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In important ways, this is really the first digital presidential campaign, and the news about Sarah Palin provides some thought-provoking examples.

First, the McCain campaign explains that the disclosure of her daughter’s pregnancy was required to dispel the wild rumors being circulated by liberal Internet bloggers about who was the mother of her own four-month-old. Someone needs to trace back who started this on the Internet. I quickly looked at the Daily Kos and both the rumor and skepticism about the rumor are discussed there. (By the way, wouldn’t a birth certificate have sufficed to put that rumor to rest? But I digress.)

The official reaction of the McCain campaign is that this is the sort of thing that happens to families. Some conservative columnists are turning this news into another way in which the Republicans can identify with ordinary Americans. That is post-Internet Republicanism. At another time, they surely would have done there best to hide it.

But you can’t hide stuff any more, as we repeatedly explain in Blown to Bits. Not your silly college-dorm photos (that’s Sarah Palin looking like the college student she was, with a T shirt that reads “I may be broke but I’m not flat busted”). Not the Facebook silliness of the boy who got your daughter pregnant (from the NY Post; thanks to Richard Bradley for point this out). We are all silly when we are young, but having all the silliness permanently recorded and universally accessible is something new.

The spread of this kind of stuff can be childish and mean. It raises the question of whether McCain’s staff was aware of the Internet materials like these that turned up very quickly after the announcement of his VP pick.

But the exposure of these personal details does seem to be making politics less distant. This campaign has so much else going on with it that it’s going to be hard to separate out the effect of the Internet from other factors. But it seems certain that politicians are going to be unable to be quite so pretentious in the future. Too much will be known about them too quickly — especially if they, like Sarah Palin, were born after 1960.

And the public is going to have to decide what it thinks about the disclosure of things it rarely used to find out about. As we say in the book, we really don’t know what we think about privacy any more.

We explain in Blown to Bits that bits crossing entering the U.S. are, under U.S. law, subject to inspection by federal authorities. No matter whether they are in a laptop (see earlier post about new border procedures) or in a fiber optic cable. So the U.S. government claims the right to read the email your daughter sends you while she is in Toronto and you are in Detroit.

According to John Markoff of the New York Times, this law is one of the reasons that Internet traffic is increasingly bypassing the U.S. entirely. Since this is where the Internet started, the U.S. network used to be a kind of hub for the rest of the world; no longer.

It’s not the only reason — there are more Chinese Internet users than American now, so of course it makes sense for other countries to build up their communications infrastructure for purely economic reasons. But this may be an early example of the U.S. driving business away by its incursions into what we used to think of as private information.

I expect that sooner or later some business executive from a friendly foreign country will have his laptop seized and searched at the U.S. border, along with documents of great sensitive value to the business and of no significance to the war on terror. The incident will cause a stink that will lead international executives to suggest that their American counterparts come visit them abroad next time, rather than expecting foreigners to subject themselves to data disclosure by visiting U.S. soil.

September 22 is One Web Day. I’ll quote from the web site to explain it:

OneWebDay is an Earth Day for the internet. The idea behind OneWebDay is to focus attention on a key internet value (this year, online participation in democracy), focus attention on local internet concerns (connectivity, censorship, individual skills), and create a global constituency that cares about protecting and defending the internet.  So, think of OneWebDay as an environmental movement for the Internet ecosystem. It’s a platform for people to educate and activate others about issues that are important for the Internet’s future.

Lots more information on the site, and suggestions of things to think about and to do.

Now here’s a curious example of web-enabled science that would have been impossible a decade ago. A group of German scientists has discovered that cows tend to orient themselves toward the North or South pole. So do other animals. They figured this out by looking at hundreds of herds in Google Earth images. No explanation offered of how or why they do it.

Nor is there any mention in the summary of whether the cows opted in to this study or even were given a chance to opt out.

We talk a lot about how digital technologies are improving, and in particular making it possible to do automated language-processing tasks that used to require human intervention. A couple of nice examples that the technologies are not perfect yet. First, a reminder that automated language translation still requires human checking, especially if the output is going to be publicly deployed:

Or this attempt at automated cake decoration, which triggered an error message in the decorating software:

Thanks to Adweek for the restaurant sign and to Livejournal for the cake.

That’s the name of a “crowdsourcing” Web site, whoissick.org. It’s a work in progress, so slow, but go try it. You type in a zip code and you find out the symptoms of people in your neighborhood. And the data comes from you too; you submit your observations of your own symptoms, or those of someone you know. Weird. The origin tale is peculiar too — the site’s creator waited with his sick wife for four hours in an emergency room, only to be told that she had the same symptoms as lots of other people in the area. He wouldn’t have bothered if he knew what was going around.

The site illustrates two developing trends. The ease with which mashups can be thrown together (including this one, from the Huffington Post site, with wonderful depictions of your neighbors’ political allegiances, drawn from public databases). And the ease with which we can now try to channel large numbers of voluntary, amateur observations into widely useful knowledge.

We have a short piece on the Business Week web site today about things to consider before storing corporate data in “the cloud,” that is, using a service such as Google or Amazon to hold your files for you. The piece got edited in a way that is a bit disappointing, since it left out one of the crucial points we wanted to make:

Who would fight a subpoena? With your data in the cloud, the cloud’s lawyers, not yours, will decide whether to resist a court order to turn over your data.

It actually seems that they ran the version they gave us for review, without incorporating any of the suggestions we made in response — for example, we pointed out that the sentences identifying the authors are ungrammatical.

Definitely Slydial. It’s a free service that enables you to leave a message on the other party’s voicemail directly, with no possibility you’ll get an actual human being instead. The site shows a bunch of uses for this, for example

You go to a week long convention for work in Las Vegas and blow $5,000 the first night at the roulette table. You need to call your wife and tell her why she should hold off on making the monthly mortgage payment. Her voicemail will be much more understanding then she will.

You are working on a dozen different projects and have as many calls to return. Instead of being stuck on the phone with just one, leave each a voicemail with an update and you may just have enough time to enjoy Happy Hour.

Is this a great country, or what?

Well, probably not the worst ever, but for 2008, terrible.

My crime? I forgot that my username was case sensitive. I typed it in lowercase rather than mixed upper and lower, along with the correct password.

No wonder people hate computers. This is a major financial services business. When the Web was young, and people were having their web sites coded by their 16 year old children, customers might have put up with that sort of indifference and hostility. No more. I am closing my account — or will, once I get the paper form I need to fill out.

I spent the last week on Harvard business on the west coast, and managed to work in talks about Blown to Bits at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Hal joined me at Google, and at Amazon I proudly showed off page 180, where we asked the question, “Does Amazon even have a physical location?” (This is part of the explanation of why public key cryptography is so important, as it enables strangers to agree on an encryption key without meeting.)

I then headed for the hills of northwest Montana to hide from it all. I stopped at a market to pick up the local paper, which usually leads with a story about bears or shootings or the water level on the lake. Wouldn’t you know it, this week it’s a bits story.

“Virtual High School closer to reality at BHS,” goes the headline. Bigfork High tends to lose top students to the bigger district in Kalispell, where they can take more advanced courses. This year they are going to pilot¬†Virtual High School, a Maynard, Massachusetts-based initiative. (If they can get past the various teacher and curriculum certification hurdles.)

Educational technology has had so many failures over the years, starting with educational TV in my youth, that skeptics about Internet-based education should be forgiven. But good for Bigfork for giving this a shot. It may well prove to be the equalizer that rural school districts need, a germ of Internet-enabled enlightenment — and with gasoline more than $4/gallon, a smart way to deliver information to the people rather than transporting people to the information.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that “Sen. Obama is a supporter of legislation that would guarantee ‘network neutrality.'” Sen. McCain reportedly prefers a “market-based” approach, meaning that he opposes neutrality rules. We all love markets, but ask yourself how much a market there is in broadband services where you live. About half the country has zero or one choices, and virtually all the rest at most two, DSL and Cable. Hard for the free market to operate in a monopoly-duopoly world. In the absence of real broadband competition and consumer choice, the service providers have to be regulated to prevent them from using their carrier power to dictate content.

The story reports that Obama has reassembled some of the Clinton telecomm brain trust, including Reed Hundt, who had nice things to say about Blown to Bits. I suppose McCain just asked Cindy? (See the earlier post, McCain and Google.)