Despite your politics, you’ve got to admit that this election is resulting in some of the best fodder for Saturday Night Live.

Absolutely hilarious. Brought a smile to my face…which was desperately needed as I watched the market fall yet again over the weekend.

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame published a survey of economists that he commissioned to see if any insight on the election might come out of it. Not surprisingly, economists split pretty evenly along party lines with Obama getting a bit of a lift due to the independents in the bunch.

It didn’t change my vote but some of the numbers are rather interesting.

I’ve been distracted in the past week trying to get a new start-up off the ground so I’ve not been posting much. This caught my eye today though.

Sun To Shed Up To 2,500 Jobs In Strategic Move

What I find interesting is that this layoff did not result from Sun needing to cut costs due to the economy (ok, maybe there was a bit of that) but primarily because their open source strategy is helping them reduce their cost of sales. If the software is free, more people use it and some of those people become paying customers. It tips the sales funnel on its end.

The enterprise software space is due for a change.

I do a lot of consulting in the financial services space and I had occasion last week to listen to a number of firms talk about fraud and fraud detection at a mini-conference. Then today I spotted a Wired blog entry talking about a fairly major ATM fraud action against Citibank where some hackers apparently got a hold of compromised ATM pins and went on a cash withdrawal spree.

Now that the new iPhone has GPS (not that many other phones haven’t had this service for awhile but I pay attention to the features of the one in my pocket), I was thinking that location aware mobile phones might offer a rather unique mechanism for banks and credit card companies to reduce fraud. Since your phone knows where you are, it would be able to tell your financial institution’s computers your location every say, 15 minutes, and they could use that information to figure out whether the credit card charge or ATM withdrawal that just occurred (or is in progress) is within a reasonable distance from where you happen to be. If not, treat it as likely fraud.

Now this opens up some interesting privacy issues but our banks know so much about us already, for your average law abiding citizen is their location history more important than protecting themselves against fraud? Even better if the bank’s systems only recorded your location just before and after a transaction and discarded everything else.

Alternatively, your bank’s computers could tell your phone in real time whenever a transaction occurred on your account and the GPS coordinates where it happened. Then you could quickly check to make sure it was where you (or your spouse) happened to be.

Lots of things would need to be figured out to make this work but those that protect our money should likely be able to confirm that it is in fact being spent by us and not someone else. Especially since they seem to have trouble protecting themselves from hackers sometimes.

Current TV has an interview up with Stephen Hawking that was done as part of a Discovery News segment.

I love that he says that he hopes there is intelligent life in space as he’s never found any here on Earth. The man is brilliant.

I was reading the Wall Street Journal this morning like I usually do and I noticed an advertisement for the Facebook application SeenThis. What SeenThis does it it correlates what you are reading on the web with what the members on your friends list are reading on the web and shows you what is mutually popular.

I guess the concept with this application is that articles that your friends are interested in would somehow be interesting to you. I have a hard time with this concept as it presupposes that a friends list is composed of people with similar tastes and I know from my own Facebook list that this is definitely not the case. There is just too much difference between the motley collection of characters who connected to me to be of any value in surfacing content I might find interesting.

Now right above the SeenThis widget on the page was another widget from PeopleReady that constructs a correlation between the article you are reading and other articles that people who read this article also looked at.

To me, this approach is a lot more relevant and produces some value to the reader as it attempts to connect like content based on a wide number of readers. That approach makes sense to me and I just don’t see the value of a widget like SeenThis.

I’ll keep looking for a Facebook application that has even a minor impact on my online life. So far I haven’t found one.

With all the chatter these days about the high price of oil and gas, the impact of global warming on pretty much everyone and the general destruction of this planet we call home, I thought it might be valuable to point out the most obvious way to make a major positive impact as I just don’t see it talked about enough.

It is pretty simple and will have an effect way beyond solar panels, wind power, more insulation in the attic, energy efficient appliances and the continuously talked about and never available electric car. It is even cooler than Google’s biofuel buses.

Are you ready for it? Simply stay home. Commuting to work has got to be one of the most ridiculous concepts in today’s broadband, highly connected, 24×7 online environment. As someone who hasn’t had a real office job in seven years and has built two companies in that time yet never paid a dime in office rent, I can assure you that it is completely possible to stay connected with a global team of people, accomplish great things and never wear pants. All this wonderful technology we talk about and blog about allows you to do it with ease (and actually rather cheaply). And the environmental numbers speak for themselves.

Plus, you get to see your kids grow up. I highly recommend it.

Reuters is carrying a article today talking about the fact that Microsoft is getting ready for customers to move to the cloud for all sorts of applications. Not surprisingly, they figure the first major migration will be Exchange mailboxes and that they really don’t care if someone buys the software or pays a monthly fee to host it on Microsoft’s infrastructure. Given that Exchange hosting in the cloud has been available for years from a whole range of companies, this isn’t much of a stretch. I’ve never worked with a company that didn’t hate all the hassle of hosting their own Exchange farm of computers.

The real interesting question is what they plan to do about Microsoft Office. Granted, cloud migration of major desktop applications requires a persistent, fast online connection but it is almost a guaranteed outcome of the current trend. Throw in offline capability like Adobe Air and it won’t be long before most of us are creating, storing and sharing our documents on the net.

In a somewhat related article, The Guardian reports that a US court has ruled that border agents can search your laptop as your cross into the United States. British border security has a similar option. While there are lots of options for encrypting and hiding information, the whole issue sort of becomes moot if you have nothing on your laptop in the first place and everything is up on the cloud. Even better if that cloud is in a country that doesn’t respond to search warrants! Not that we’d ever do anything illegal of course…it is just the point of the matter.

Ask.com is making headlines today with a new feature they’ve launched called AskEraser. Essentially if you want, any search you make on Ask.com can be made anonymous and they won’t store a record of it anywhere on the Ask servers.

So after turning it on (you have to opt in) when you do a search on “Britney Spears Partying” you can rest assured that not even under subpoena can the folks as IAC tell anyone how you were spending your working day.

Not necessarily new functionality - there are many sites that will allow you to mask your web browsing behind a proxy server (just ask all those politically sensitive bloggers in China how it works), this is the first time that a major search engine has said they won’t retain any information that can be tied to a specific searcher.

But there are some caveats. For one, they cannot guarantee that some of that information isn’t leaked to the partners who provide their ads (Google among them) and of course they are likely still all that rich search data together and using it to drive their own advertising engines. So call it search privacy light.

Still, it is an interesting ploy to stand out in the search space and as Facebook found out over the last few weeks, if you visibly show your users how much you happen to know about them (or can find out) they are going to scream.

Question is, does anyone care about online privacy unless it hits them in the face?

In the era of digital marketing, PR is arguably even more important than it was offline - not only is every traditional media publication online, the mob of blogs and user comments quickly multiply the impact of any newsworthy story. But what’s changed very little is the way mainstream PR gets done - clients hire PR firms, who write press releases, which they pitch to reporters, etc.

Yesterday, Hill & Knowlton, one of the more blue-chip PR firms in the country, issued a press release of their own claiming that “60 percent of consumers polled agreed that the government should regulate the sale of games deemed mature or violent.”

Now this is odd.. PR firms usually write press releases for clients, rather than releasing their own. Hill & Knowlton doesn’t even have any clients in the games industry. But the plot quickly thickened - a rebuttal by the ESA, the industry trade association, revealed that Hill & Knowlton had commissioned the research on spec in the hopes of winning the ESA as a client. When the ESA turned them down, Hill & Knowlton released the study results (spun in a way that made the ESA look bad, natch), apparently out of pure spite.

Sounds pretty offline so far, no? But thanks to the magic of blogs, RSS feeds, comments and forums, even old-school battles between regulators and industry groups (check out the 400+ comments!) are now playing out online, and this one involves public figures as big as Hillary Clinton. Whenever the stakes get high enough, you can be sure that offline dirty tricks will soon be just as commonplace in the online world.