These are just hilarious. I love these guys from the Muppets. Hrmph is my favorite. Hat tip: Althouse

Hrmph

Meh

Mmph

Blech

Today must be cool tool Tuesday. Doing my normal perusing of the blogs/web sites I follow I found a bunch of cool new stuff. Links below. Have fun!

Firefox 3 Download Day: Today Firefox is launching Firefox 3 and they're trying to set a record for the most number of downloads in a day. I downloaded the beta this weekend on my new mac and so far love it.

Wordle: Make fun word art out of a block of text. It sees what words you use the most and arranges them in a cool word cloud. Here's one Turk at KungFuQuip made.

Hippopost: Courtesy of TechCrunch this new start up lets you send postcards to your friends through Facebook for free. They put an ad on the postcard and that's how they make money. Put some thought behind this and this could be huge for the political direct mail world.

Sims Carnival: Make your own flash game from Sims. Sweet.

Finally, if you use Twitter click here to see what newspapers are Twittering and who's popular and who's not.

If you're a junkie of politics and the Internet then make sure not to miss this new study from Pew today about the 2008 Election and the Internet.
Some key findings from Pew:

A record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others.

35% of Americans say they have watched online political videos a figure that nearly triples the reading the Pew Internet Project got in the 2004 race.

10% say they have used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved. This is particularly popular with younger voters: Two-thirds of internet users under the age of 30 have a social networking profile, and half of these use social networking sites to get or share information about politics or the campaigns.

6% of Americans have made political contributions online, compared with 2% who did that during the entire 2004 campaign.

Jon Henke writes on The Next Right about Obama's integrated new media marketing campaign and how a member of Obama's staff will call up an online donor right after they've donated to ask why. Then they'll blog about it, etc.

It's a great exercise to do and one we did somewhat on Giuliani. Doing mini survey's of your online audience doesn't need to be that hard either. One thing we did was put a form on our donation thank you page asking folks why they donated. A lot of folks responded and gave us some good insight into what made them hit that donate button. The same could be done on an email sign up thank you page or even an online survey using poll daddy. It's something campaigns should be doing more of. It's easy and cheap to do and can give you anecdotal information basic analytics can't.

I agree with Patrick Ruffini about the right blogosphere's attacks of my.barackobama.com and it's detriment to our party moving beyond the play-it-safe web campaign. Micah Sifry with TechPresident also has a must read about the new political organization Obama has built up.

Earlier this week I finished reading the expanded edition of Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. It's all a part of me trying to learn more about how corporations are using new media, the successes and failures they've had and how I can use those in my job.

If you're already an internet guru the practical lessons in this are going to be ones you already know and the wealth you'll find in this are the case studies you can use when making that argument to your boss or client that they shouldn't ignore new media. The book can get repetitive at times and you'll find yourself saying, "Yeah, I get it." But soldier (or flip) through for the examples.

If you're not an internet guru, but know that the internet is something not to be ignored and aren't sure how to start. This book is a good one to add to the reading list. It's more conceptual than the book Managing Your Online Reputation, so it's not going to give you step by step instructions on how to do things. But Wikinomics will give you a good idea of the steps companies are being forced to take to compete and stay ahead of the curve these days.

Thanks to Jeff again for sending on another interesting story. This time from the Atlantic Monthly on Obama's unprecedented and impressive fund raising apparatus and how he might be this year's hottest start up in Silicon Valley.

This story from Advertising Age is a great case study of how to use social media to your company's benefit. This past tax season H&R Block cast a wide net with with "MySpace and Facebook profiles, YouTube postings, a Twitter account, widgets and even a virtual tax office in Second Life." They said that in the end doing these things "produced a 171% lift in internet ad awareness among the targeted audience and an overall brand awareness lift of 52%." All of that return for only 5% of their marketing budget. Pretty good return if you ask me. Now if only we could convince politicos on the GOP side that it's worthwhile as well.

Congrats to Mike Allen and the Politico and Yahoo! for snagging the first interview meant exclusively for online viewers with the President.

So apparently YouTube was down this morning and no one knows why. Google and YouTube ain't talkin'. I had no clue until I finally connected myself to the interwebs this afternoon and had my twitter a flutter and blog posts abound about the tragedy. It's back now, but does this worldwide outage represent something to the effect that Google is in fact human, makes mistakes, and might not be the best out there on everything?

Don't get me wrong. I love the Google. I use Google for most everything (except reader, for some reason could never get into that. I like bloglines instead.) However, as Mashable pointed out, YouTube was down, people were panicking, but there are alternatives out there people. In fact, when it comes to online video quality, YouTube is far behind. I prefer Blip.tv for a good video player and nothing beats UStream.tv for livestreaming. Plus Blip and UStream have no time restraints, which I also love.

This event may just end up as a small little blip in the empire that is YouTube and Google. But I think it's a sign that eventually people are going to realize the Google giant has flaws too and hasn't been improving as fast as everyone else. Especially on the online video front. And they may start to go look elsewhere. Just like what is happening to Microsoft with more and more people cozying up to their shiny new macs.