Larry Ryan's election watch
Have your say: www.votetube.org
The proliferation of rolling news, YouTube and cameraphones should keep politicians on their toes on the campaign trail this year. VoteTube is an Irish site that aims to "help young, floating voters make up their mind about how to vote". Recently it has been bemoaning Ireland's lack of political satire, in the vein of Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which it blames on the difficulty of getting hold of Oireachtas footage. It has unearthed, in the standing orders of the Houses of the Oireachtas, a rule that seems to suit image-conscious Irish politicians down to the ground: "Recordings or extracts of the proceedings shall not be used in programmes of light entertainment, political satire, party political broadcasts, or in any form of advertising or publicity, other than in the form of news and current affairs programme trailers."
How they do it over there: www.huffingtonpost.com
Although the next US presidential showdown is almost two years away, it hasn't stopped bloggers gazing into the future. On the Huffington Post, the political commentator Bruno Giussani envisages a report announcing an Al Gore-Barack Obama campaign - "the Gorebama Ticket" - (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruno-giussani/artifact-from-the-future_b_40498.html).
The notion of Gore standing for president with Obama as his running mate appears to have readers in raptures: "Hell I would actually volunteer for the campaign and I have never done that before!" says one user, although another is somewhat nonplussed. "Gorebama. What a ticket. A has-been and a wannabe. Good grief . . . 300 million people and this is the best we can do?"
Obama, who always seemed unlikely to hide his light under Gore's bushel, appears to provoke hysteria in certain sections of the media, so you could be forgiven for thinking that he may be even closer to God than George W Bush imagines himself to be.
The online magazine Slate(www.slate.com) has cottoned on to this, too, with Timothy Noah's The Obama Messiah Watch, an occasional feature considering evidence of miraculous powers (www.slate.com/id/2158578).