Around the Net

Bloggers, Twitterers, Respond To Obama's Speech

  • Wired, Friday, August 29, 2008 11:45 AM
The Web blogged and tweeted away as Barack Obama on Thursday accepted the nomination for President at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last night. "It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety," wrote The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, a Republican and an Obama admirer. "What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check."

Meanwhile, on the microblogging service Twitter, traffic surged. This wasn't surprising, given that Obama is the most popular person on Twitter -- it was perhaps more surprising that the failure-prone site stayed live during his speech. According to Wired, more than 6,500 tweets poured through the service in just 20 minutes on Thursday night. "It's hard to imagine there are people in this country that can not at least feel inspired by Obama even if they do not plan to vote for him," wrote one Twitter user.

Not everyone was impressed. Megan McArdle, a colleague of Sullivan's at The Atlantic, blasted Obama's promise to end energy dependence on oil from the Middle East. "It doesn't matter what we do: drill, research alternative energy, raise CAFE standards ... in 2018, we'll still be using oil," McArdle wrote on her blog Asymmetrical Information. "Even if we discovered a magic source of clean renewable energy tomorrow, we'd still be using a lot of oil, because transitions of that magnitude take time."

Read the whole story at Wired »

Next story loading loading..