ReadWriteWeb

"We're always looking to get as close to one touch donations as we can," Romney Campaign's Digital Director Zac Moffat told the LATimes.

Politico reports that both the Romney and Obama campaigns have started using Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's "magical" dongle, Square. Of course, you can't pay by saying your name as you now can at select merchants, but Square still makes campaign donations much faster and easier. Staff, field organizers and campaign volunteers hook up Square to their mobile phones and accept campaign donations on the spot.

The President of the United States held a Google+ Hangout today. He fielded questions selected from over 130,000 submissions as well as from five lucky Americans selected to hang out with him live. For the rest of us, it was a streaming video experience. It began with a swooping, dramatic intro, and then Google MC Steve Grove took control of the proceedings.

This is the most user-friendly White House in history. It was a nice experiment in Web-enabled democracy. But despite the great camera angles and the believable-but-composed real-world folks, it stretched the definition of "social media" pretty thin. User-submitted content is good, and the hand-picked live participants get to be involved, but for most of us, it's no different from television.

As we saw last week with the blackouts associated with the Stop Online Piracy Act protests, the Internet has given common citizens of the United States an unprecedented ability to interact with the political process. This precedent is also evident in the social media battles being waged between candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination. Tonight President Barack Obama will take that participation to a deeper level with the most connected State Of The Union Address ever.

So what just happened? Well, several of the world's most prominent Web destinations interrupted their regular programming to remind their readers of the dangers of a world where certain content may be arbitrarily made to disappear. For most Americans, this was probably the first they'd seen of any efforts by Congress to change the Internet, for whatever reason they'd want to do so.

They were given links to click on to learn more. Some of those links led to the White House Web site, where over a hundred thousand people signed petitions urging the President to veto any bill that would suborn Internet censorship. A few of those links led, to our own surprise, to ReadWriteWeb; and for a few hours yesterday, our traffic rose to unprecedented levels.

The Internet and politics have a way of magnifying each other's faults. Depending upon which source you read this morning, President Obama either came out forcefully against SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy legislation on Saturday or he staked out a position enabling himself to back away from opposing it outright.

Buried in-between the apparent opposition and the apparent ambivalence is the most important part of Saturday's statement, which would otherwise resound like a clarion call: "Rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don't limit your opinion to what's the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what's right."

In a statement on behalf of the Obama administration this morning, a trio of senior officials including the nation's Chief Technology Officer made clear that any anti-piracy legislation passing the President's desk would not create risks of censorship, nor would it condone any alterations to the Internet's domain name system that could invite security dangers.

The statement, which lists all three anti-piracy bills currently under discussion - the PROTECT-IP and OPEN bills in the Senate, and the SOPA bill in the House - is a loud warning shot indicating the President's lack of support, and likely veto, of any legislation that requires tampering with the structure of the Internet to enable enforcement.

In advance of its live event with President Obama today (starting now! 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific), LinkedIn has produced this infographic about the swath of the U.S. economy represented by its members. Since 2009, over 7.4 million job changes have been reported on LinkedIn.

The top industries on LinkedIn are higher education, marketing and advertising, information technology and health care. Of its 115 million members, almost 5 million are employed by small businesses. The biggest growth industries are renewables and environment, and oil and energy. The infographic also focuses on LinkedIn's use by veterans, as well as the number of users who have attended community college.

The Obama Administration's 2012 budget includes $126 million for the development of exascale supercomputing. The last budget marked out only $24 million for supercomputing.

Exascale computing systems are said to be capable of 1,000 times the processing power of the fastest computer currently operational, the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer.

The Guardian has a great story today about how to be a data journalist. It's a timely post. The forces that drive online law enforcement are increasing. It's affecting the world of cloud computing and the open Web.

The FBI is telling us that they need access to encrypted messages. They want peer-to-peer technology to be outlawed. It's centralization that they desire, not the chaos of an increasingly fragmented world.

But who is responsible for watching the FBI?

On Friday, the Obama administration re-launched USA.gov, the online portal that connects citizens to government agencies, departments and resources. The newly re-launched site features cosmetic and navigational improvements, including an improved search tool and a continually updated home page graphic that highlights some of the most requested items.

But one of the more interesting changes for the new USA.gov is the launch of a mobile application store where already there are 18 apps available.