you agreed to uphold in the first place.
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