On the left, you see President Elect Barack Obama's website. On the right, that's not just Obama's site localised in Hebrew...well, maybe it sort of is. It's the campaign site of Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu (who is running for Prime Minister of Israel). Everything has been copied, from the colours to the donation areas to the integration of social networking platforms. And no one is denying that fact, either.

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President-Elect Barack Obama has pledged to deliver weekly "fireside chats" a la FDR via YouTube, and today he posted his first. The content of the video isn't unexpected: he calls for immediate help from Congress to aid unemployment insurance, and calls for all Americans to come together to weather the hard economic road ahead. What's remarkable is how right it feels.

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Obama is officially the first YouTube president—you know, if you doubted it for some reason with 1800 videos uploaded and over 110 million views. He will be the first president to post videos of his weekly fireside coffee talks on YouTube in addition to the traditional radio format, which goes back to FDR, who used the medium to directly address the nation as he steered it through the Depression and WWII. Indeed, some pundits are calling the Obama administration's use of the web the "internet-era" version of FDR's fireside chats.

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I'm kinda disappointed Google CEO Eric Schmidt really won't be the country's first ever chief tech officer after all. Despite rumours and (fairly reasonable) speculation he was not-so-subtly campaigning for the position (and Obama), yesterday he definitively said that he wouldn't take the position if offered:

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If you tuned into CNN's election coverage last night, you probably saw their new fangled hologram technology being used to pull up data and conduct interviews. Sure, it was a gimmick-and-a-half—but it was interesting at least. Plus, as far as I could tell, the complicated system was pretty much glitch-free (Fox News, on the other hand, seemed to have problems with their basic touchscreen system all night). But my question is: was was it stupid or cool?

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The ObamaBot has been a patient contributor to the Obama presidential campaign. After being assembled for $US250, the 6-foot metal and wooden robot took to the streets of Florida waving signs to promote early voting and now President-elect Barack Obama. From a technical standpoint, the robot is apparently "powered by hope," which seems like a...unique...approach to constantly fluctuating energy prices. Bonus shot:

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Astronauts Michael Fincke and Gregory Chamitoff did what only four other Astronauts have done in NASA's 50 years when they voted today—from space. Thanks to a Texas bill passed in 1997, NASA space cases are able to legally vote while they're out of the planet on business. But how did they cast their ballot from space, you ask? Here's the answer that Space.com got.

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A technique known as nanolithography was used to build these Obama faces, combining 150 million carbon nanotubes to construct each individual half-millimeter visage. Depending on your political leanings, the result is either the cutest wittle powitician ever or proof that science, in the wrong hands, will engineer miniature robotic Democrats who distract with a message of hope while eating our flesh. As for the undecideds...I'll be honest here. I'm so sick of hearing what those dudes "think." [Flickr via Wired]

The Gadget: Touchscreen, punch card and lever voting machines

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Gizmodo is not endorsing a presidential candidate. Nearly everyone on staff agreed that it would be a bad idea, for a lot of valid reasons. Besides the fact that Gizmodo is seen by many as a means of escape from the the real world, we simply don't cover politics. Many on our staff felt that, even if we weighed our selection using just the candidates' statements on technology, we'd just be trivialising the truly pressing issues—the economy, the wars, national security, America's cultural divide and our standing in the international community, to toss out a handful. But I think you guys should know where at least one of us is coming from: Technology is political, because it's tightly intertwined with every major issue. If you don't grasp technology, you no longer understand the world. I'm voting for the guy who gets that.

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