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Presidential Primaries are so 20th century. Let’s spend a few movements at take a look at who’s the most popular Democratic Candidate online:

According to Alexis.com, which tracks and ranks website traffic BarackObama.com is a clear winner ranking 9,008 with HillaryClinton.com taking a distant second with 23,375. JohnEdwards.com is left in the cyber dust with a rank of 48,516.
Alexis.com winner: Obama

Next lets see who has more freinds on MySpace.com. You may be one of the 235,559 friends of the most popular candidate on the social networking site of Barak. Hillary has 168,924 freinds and John is in the corner with only 52,925 freinds.

MySpace.com winner: Obama

More people seem to be posting blogs about Barack Obama according to Technorati.com. 24,424 blogs have been writting about the Senator from Illonois. Former Senator Edwarws squeeked out more entries than Senator Clinton. Mr. Edwards has 22,858 entries about him with Mrs. Cliton with 22,502 entries.
Technorati.com winner: Obama
Social bookmarking site Digg.com has a story “dugg” 1,113 times about Barack Obama’s named being misspelled on the Florida Ballots. 2,167 diggs on a blog entry at JohnEdwards.com that explains all of the major networks are discounting the former Senator as a front runner. In the top 10 search results at Digg.com Hillary Clinton’s appears, but not as favorably as her opponnents.

Digg.com winner: Obama

YouTube.com serves up online videos of every sort. Hillary Clinton has about 35,600 videos with her name tagged in them. There are about 27,700 tagged for Barack Obama. John Edwards, is not so popular on the site with about 11,100 hits to his name.

YouTube.com winner: Clinton

Conclusion: It appears that in this clearly unscientific poll that Barack Obama wins this online primary of the front runners for the Democratic Party’s candidate for President in 2008.

A technology developed by The British Ministry of Defense to silence helicopters has benefits for the consumer market.

This new flat-panel surface can enable speakers to be placed on cell phones (making them thinner) and car roof liners (for stereo speakers).  The MoD sold the technology to a Cambridge-Based company called NXT.  They have crafted this “SurfaceSound” into Toyotas, Gateway computers, and even Hallmark greeting Cards.

The MoD’s design was developed to silence the sounds of the blades of helicopters.  The design did just the opposite.  The honeycomb material conducted sound, not dampened it.  With that, they sold it off.

At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show NXT has been showing off the 14 mm thick speakers with an iPod Nano to great revues.  They have also made a transparent screen called a “SoundVu” on placed it on a Gateway all-in-one for “invisible speakers”.  With the ability to have 6 zones the “SoundVu” allows users to chat with 6 people at once.

Car maker Toyota has announced they will place the roof speakers in four of its models.

The hardware maker, Bit Micro, has recently announced that they are finishing on a 832 GB flash, solid state hard drive.  This along with other flash drive will improve a users experience.

The E-Disk Altime 2.5″ drive will be a serial ATA drive with flash solid state technology.  The company will start to test the drive in the summer and expects the new part to ship by the end of 2008. As of the time of the announcement the price was not disclosed.

What good will it do me?  Go question you ask.  With the promise of large (more than 20 GB) flash hard drives a consumer will see:

Their PC cases shrink: Because of the size of the traditional hard drive and room for proper cooling PC cases are bigger.

Their laptops get thinner and battery life improve: Since these flash drive are thinner, laptops will be thinner as well.  Also considering how much energy it takes to keep the platters spinning in a traditional hard drive battery life will improve.  A flash drive is solid state, with no moving parts for less battery consumption.

Less hard drive failures: Many times a hard drive crashes due to a physical problem with the drive.  Traditional hard drives have a reader (head) that picks up  the data on a platter on the drive.  Both the head and platters are sensitive to their environment (hence lots of cooling) and how they get handled.  Improper cooling and/or handling can cause physical damage to the drive.  Flash’s solid state technology has no moving parts to break, but do need to get cooled, albeit less.

Microsoft’s “new and improved” operating system, Vista, is less appealing to new PC buyers than Windows XP was during it’s first year on the software market.  Once one factors in the market size, which has doubled.

Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates, was speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week and revealed the news.  Some say Gates unintentionally revealed the news.  Gates mentioned that Vista shipped 100 million copies since its launch in January 2007.

That number may sound big but put into the perspective of all new PCs shipped that number is only around 39%.  That would mean that Windows XP, Linux, and OS X took up about 60% of the market share of new PCs in 2007.

Windows XP released a month after 9/11 sold about 89 million copies according to Gates at the 2003 CES.  Since 2001 the PC market has doubled.  Which would mean that on the surface a 10% increase may seem good until one factors in the doubling of the market.