Loic filmed a bit of the announcement this morning on seesmic only to end up with a huge response from the seesmic and twitter community. He ended up championing the cause with great applause from leaders of the launch – In end it looks like the response was rapid and robust so we were able to secure a personal interview with Mr. Annan that we will be doing in about an hour from now. I’ll have more to report later (hopefully tonight yet unlikely – I have no internet in my flat).

I digress, the whole point of this post is that I’m not the only person in my family writing political commentary. Here is my aunt’s article in the Orlando Sentinel.
The main gist – Vote Obama for the kids. Always a good tactic, everyone wants to save the kids. The kids and the seals. I think I’ll write another article about how Obama wants to save the baby seals.

I shot John Cleese—I’m a camera man, that’s what I do.

Recently I was fortunate enough to travel down to Santa Barbara with Vinvin and Dean Whitbread to interview John Cleese. I was immediately excited, after all my mom raised me on Monty Python. Growing up, if I stayed home sick from school, she would rent me Marx Brothers or Monty Python, which eventually led me to love Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

I digress. After a nice road trip down from San Francisco, during which I slept in the backseat most of the way, we ended up in Santa Barbara, and eventually at John Cleese’s cottage. This visit was just to scout what we would be shooting the next day.

Day 2, the day I shot John Cleese, we spent about 4 hours at his house on an interview, a tour of the house, and finally a conversation on Seesmic. By far my favorite part was the interview, in which John spent most of his time bashing Sarah Palin and endorsing Obama.

When I heard Mr. Cleese talking about politics, and found myself both laughing and thinking hard about what he was saying, it immediately dawned on me that this footage of him had to get online as quickly as possible. Not because I think John Cleese is going to make anyone change their mind about who to vote for, but because I think it will help inspire other people to be more active in the campaign. The thing that struck me most about what he said is that the US has made itself look so bad in the last eight years, particularly in re-electing George Bush. He said the international world looks at us completely different than it used to but that in a single day, with a snap of the finger and a single vote, we can change how the world perceives us.

To me this is one of the most important points of the upcoming election: the perception of the outside world. We live in a modern global society, and if you don’t think how we are perceived by the rest of the world matters to nearly everything that has to do with us internally, I think you may need a reality check.

I’ll move on.

So the first thing that we made when we got back to San Francisco was a short clip of John Cleese talking about Sarah Palin. In 24 hours the had received more than 10,000 hits on YouTube—this is when we decided it was time to start editing a longer version of John Cleese on US politics. I knew full well that the longer version would have a harder time taking off—first people would think it was the video they had already seen and second it seemed like the moment had passed. Nonetheless, the video went up and about a week later has a little over 24,000 hits.

Being a part of a video that goes viral online is pretty fun. I saw the Diggs Climb (Digg is a place where you can vote if you like a video, blog post, photo, or just about anything online), I saw it on people’s blogs, and my favorite was seeing it on the Huffington Post and Comedy Central’s blog. I think the reason it’s fun to see it get big is knowing that a ton of eyeballs are watching an interview that I shot, Jeremey edited, and Vinvin hosted.

Here is a quick rundown of some of the web pages on which the video was mentioned, or where you could see it posted.

1. Election 2008 on Twitter: John Cleese at the top of the tag cloud.
2. The Huffington Post: an article about the video.
3. Reddit: eventually made it to the top
4. Comedy Central’s blog featured an article
5. 3rd on Digg, eventually made it to the top of Digg. Last I looked the video had 6813 Diggs.
6. YouTube: most viewed of the day and the week. Last I looked the video had 967,115 hits.
7. Boing Boing: probably gave the video it’s first boost.

Speaking of Free Obama, I’m wondering when will he be free (for coffee)? I donated a substantial amount of money to the campaign (somewhere between $15 – $20) and since then, Barack has been sending me e-mail updates on his campaign – awesome!

I recently found out that his campaign headquarters are in Albuquerque NM, which is great news because my mom recently moved there! When I found this out I immediately started to reply to his daily e-mails.

“Dear Mr. Barack Obama, What a coincidence – my mom just moved to Albuquerque, maybe we can go out for dinner when I come into town. Now that I think about it, you’re probably pretty busy – maybe coffee will do? Let me know how free you are in October, that’s when I plan on visiting.

Sincerely, Whit Scott”

To be quite honest, I’m a little mad at Obama right now. The dude sends me almost an e-mail a day and I only send e-mail’s back once or twice a week. I gave him $15 – $20! I’d be more then happy to buy his coffee, although I heard he’s been breaking records when it comes to fun raising (by the way fun raising sounds amazing, I totally want to work on a campaign!).

My guess is this all comes down to the Free Obama stickers I keep seeing. I know he has an Internet connection wherever he is being kept, but he obviously can’t get out for some coffee with one of his biggest supporters. If you happen to see Obama anytime soon let him know that I’d still really like to go out, and that I’m not that mad at him – I understand that running for President is not easy (I was the President of the Anti-Social Club in high school).

Tomorrow I leave for Italy. This is definitely a trip for pleasure, not work or anything else. Claire and I will be playing Ultimate Frisbee on the beaches of Italy for 4 days straight – this is often one of the best weeks of the year.

Just now Claire and I watched a video posted by an online friend of mine Christian Payne. His blog is here if you want to go check it out. All of Christian’s videos that I have seen have been quite compelling, from the funny stuff to the serious stuff, you’ll always watch his work all the way through.

After watching his video I feel that posting about our trip is quite insignificant as far as world events go. So if you’d like to learn more about what we’re doing you can check out last years blog post for Paganello here. I’ll be taking video while we’re gone, hopefully it’ll help you better understand what it is we’re doing at the tournament.

What should we call today? Super Sandwiched Monday? This day we will all enjoy super sandwiches as we relax after a Sunday full of football, and prepare for the line we are going to stand in tomorrow so we can vote for 1 of 2 presidential candidates.

Speaking of candidates with the help of some friends I have come across some pretty good sites to help you decide on who to vote for. This first site compares whatever 2 candidates you would like to compare. The second site helps you see what different candidates think about specific issues. I know this is coming to you late, but i’m tired after Super Bowl Sunday, and Stuffed on this day of Super Sandwiched Monday, and full of anticipating for Super Tuesday.