Virtual Keyboard Makes Smudges a MustA virtual keyboard called Swype lets you type without lifting a finger. Words are traced out on the keyboard in one long swiping motion, from one letter to the next. Read Article   

 The two big mistakesMichael TomaskyComments (90) I do think there are two tactical errors the White House made with regard to healthcare. There may be more. But these are the two that matter. And these are beyond doing it this year, which I've said many times I was against.
 
First -- I've said this too, come to think of it -- not enough emphasis was placed on the moral case for changing the status quo. Obama placed emphasis on cost savings. One understands why, I guess, given the state of the economy right now (although this circles back to my main argument that they should have waited until the economy was better). But the problem with the p.r. campaign was that they didn't show how this would change many peoples' lives for the better. Now, lots of us are asserting that, but we're doing so in a vacuum because the White House didn't really do it.
 
For the last four months, Obama could have had weekly or bi-weekly events of some sort with humble working- to middle-class Americans who got thrown off their plans over cancer or diabetes or whatever. Or merely who saw their premiums increase by 18% in a single year. He talked a lot about these things in abstract terms. But that isn't remotely the same as putting actual human faces on the narrative. TV eats that kind of thing up. If he'd had eight or 10 such sessions over the last 16 weeks, the polls would be better right now -- not massively, maybe, but better enough that it would matter.
 
Second, the administration -- Obama himself sometimes, but especially Rahm Emanuel -- have tonally mishandled the relationship with the left-activist-blogospheric wing. Every time one of those stories appeared on HuffPo of the Emanuel to netroots: STFU variety, and there were loads of 'em, it just gave people something to be righteously angry about.
 
Whether the posture on the netrootsy left might be different today if Emanuel in particular had been a tad more sensitive in his posture toward that cohort is right now a topic of intense debate. I think a more respectful tone, even if it had led to the same policy outcome, would have helped some. Not massively, but enough.
 
The administration does need to learn from this. Obama needs to give Emanuel a talking to, more specifically. If the bill passes, the administration will need, by next November and especially by 2012, to get these folks back in a positive frame of mind. Irrespective of who's to blame, that's going to be a big job.   

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 Google Buzz: social networking for the anti-social By Shane Richmond Social media Last updated: February 10th, 2010 It’s hard not to be underwhelmed by Google Buzz, which was widely trailed earlier this week as being Google’s Facebook/Twitter-killer. It’s unlikely to kill either of those services since it doesn’t seem to add anything significant to what they do and it appears not to take any of the existing functions of Facebook and Twitter and do them better.Google Buzz is better thought of as simply another social media aggregator. As Paul Buchheit, the former Google engineer who created Gmail and founded social aggregator FriendFeed, put it: “There’s a FriendFeed in my Gmail.”Still, as with most new social networks, it’s hard to judge Google Buzz at this point. It’s like being one of the first at a party. Perhaps nobody will come or perhaps everyone will show up and it will be great.Google has gone some way to dealing with this problem by turning Buzz on for anyone with a Gmail account and then auto-following certain people on your behalf based on who you email most often. This is the one key advantage Buzz has – the potential to tap into a huge, already-existing network. The problem is that unless those people actually do something there remains disappointingly little buzz.There are plenty of possibilities for how Google Buzz will develop but it looks, at this point, like a service for people who spend most of their time using email and very little on social networking sites – if they’re even on them at all. However, these people have lots of friends on social networks and Buzz provides them with a lightweight way to keep up without leaving the comfortable surrounds of their email.For it to be anything more than that, Google needs to offer some killer features.