California voters passed Prop. 8 in 2008, banning gay marriage after thousands of same-sex couples had exercised their brief legal right to marry, effectively stripping away a minority group’s civil rights. This was finally struck down this week…and could this be attributed to Santorum’s surprising sweet over three state caucuses?

In Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota, Santorum took surprisingly large wins, primarily in mostly rural and religious counties across all three states (however, Santorum won every single county in Missouri… not surprising).

Rick Santorum, who builds his platform on his conservative stance on social issues, over-performed the latest polls by a large margin on the same day a federal court rules against California’s ban on same-sex marriage. News outlets are blasting that the case could go to the Supreme Court.

As election results came in, Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com noticed disproportionately high turnout in rural, religious counties in Colorado and Minnesota’s caucuses where Santorum performed the best.

The California Prop 8 ruling was a certainly game-changer that got Santorum’s natural base out to the polls as it woke the attention of Santorum’s natural fan base.

What do you think? Did the Prop 8 ruling give Santorum a boost at the polls that he wasn’t getting before? What does this mean for the possible GOP nominee?

Historically speaking, if Facebook has raised that much for its initial public offering, it would:

— be the sixth-largest U.S. IPO ever, sliding between AT&T Wireless and Kraft Foods.

— be the 15th-largest IPO in global history, behind Glencore International and ahead of Japan Tobacco.

— have an initial public offering more than six times that of Google. Google currently holds the record for the largest technology IPO, according to Renaissance Capital, of $1.66 billion.

— come in with more hype than other technology companies, thanks to a per-share valuation that at least one investment firm predicts will open “north of $100,” Forbes reports. For example, when Apple went public Dec. 12, 1980, it was priced at $22 per share, climbing to $29 by the end of the trading day, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple made less than $100 million by selling stock to the public. Google, according to archives from The Washington Post, was valued at $85 per share, surging to over $100 a share by the end of the day for a market capitalization of $27.2 billion.

— have a market capitalization larger than Disney ($70 billion) or General Motors ($38 billion), if reports that its market cap is expected to be between $75 billion and $100 billion ring true. Compared with its technology peers, however, its market cap would be on the low end of the list, as compared with Google ($187 billion), Microsoft ($248 billion) or, of course, Apple ($422.47 billion). It would, however, outstrip Amazon, which has a current market capitalization of about $87 billion.

The hype is certainly there for Facebook’s IPO,but the question that will dog its heels is whether or not it can buck the trend that’s plagued other technology IPOs in the past few months — whether it can debut strong and keep up the momentum. Although almost a third of all initial public offerings in the past 12 months have been in the technology sector, prominent debuts from Groupon, Zynga, LinkedIn and Pandora have all fizzled quickly.

Zynga, for example, opened at $10 per share and closed at $9.50. The stock has recovered since then, closing Monday at $10.39, but has hardly been the breakaway success that many had hoped for. Similarly, LinkedIn, which skyrocketed from an opening share price of $45 to a first-day close of $94.25, has settled back down to Earth at about $75 per share.

Originally posted on The Washington Post. See the original posting by Hayley Tsukayama here.

Obama’s success in 08 was largely due to his demographic being younger and more tech savvy, so does the Republican cross-over work? In the last election season we saw the largest spike in young voter turn out in our lifetime, which is good news for the future of the Democrat party and the political process.

Newt Gingrich was the first republican candidate this season to announce his campaign via Twitter, but was busted for having thousands of fake followers that were paid leads. Now, Ron Paul is the leader in social media savvy among the Republican candidates due largely to his unique Libertarian-esque views. Other candidates seem to be much too conservative and traditional to gain the same social media respect and have generally older demographics.

There are several advantages politicians can take advantage of by using social media: to reach a demographic of voters who don’t watch national news or broadcasted debates; to gain feedback from voters about important issues so they can run more targeted campaigns; to take advantage of cheap and targeted advertising; and most importantly to harness political brand awareness and user testimonial.

The 2012 elections seem to have less buzz on social media than we saw in 2008, but hopefully once primary season is over and a Republican nominee is chosen, things will begin to heat up once again.

How do you interact with politics on social media? Do you prefer traditional media to following politicians on Facebook or Twitter?

The new privacy policy will be a cross-platform agreement allowing Google to monitor and use information across its many products. For example, if you watch a YouTube video on a certain subject, write an email to somebody, and indicate what city you’re in while searching, Google will use that data to deliver related ads across all of its products. Google also explains that over time, Google products will become “more intuitive” to the needs of their users.

Google users are alarmed that the search engine giant will not allow people to opt out of this service, however data will not be tracked if you are not signed in to a Google account. Critics are calling for an option to allow minors under 18 to be able to opt out, but so far Google has been unresponsive to this request.

In general, people often get nervous when the subject of information sharing comes up, however from a day-to-day perspective, this new change will not affect users very much.

What do you think? Do these new changes worry you?

The announcement by Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano Island, that she would cast the 25th and deciding vote in favor of the issue came as hundreds of people filled the Capitol to advocate for and against gay marriage.

In a written statement issued at the end of a Senate committee hearing on the bill, Haugen said she took her time making up her mind to “to reconcile my religious beliefs with my beliefs as an American, as a legislator, and as a wife and mother who cannot deny to others the joys and benefits I enjoy.”

“This is the right vote and it is the vote I will cast when this measure comes to the floor,” she said.”

Washington citizens have been increasingly supportive of same-sex marriage and civil unions. About 43 percent of respondents said they support gay marriage, up from 30 percent in the same poll five years earlier. Another 22 percent said they support giving identical rights to gay couples but just not calling it marriage. When asked how they would vote if a referendum challenging a gay marriage law was on the ballot, 55 percent said they would vote yes to uphold the law, with 47 percent of them characterized as “strongly” yes, and 38 percent responded “no,” that they would vote to reject a gay marriage law.

“We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure—the ranking of their organic search results—to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded,” the site explaining the proof of concept says.

Another site called “Focus on the User” has surfaced that allows internet users with an alternative to Google Plus Your World.

“We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure—the ranking of their organic search results—to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.”

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of Northern California by the City of Royal Oak Retirement System on behalf of all those who purchased stock between Dec. 20, 2010 and Oct. 24, 2011. In addition to Netflix, Chairman and CEO Reed Hastings, CMO David Wells, Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt and CMO Leslie Kilgore were named in the complaint.

The plaintiff claims that Netflix issued “materially false and misleading statements regarding the company’s business practices and its contracts with content providers” and “concealed negative trends in Netflix’s business.” Those actions caused the stock to trade at “artificially inflated prices,” reaching a high of $291.27 per share on July 12, 2011. During that period, Netflix executives sold 338,661 shares of Netflix stock for proceeds of $90.2 million.

However, it isn’t time to celebrate quite yet. PIPA (aka ‘Protect IP Act’ – the Senate’s version of the SOPA Bill) is still up for consideration.

SOPA had received a huge outcry of resistant online from social media website blackouts to service protests like GoDaddy (GoDaddy lost well over 100,000 domains in the span of about 10 days due to their involvement with SOPA and PIPA). Thus proving the power that the online community can have on the democratic process, enabling individuals to speak their mind.

PIPA is less well known than SOPA, but the provisions are basicly the same. It still includes the same DNS blocking and censoring system that the original SOPA did, just without the SOPA name. There are around 40 co-sponsors of the bill in the Senate so far, with no word on how many senators support the bill in addition to that. There will most likely need to be 60 votes in the Senate in order to invoke cloture and end an almost guaranteed filibuster.

What do you think of this vote, and what do you think will happen with PIPA?

[Click here to see why SOPA is bad, and to sign the petition!]

This coming Wednesday (January 18th, 2012), the popular blog site Reddit will go dark in protest of the bad bill as the co-founder Alexis “kn0thing” Ohanian goes to congress to testify on behalf of the tech community. This impactful demonstration will certainly gain many internet users’ attention, and is one of the first ‘put your money where your mouth is’ act we’ve seen in relation to the unpopular bill.

But will Reddit’s blackout be enough? Even though the blog site is hugely popular, there will still be a large percentage of internet users who won’t notice – therefore, larger sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube should follow and do similar blackouts to reach the thousands of users who are still ‘in the dark’ about how SOPA could negatively impact them. Not only should they black out for a day, but they should also post easy-to-understand information about how SOPA will affect the online community in the place of their site.

What do you think? Comment and let us know how you think we should go about spreading information about this negative bill, and what you think would stop it…