Why do I bring all this up? Because New Media Strategies (where I work and whence I type) has teamed up with Tropicana (the orange juice makers, not the casino resort) to create a Twitter-focused data visualization tool that we’re calling Fresh Squeezed Election Tweets, and just went live a few moments ago at www.anorangeamerica.com:

The site is continuously collecting tweets using the words “Obama” and “McCain”, counting up which other words appear with them — Vote, Election, Country — and other words that appear frequently — Bush, War, Lie (no one said Twitter was fair and balanced) — and representing this frequency by the size of the associated blue-red bubble. The bluer it is, the closer-aligned the keyword is with Obama; the more red, the more it’s McCain. And see the black lines connecting? Those show you which words are used together most: if you mouseover the keywords, you’ll get actual percentages. Did I mention it’s embeddable? I don’t think I did. Here, let me: It’s embeddable.

Is that cool, or what? Feel free to use it in your own posts and check back throughout the day, as the data set changes and perhaps reveals some insight into the day’s events. We might already have a pretty good idea who will be president-elect by day’s end, but Freshly Squeezed Election Tweets may help give a better idea why.

I thought so, until this dropped into my inbox a few hours ago:

Wow, Limited Edition Fleece Blanket? This must be my lucky day!

Seriously, what on Earth is Mitt Romney doing asking Republicans, who could give money to John McCain’s campaign the RNC, to give it to himself instead? If you’re a committed Republican, what’s the most responsible thing to do in the next few weeks: Give money to put television ads on the air in Michigan Iowa, or add this comfy blanket with snazzy carrying straps to your collection of campaign-branded political paraphernalia?

But wait, it gets better. Did you see the last line of the e-mail in the image above? Here it is again, for those of you who dislike squinting:

It is more essential than ever that conservative candidates and organizations have the resources they need to get their message out to voters, and that is why I am writing to you today.

I think we can safely consider this Romney’s retaliation against McCain for picking Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Updated, minutes later: Wow, what timing — as I was writing this very post, another e-mail landed in my Gmail account. And it looks like someone else had the same idea:

What’s her excuse? Romney did it first?

P.S. At least Romney got a crummy, non-prime time speaking slot at the RNC. Hillary can’t say that.

Luckily, this past week, he did. Whereas many Wikipedia editors announce that they will be on leave and then continue to edit, this guy took his vacation seriously. And from what I hear, the Europeans do take some long vacations.

So if you’ve never seen this tool, I thought I’d take this day of much discussion about Sarah Palin and Wikipedia to compare two snapshots of Henrik’s tool for the main Sarah Palin article. First, the chart for May. Each bar represents one day, and the number with each counts raw page views. So how many views is that?

35,563 total. Not bad — in fact, that’s more than twice number of page loads at Tim Pawlenty’s article that month. I am not, however, suggesting we start using this like a futures market; the tool is highly sensitive to news articles that will send droves to Google with a particular keyword in mind, and then many of them to Wikipedia. So how many visited Palin’s article in August?

Notice how you can’t see those bars almost at all until the spike at the end of the month? Some of those slivers toward the end are 14,000+ views. The biggest day was somewhere around 2.5 million, for a total of 4,220,407 views for the month. Barack Obama’s page received a relatively meager 1,377,462 page views for the entire month (if only this tool had existed when Obama announced in Feb. 2007) and John McCain’s page received an even smaller 988,944. And both presidential nominees received a significant boost that day and for a few thereafter. How about Joe Biden? Better than the top of each ticket, but still about half of his rival undercard. This proves nothing except that Sarah Palin’s entry into the race drew a tremendous amount of attention, but we already knew that.

Now that the tool is back, I will plan to make use of these charts every once in awhile. Close readers will wonder if this is the Wikipedia feature I hinted at a few months ago, and others may wonder if I’ve given up on writing All the Rage for this month. The answer to both is no, so hang tight. As to whether this blog is now simply about Wikipedia… the answer is I don’t think so.

For 168+ hours now I’ve been working literally around the clock — to be more accurate, one revolution of the hour hand each solar day — finding and spotlighting blog posts from national and state-level media and political blogs, and running a Blogads campaign involving changes to the artwork and copy reflecting each evening’s developments (I like how it’s rendered on BuzzMachine best). I’ve also done C-SPAN TV twice, sitting on the back of my sport coat, focusing just beyond the camera lens, depending on the bug in my ear for cues, reporting on the latest buzz from the left- and rightosphere from the offices of New Media Strategies.

This week my role shifts, and in a dwindling few hours I’ll be flying to St. Paul, Minnesota for the Republican National Convention. As the NMS Blue Team returns from Denver, the Red Team will be shipping out to the metropolitan area where the Coens’ Fargo mostly took place. I travel both in my capacity as a representative of C-SPAN at the convention as well as an official, RNC-credentialed blogger, so I will do my best to share the experience with you.

This will be a new thing for Blog P.I., but a second time for me as a blogger at a GOP convo; in 2004 I was part of Hotline’s convention team in New York City, and I blogged the convention in my off-hours. Then, I took some pictures with my crummy first-ever Sprint camera phone, most of which were uploaded to a server I long since forgot to pay for. This time I’ll be blogging it here in this space, using my iPhone camera and WordPress app, available free of charge from iTunes (which by the way now is really crying out for rebranding).

For the next five days or so, I expect to be taking photos and posting them with minimal presentation, reserving most of my reporting and commentary for a widget from my Twitter account, which will appear here shortly. This is basically the opposite of what Blog P.I. has been in its two years-plus existence: whereas my blogging has primarily comprised several times-weekly essay posts (such as this one) I will instead switch to frequent, quick-hit posts that will take you inside the moment (I’m pretty sure I can do this).

If you’re going to be in the Twin Cities this week, gimme a shout (see the contact page). If you know me from e-mail or the Blogometer or Blog P.I. and want to say hello, drop me a line. If you know of a party, breakfast or similar event that’s either open-invitation or you can extend one, consider me interested. Need a mug, thumb drive or baseball cap emblazoned with the C-SPAN logo? We can probably work something out.

And but so, I’ll get back to packing a week’s worth of my least-unprofessional attire and making sure I don’t leave anything behind, with the DVR playing the Oregon Ducks’ 44-10 victory over the (Huck the) Fuskies as I close up shop here and make my way to the Lesser White North.

More coming soon.

What I can offer are details about the Convention Hub microsites. There will be two, one for each convention, with video and blog coverage around the clock:

• C-SPAN will provide exclusive video from the conventions, and for the first time, this C-SPAN video is searchable, clippable and embeddable. As someone who has tried (unsuccessfully) to jerry-rig an embeddable C-SPAN video in the past, this is a huge leap forward.
• NMS will feed the latest convention reporting and blogging to the Convention Hub pretty much non-stop. Or as our official language puts it, “extensive real-time blogosphere coverage using NMS’s proprietary combination of software and trained human analysts.”
• More about that software another time; all I can say is that it answers the questions I’ve asked about such analysis tools.
• The Hub will also include Twitter feeds of users using the hashtags #RNC08 and #DNC08 (and surely other tags, as their usage rises).
• The site goes live at c-span.org/politics later this month. The Democratic Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/DNC08 and the Republican Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/RNC08.
• NMS will have a presence at each convention to help to facilitate coverage and promote the Convention Hub. It certainly doesn’t hurt that we have bloggers credentialed to both (see you in St. Paul).
• There is more, but I’m not exactly sure what I didn’t see in the press release that’s public, so I’d better hold off for now. At the moment, this is the only public hint on c-span.org:

Meanwhile, the C-SPAN Convention Hub is already drawing praise from one of C-SPAN’s (few) notable critics. The Sunlight Foundation has differed with C-SPAN before over distribution of copyrighted C-SPAN video, so they are enthusiastic about the open nature of the Convention Hubs:

The convention announcement marks a new moment for C-SPAN as a modern Internet information provider. Once a small cable channel with a dream; now with embeddable web video, Twitter hashtags, and aggregated blog posts.

As a longtime C-SPAN junkie, I couldn’t be more proud to play a small part in this project. How dependent am I on the C-SPAN network?

• I wake up to Washington Journal every weekday morning (my Twitter account will bear this out).
• Before I found podcasts, I’d listen to streaming Realplayer segments from the program (I still listen to the podcast of Brian Lamb’s Sunday night Q&A).
• Back in college I would sometimes wake up early (4 a.m.) to catch particular episodes live, such as the first of the Hitchens-Sullivan conversations with Lamb, shortly after 9/11.
• If it’s the weekend and my television is not on baseball or football, it’s on BookTV.
• The tagline of my personal blog, The Washington Canard, is: “Where C-SPAN is the local TV news.”

The good news is that it’s a supportable addiction.

And by way of conclusion, a confession: I want this searchable video for my own reasons. On Election night 2004, The Hotline worked all through the night covering the coverage, as the election tipped from Kerry winning the exit polls to Bush winning the popular vote. If you’ve seen my Facebook photo, this is where that crazy image comes from.

As usual, C-SPAN cameras were in the office for Chuck Todd and Vaughn Ververs to offer recaps, also deep into the morning hours. Sometime around 3 o’clock in the morning, I informed friends watching the coverage from back on the West Coast to look carefully: As the cameras rolled, I picked up a plastic trash bin and… well, I danced through the background.

The waltz, I think.

I entered left with vulcanized dance partner, twirling across one shoulder, behind the talking head, past the other shoulder, exiting right. To this date, it’s still my best television appearance. And I look forward to the day, much sooner now, that I can embed this on Blog P.I.

I think the only reason there is any controversy is because the first quoted passages, about Georgia and Christianity, are obviously very similar. They are also very short. And in all three examples, the text is purely expository: none of it expresses any thoughts, feelings, emotions or other content that would be an obvious case of intentional plagiarism. Additionally, it’s worth noting that historical facts cannot be plagiarized, only their expression. If there is any here, it’s probably inadvertent.

Meanwhile, consider that plagiarized text is almost always longer than original text. This is because the original writer is likely to state things in as few words as possible while the plagiarizer is trying to hide the origin, which means more words. But here, the McCain speech text is shorter in the second and third examples. The second example is the most alike, as ThinkProgress highlights, but the phrases in common are themselves quite pedestrian, and the other word choices are rather different.

The biggest blow to the plagiarism charge, however, is that the third McCain section actually contains information not in the Wikipedia version. The McCain version notes that Mikheil Saakashvili is a “U.S.-educated lawyer”, but this is not in the Wikipedia passage. Sure, this information is available from Saakashvili’s article, but if that’s the charge, I think the McCain campaign can rest easy. Pretty soon they’ll be accused of doing actual research.

I think that about covers it. Of course, if the campaign did plagiarize it, at least Wikipedia is released under a free public license. And as one Wikipedia editor puts it on the Georgia talk page:

Well, at least we’re being useful to lay readers, rather than specialists; and the extracts appear to be factual…

Update: Keith Olbermann just mentioned the “plagiarism” accusations on Countdown a moment ago, so this just might be the next “100 years” claim (which, curiously, I never seem to hear about anymore).

I might as well get this out of the way: I am not actually about to eat the viewer. It just looks that way.

The following is based on one brief passage from “Up, Simba!”, Wallace’s not-so-brief 2000 Rolling Stone article about his time aboard the Straight Talk Express with the “anti-candidate” and the traveling press corps, recently republished as a short book with the dreadful title “McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope”²:

So Where’s Murphy?

That is to say, why has former McCain strategist Mike Murphy not yet joined John McCain’s presidential campaign? Because Kristol is talking about it, it seems like everyone else is talking about it, but nobody is talking about where Murphy has been recently.

Or where he may very well have been. That would be the Weekly Standard’s blog, where a pseudonymous contributor named Richelieu is thought to be Murphy by several writers in a position to know (or at least fairly suspect) that this is so.

This makes it all the weirder for Dean Barnett, also of the Weekly Standard, to write today at the very same blog:

In the New York Times today, Bill Kristol speculates that Mike Murphy may be about to ride in on his white steed to save the McCain campaign from itself. Maybe he’s right.

Looking through the archives, it turns out that Richelieu has not contributed a post since late June. After several months (since October 2007) of frequent posting, Richelieu’s output slowed to a crawl in mid-May and had nearly ceased altogether by early June.

Mid-May was also about the time where Obama’s nomination finally appeared to be inevitable, and early June was when Sen. Clinton finally dropped out. So did Murphy hang up his pen name just in time to be available to offer his services to McCain? It looks like we just may find out.

Update: Apparently not? Mike Murphy has signed a deal with NBC.

Four years later, some on the left are doing the exact same thing to John McCain. The Politico has already taken note of two in particular. One is Gen. Wesley Clark, who is likely to get some major press coverage. Less likely to generate interest offline, but still likely to be influential, is this John Aravosis post:

Honestly, besides being tortured, what did McCain do to excel in the military?

It’s not “nice” to ask the question, but it’s actually a pretty good question. … A lot of people don’t know, however, that McCain made a propaganda video for the enemy while he was in captivity. Putting that bit of disloyalty aside, what exactly is McCain’s military experience that prepares him for being commander in chief? It’s not like McCain rose to the level of general or something. He’s a vet. We get it. But simply being a vet, as laudable as it is, doesn’t really tell you much about someone’s qualifications for being commander in chief.

One might think that Aravosis would think twice about taking this line of attack, considering his support for John Kerry in 2004. On the other hand, AMERICAblog spent most of that year trying to make President Bush sound like a deserter. And in fact, Aravosis has been pushing this McCain-is-not-a-war-hero line for awhile.

But let’s answer the points Aravosis avoids: McCain spent more than a half-decade as a prisoner of war. Significantly, he refused an offer of early release in 1968, remaining behind with his fellow POWs and denying the North Vietnamese a propaganda victory (McCain’s father was a four-star admiral leading the U.S. Pacific Command).

Meanwhile, Aravosis portrays John McCain as participating in a propaganda video as if McCain did so of his own volition, rather than being held captive. To the contrary, McCain often made trouble for his captors — cheering the bombing of the North with his fellow soldiers — and spent significant time in solitary confinement. I don’t refer people to Wikipedia as a matter of course, but these sections are very well-supported, and the bibliography is a credible one.

Meanwhile, based on the comments to Aravosis’ post, it sounds like McCain’s critics are likely to try pinning the 1967 USS Forrestal disaster on him as well. Oh, and there’s this lovely comment:

HOW ABOUT A LITTLE WATERBOARDING FOR THIS CLOWN

Meanwhile, Aravosis’ 2004 candidate was “merely a vet” who spent just four months in combat, gave time to slanders against his fellow soldiers and whose convictions on the Iraq war developed late, at best. But I don’t want to argue about John Kerry; that may be the point. In fact, Barack Obama’s lack of a military record is an unlikely plus: he grew up at a time when military service was neither obligated nor obligatory.

Aravosis’ post by itself is deliberately inflammatory and poorly reasoned. Alone, it wouldn’t demand a response. But with liberal 527s outspending their conservative counterparts, it will be very interesting to see how far Obama supporters pursue this line of attack in the coming weeks and months.