According to a report from Time magazine, President George W. Bush has raised more than $500 million for the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Texas. Loosed from the constraints of campaign finance laws, Bush was able to raise more money for the center than he raised during either of his presidential campaigns.

Mark Langdale, the president of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, told Time that half the money will pay for the construction of the building, which is located on the campus of Southern Methodist University (SMU). Other portions of the money will go to SMU and the U.S. government, while the remaining portion will be used to fund the George W. Bush Institute. Landale stated that the institute will contribute to “advancing freedom and the principles that have guided President and Mrs. Bush in their service to their country.”

The George W. Bush Presidential Center is scheduled to be dedicated during a ceremony on April 25.

Though all of the clips shown in the ad are from public appearances, it seems that not everyone is happy having their words used to promote marriage equality.

Laura Bush has requested that the organization remove her image and words from the ad. The Dallas Morning News has quoted a Bush family spokesperson as saying that Bush “did not approve of her inclusion in this advertisement.”

The coalition has responded quickly to Bush’s request, and issued a statement to Politico stating their disappointment that she did not want her words in the ad. The organization has instead released a new ad that depicts a former Marine Corporal and his wife speaking about their support for gay marriage, and how their thoughts were shaped by learning the Marine’s brother is gay.

She is, and she recently joined Cyndi Lauper onstage for a rendition of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, along with St. Vincent and Alexis Krauss from Sleigh Bells. The performance was for a benefit for Lauper’s LGBT youth charity, True Colors Fund, and as is everything that involves her, it was awesome.

Apparently Saturday night was a good night for collabs, because Bush teamed up with Gwen Stefani for a rendition of their old hit, “Glycerine”. If this was the mid-’90s, my head would be exploding. As it is, it’s fairly rad. Check it out.

The video was captured by blogger Jim Hoft of the Gateway Pundit. Hoft isn’t fond of Barrack Obama and apparently the TSA is all his fault, even though the organization was signed into law by George W. Bush as part of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act. The organization became a part of Department of Homeland Security in 2003. “It’s an Obama world”, the blogger writes.

Though no history about this particular woman has been released, 1 out of 6 American women have been the victim of sexual violence in their lifetime. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a common diagnosis among victims of sexual abuse, causing victims to relive the experience in situations that may induce these flashbacks.

Whether or not this woman falls into this category is unclear, but 1 in 6 is a hard figure to ignore when you consider the amount of women being groped daily by the TSA. What better way to fly than to relive a past traumatic experience? Thank you TSA.

See Also:

Search for Barack Aboma in Google and you will get a "Did you mean: barack obama" suggestion, and the top 2 results for Barack Obama:

Search for George Busch and you won’t get any suggestions:

You will just get stuff like Bush getting a shoe thrown at him and "George Busch is a Fascist" t-shirts.

This has led some to speculate that Google is showing its political bias. Top executives with the company were very open about supporting Barack Obama during his presidential campaign. Eric Schmidt even appeared in Obama’s 30 minute infomercial. This surely only adds to the speculation.

"So what is this all about?" asks someone under the handle Discovery on Search Engine Watch’s Forum. "Obama who Google endorses has all negative pictures, negative sites and negative videos completely removed and his self promoting website put in their place while at the same time George Busch has every single nasty photo, nasty attack site and video presented with NO alterations by Google’s editors to direct searchers to what they deem a more relevant site?"

Is this what is really going on though? You may get the suggestion of a correct spelling with "Aboma," but there are still negative results in the "Aboma" listings. Stuff like "Will Barack Aboma Try To Destroy America?" Further more, if I search for George Bushl, I get a suggestion for "George Bush" and his top 2 results, which are links to his Wikipedia page and to the White House. And the George Bushl results aren’t that bad either.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, who  makes it clear he doesn’t think Google is doing any biasing, thinks it is more a bias of the American people and the results are simply a reflection of that. "But is there more going on?" he asks.

Perhaps Google just doesn’t have its algorithm fine-tuned to eliminate political bias for every possible misspelling of every possible search. And frankly, they’ve probably got more important issues to worry about than providing the best results for erroneous searches. I personally would rather see them continue to improve search for correctly spelled queries.

Tradition and Transition

A controversial Washington Post article discusses the state of the technology situation in the White House as the Bush Administration moved out and the Obama Administration moved in. The article takes the angle of the Obama crew being forced to step back into the "dark ages" and use "old software" and Microsoft instead of Mac, disconnected phone lines, etc. Obama’s team were using Gmail addresses because their new white house addresses had yet to be set up. An Obama spokesman said it was like "going from an Xbox to an Atari."

Perhaps that’s just how it is. "The White House itself is an institution that transitions regardless of who the president is," says David Almacy, Internet Director under the Bush Administration. "The White House is not starting from scratch. Processes are already in place."

"Bureaucracy is nonpartisan," he says. "Moving 3,000 people out and 3,000 people in is a Herculean task." That is worth considering when it comes to the phone lines, email addresses, etc. Although one might think they would have had plenty of time to get this worked out by the time the new President was ready to take office.

As far as the technology itself, a lot of people around the Internet are taking the stance of "welcome to the real world". According to a Fox News article, "the White House has everything a modern corporate office would — Windows XP, BlackBerrys, Outlook e-mail, plenty of laptops and lots of flatscreen monitors and TVs." Owen Thomas at Valleywag had an interesting take:

Guess what? Outside the Manhattan media bubble and Silicon Valley’s startup cube farms, this is how most Americans work. Want a Macintosh? Sorry, IT hasn’t approved it. Oh, you need to use Facebook to interact with customers? Sorry, that site’s blocked — and management suspects that "social media" is a buzzword which means "getting paid to waste time chatting with friends." Want to use some new blogging service? Fill out this three-page questionnaire about the site’s security practices, please.

This is not a story about digital pioneers getting cast back into the Stone Age; it’s about a privileged elite learning how the rest of the country has to work. Those "six-year-old versions of Microsoft software"? That must mean Windows XP. If you haven’t noticed, most people still prefer XP over Microsoft’s clunky, buggy, annoying new Vista. Here’s a suggestion for the Obamans: Stop whining about the tools taxpayers have paid for, and get to work learning how to cope with what your employer gives you, just like the rest of us.

But still, you have to think the people behind a Presidential campaign that was practically built on using technology and highlighting tech policies might have some kind of grasp on the reality of the situation. The real issue is where technology and security clash with each other, and speaking of Herculean tasks, how about staying transparent and completely secure at the same time?

Security

The national security agency added special security software to Obama’s blackberry so that he could continue to use it. "This means Obama can continue emailing routine and personal messages that will become part of the public record," says Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm. "However, some of the more ‘fun’ functions of a smartphone, such as IM and those requiring GPS functionality, won’t be available for his use. So far no data channels appear to be secure enough for Top Secret emails."

You’ve probably read about how the Obama administration cannot use Facebook, instant messenger clients, and outside email accounts. How will this kind of stuff affect the transparency that the Obama administration is trying to maintain?

Transparency and New Media

If you were expecting to be updated from the new staff via Twitter, you might want to read this story. A fake White House Twitter account has been posting presidential updates, but beware that it is not coming from the real source.

Everybody knows by now that YouTube videos are one way Obama intends to remain transparent. He and his staff frequently communicate with the people through them. Some questions have been raised about why YouTube is getting preferential treatment, however.

The Privacy Policy at WhiteHouse.gov depicts very strict rules about using persistent cookies on government sites, YouTube is apparently exempt from this because they want to be able to embed YouTube videos on the site. Some are wondering why they don’t just use their own video service. "The U.S. should be able to stream videos through its own service at this point without making YouTube its default online video service," says Frederic Lardinois at Read Write Web.

It’s only been a few days since the inauguration though. There are certainly kinks to be worked out. Interestingly, the new administration has unblocked Google from crawling info on the White House site. Previously there were a lot of pages being blocked that were available to the public anyway.

Open Source and Changing Tradition

The new administration may not have been thrilled about the state of the White House’s technology, and there may be certain aspects of it that just can’t be sacrificed, but that doesn’t mean that change isn’t an option. Already Obama has shown an interest in open source. Sun Chairman Scott Mcnealy says that the President has asked him to author a white paper on potential benefits to the government of open source solutions.

"The government ought to mandate open-source products based on open-source reference implementations to improve security, get higher-quality software, lower costs, higher reliability–all the benefits that come with open software," says McNealy as quoted by BBC News.

He also says that the CIO should have "veto power, the right to eliminate any hardware, software or networking product that touches the federal network…He or she would have real power, real oversight and employ real consequences for folk that don’t realign with the architecture. It’s what every business does that the government doesn’t."

From the sounds of it, change is definitely in the air, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has witnessed a single iota of what the President’s campaign has been about. However, that doesn’t mean that change doesn’t come with restrictions, and compromises are going to have to be made. Transparency and new media efforts will not be able to work without the security needed to protect the country.

I’m only saying that, aside from entries and edits made to more clerical and administrative areas of Wikipedia, "W." leads as the topic of choice among editors and writers there. Jesus isn’t even second; he’s in third place, behind the United States.

Perhaps, "less agreeable" is better than "popular."

According to the stats provided by Wikipedia, over 32,000 edits have been made to articles about George W. Bush by 3,622 users, doubling the number of edits made to entries about the U.S. with 16,594 from 2,320 users.

As for the Prince of Peace, the Wonderful Counselor, God With Us? Seems there’s less to quarrel with. Only 1,747 users have made 15,286 edits to articles about Jesus.

At least he trumps the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict (14,287 edits) and his, well, antithesis, Adolf Hitler (14,287), who edges out World War II in general (14,033), RuneScape (13,155), Hurricane Katrina (12,754), and Nintendo Wii (12,465).

Ah, the things humans will argue about.

Those are overall numbers since Wikipedia’s inception. Here are the top 25 most edited articles as of March 2007 (the latest numbers Wikipedia made available):

1.    300 (film)
2.    George W. Bush
3.    Deaths in 2007
4.    PlayStation 3
5.    Wikipedia
6.    Essjay controversy
7.    Harry Potter
8.    Eminem
9.    Battle of Thermopylae
10.    Borat
11.    Conservapedia
12.    United States
13.    American Idol (season 6)
14.    Grand Theft Auto IV
15.    World War II
16.    Saint Patrick’s Day
17.    Beyonce Knowles
18.    WrestleMania 23
19.    McDonald’s
20.    Kobe Bryant
21.    2007
22.    2007 Cricket World Cup
23.    Christianity
24.    Jesus
25.    American Idol

• your own experiences – how you save time, your favorite work tips, things that slow you down, interactions with others, how your perspective has changed over time, etc.
• encourage readers to ask you questions – use a button like this one, and run open threads where you answer questions
• find common questions in forums that are typically poorly answered – why doesn’t Google show all my backlinks and why hasn’t my PageRank changed? etc.
• common misconceptions in your marketplace which are spread as fact – new websites can’t rank, etc
• interview other experts, create interactive contests, offer awards, etc. – these touches the ego of others and uses their reach to help market your site
• bring back old classics that are not talked about too much in the current marketplace and compare them to the current market. You can’t go wrong bringing up Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, Bush’s As We May Think, Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons
• show how your topical language has shifted – compare news from the 1950s to today, there are many stories from the 1980s and earlier which are easily accessible via Google News, but have not been pushed heavily on the web graph
• compare information from different formats – blogs, magazines, books, dvds, conferences, stuff in Google Scholar, etc.
• content behind firewalls – bring these ideas into the active parts of the web
• find ideas that were popular and spread on other networks, seamlessly aggregate the best parts in a new way which allows the structure to add significant value
• parallel markets – read information from other markets and relate it to your current market

Comments

 Don’t worry, he doesn’t list all of them there. He does, though, if you like learning the origin of phrases, go into where the phrase "There’s no such thing as a free lunch" comes from.

The most popular of the free queries were searches for free games, music, and ringtones. Well, that’s the family friendly version.

The Skinemax version is that most of time, freeloaders are looking for sex, sex stories, sex videos, and sex pics. These may also want to do a search on "free virus protection," while they’re at it.

If memory serves, though, free ringtones, games and wallpaper are dangerous queries, too.

As you might expect, free shipping is most popular around the holidays, and free games, chat and movies are more in demand during the lazy summers.

Here are a couple of other idiomatic origins, just for good measure:

You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
 

U.S. Broadband To Reach 86 Million Households

The report "US Broadband Forecast, 2007 to 2012: LECs Maintain Advantage over Cable Operators in Quest for New Subscribers" says that because of high-speed service there will be close to 36 million new broadband subscribers in the next five years.

"Price reductions are responsible for driving take-rates for DSL services offered by the incumbent local exchange carriers, while higher broadband transmission rates and attractive bundles are driving consumer adoption of cable modem service," said Doug Williams, Analyst at JupiterResearch.

"As broadband becomes more attractive to consumers from an economic perspective, current dial-up users will be more likely to migrate to broadband service, and consumers who are new to the online population will never take dial-up service in the first place."

JupiterResearch estimates that the 33 million dial-up Internet households will drop by more than two-thirds by 2012 but that the market for dial-up service will not totally disappear.

"Despite moderating growth for broadband services, significant market opportunities for broadband service providers still exist," said David Schatsky, President of JupiterResearch.

"Cable operators and local exchange carriers will remain the key market participants, while alternative broadband service providers will continue to struggle to integrate into the mass market."