I came across the chart above thanks to betfair.com. The chart shows “the most accurate, up-to-the-minute prediction of who will win the U.S. Presidential election based on millions of wagers placed in the world’s largest betting exchange.” Neat stuff.

But look closer and you see a divergence on September 15th (a Monday). Something happened on this date that reversed both Obama’s downward trend and McCain’s comeback.

Find out what I theorize this to be and how YouTube has political blood on its hands.

As our Doug Berger posted on earlier this month, presidential candidate Barack Obama offered to send you a text message with his VP choice. You’d be among the first to know, as Obama was leaking this info to you first, instead of the talking heads over at CNN and the like.

So how many gave away their phone number? It is estimated 2.9 million parted ways with that morsel of data. Shocked? Astounded? Me too. And not just with Obama’s choice of running mates.

Nielsen Mobile makes this estimate and calls it the biggest mobile marketing campaign ever. So far.

Since younger voters tend to skew toward the ranks of the non-voters, bringing this group to the table could prove huge come this December. Brian McConnell over at Gigom wrote up a thoughtful post on the far reaching effects of thinking outside the networks:

Sure, we don’t typically cover politics on Gadgetell. But when a candidate clearly comes into our territory, it’s fair-game. Senator Barack Obama’s campaign has announced plans to announce his vice presidential running-mate before the Democratic National Convention. So that means they’ll go on the news and announce it there, right? Wrong. The campaign is currently collecting cell phone numbers via their website, and will send out a massive text message to subscribers announcing their selection.

We had already expected the release to come in mid-June and it looks like Mozilla has held that date true, they have officially announced that Firefox 3 will be available on June 17. In addition, they have also, as we mentioned early yesterday, released an additional release candidate as RC3 that took care of a more »

While we were all set and waiting for the final release of Firefox to drop at anytime now, CNET is reporting that some of us may indeed be given an RC 3 sometime today. The latest release, which will come officially as RC 3 will only be for Mac users as the Windows and Linux more »

As we expected Mozilla has made the next early-adopter release of Firefox 3 available for download. The latest is Firefox 3 RC2 and although the release notes are a little light on the exact updates, its safe to say they have taken care of the issues that were found during the testing of Firefox 3 more »

We have seen numerous reports, those even coming directly from Mozilla about how we can expect the final release of Firefox 3 to land this June and up until now it looked like it was right on track. While we have not heard any news of a major delay with that expected date, the latest news may push it up just a little bit. Recently we had seen the reports that ten critical flaws had been found in Firefox 3 RC1.

Since then Mozilla had been working to decide whether to ship the final “consumer-ready” release and then fix the flaws with version 3.0.1 or just move onto a Release Candidate 2. Well it seems the decision has been made, because they have officially announced that we will indeed be getting an RC2 before the final.

As expected Mozilla has rolled out the first non-beta release of Firefox 3. For those who are currently running a beta version or just feeling adventurous Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. A final release is still expected to come in June, of course the beta version has been pretty stable for us, more »