Mark Zuckerberg got a big present from Santa this year: Facebook had more traffic on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day than Google. That’s a first, according to Hitwise, which tweeted the news.
MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka predicts Facebook could get a repeat on New Year’s Eve.
Click here for Kafka’s article.
The White House Correspondents Dinner gained some notoriety yesterday, when White House Budget Director Peter Orszag proposed to his girlfriend, ABC News correspondent Bianna Golodryga. The two met six months ago at the WHCD — Orszag was a guest at the ABC table.
The New York Times Caucus Blog reports that Orszag, who emailed 50 friends and family with the good news after popping the question over lunch at Sarabeth’s restaurant in New York City, said he was attracted to Golodryga because, “She’s a Russian Jew who gets up earlier than I do.”
As kids live more of their lives online–through social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and LiveJournal–schools are looking for ways to cope. Slate’s Nicholas Bramble suggests schools should try to harness students’ interest and creativity by integrating social media in the classroom, rather than stifle it.
“After all, it’s not as if most kids are investing commensurate energy into, say, their math homework. Why not try to start bridging the worlds of Facebook, YouTube, and the classroom?”
Bramble shares the warnings of John Dewey from a century ago:
“when teachers suppress children’s natural interests in the classroom, they ‘substitute the adult for the child, and so weaken intellectual curiosity and alertness, suppress initiative, and deaden interest.’ By locking social networking out of school, teachers and principals are making exactly that error.”
Click here for the rest of the article: “Fifth Period Is Facebook”
President Obama’s weekly address was a Christmas message, with First Lady Michelle Obama, and included a special tribute to the men and women in the military serving overseas. The White House web site suggested ways to support the troops through DOD’s Military Homefront, OurMilitary.mil, and the USO.
Watch the address here:
Now that the dust has settled and the 2009 election results have sunk in, the pondering and pontificating by the pundit elite (and not so elite) continues on cable news and online media sites about what the results mean for the president and the nation’s political future. Much of what is discussed is, and will continue to be, partisan in nature (as is the nature of cable news) and quite frankly, without much merit or solid research beyond party talking points and Wikipedia entries.
Discussions have been playing out on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News on whether Obama’s coattails are still strong; whether 2009 elections are a prediction of the 2010 midterms; whether the GOP can turn 2 key gubernatorial wins into a midterm Congressional movement, and so on. Most of these are unknowns, but there is one major continuous thread of the ’08 and now ’09 election cycle that is guaranteed to be part of every successful future campaign whether GOP or Dem or Conservative or Independent: the integrated use of social media and online communications (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, SMA, web 2.0, etc), combined with an authentic, engaging candidate, must be paramount within a campaign’s overall strategy in order to be successful.
