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The McCain camp, after learning this past weekend that not only was Colin Powell supporting his opponent, but that Barack Obama has raised a record breaking $150M in campaign funds last month, has thrown all caution to the wind with their online advertising buys.

Similar to last week’s fiasco of purchasing in-game advertising on the Xbox 360, the McCain/Palin campaign is putting out all stops in purchasing online banner ads in any available ad space (like yooRyoo – see the ad in the lower right hand part of this very page!). Unfortunately, true to McCain’s “maverick” style and impetuous decision-making skills, he has gotten it all wrong again.

Rather than have our readers scour the web for samples of these misplaced, misspoken and highly-unusual ads, yooRyoo has gathered them here for your convenience:

In a miscalculation, even the click-through URLs of these ads are reportedly wrong, sending users to sites such as VPILF.com, the Sarah Palin Blog and Sarah Palin as President!

Happy Sunday and welcome to our regular Sunday feature called “Is It Real?“…where you guess if the web 2.0 company/product/service that we present to you today is real.

You see, we give you just enough information to grasp the concept of what we’re presenting, and then ask you to vote – without the help of the web in ANY WAY – if this company is real or not. Voting runs all week, and we reveal the real answer this Friday in the Friday Fishwrap.

Today we present to you a social networking site dedicated to lawyers. Called “LegalForce,” this site allows you to join only if you are a lawyer (all other people will either be sued or pressured into instigating legal action against another!). LegalForce currently has close to 150,000 lawyers enrolled, and provides a platform to share contacts and information about current rulings.

Moreover, it has a special section called “the Water Cooler” where fellow lawyers can start threads about certain topics (“What is the bonus at Cheatem, Lyum and Steele if you become a Jr. Partner?”) or qvetch about that pesky criminal trial you are working on (“How can I trick the judge into giving me a four day recess, because I have tickets to Guadalajara for a long weekend?”).

It seems that every profession has some form of social networking, and LegalForce is the one for lawyers.

So, yooRyoo readers, I ask – is LegalForce real? And be careful of how you answer, they may be watching…

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Happy Friday Fishrap! This is where we share the results of our latest “Is It Real?” poll, and then present an entertaining video from the web.

First: let’s share with you the results of our last “Is It Real?” -

Last Sunday we presented a new technology that the McCain campaign released in a desperate attempt to keep up with the Obama campaign. This iPhone application is designed to share with his supporters the latest smear ads and falsehoods….er, latest campaign ads and stump speeches. Taking unique advantage of the iPhone platform, they included a built-in game allowing McCain to fight back against imaginary domestic terrorist groups and voter registration groups out to “destroy to fundamentals of our economy.”

We then asked you to vote, if you think it’s real. Here are the results of that poll:

• 80% thought it was fake
• 13% thought it was real
• 7% weren’t sure

The actual is that the McCain iPhone application is NOT REAL (big surprise – this guy needs his secretary – er, Cindy – to use his Blackberry for him…evidently, even though he invented it, he still doesn’t know how to use it). Good guessing…and tune in this Sunday for a new edition of “Is It Real?’

Now, on to the video part of our show. Today, we feature a nice vignette that illustrates one man’s love for the progress bar. It might take a moment to load, but be patient…it’s worth it. Have a good one!

By now, you may have already heard the news that the Obama campaign has started inserting campaign ads into console video games (if you haven’t read the scoop at GigaOm here).

Actual Obama ad in Xbox 360 racing game “Burnout Paradise”

As always, the McCain campaign responded quickly yesterday by releasing news that their campaign will also begin in-game advertising as part of his desperate attempt to appeal to young people – sometimes by even buying the same advertising space!! Here are a list of proposed placements for McCain ads:

McCain ad in “FIFA ’07″

McCain/Palin 08 ad in “Burnout Paradise”

McCain issue ad in “GTA IV”

As noticed by many observers, during the last presidential debate, the Democratic candidate seemed rational, giving real world answers to questions, while his opponent was lost in thought, uttering platitudes and generalizations to real-life problems (i.e. “we’re the best innovators, we’re the best producers” and how “we will succeed and we will bring our troops home with honor and victory and not in defeat”).

A Silicon Valley company – iWear – quietly issued a press release this week, as a means of explanation. “The reason John McCain waxed poetically about seemingly random non sequitors in the last debate is due to a new technology that we created. Entitled Telepromptya, this device is a surgical contact lens implant that is grafted to the wearer’s corneas. Then, from a remotely controlled wi-fi device – like an iPhone – users can project teleprompted text and other related images onto the surface of the eye. If done properly, this device can inspire and help set tones and subtleties in speeches and debates…even for presumably losing candidates.”

As an example, the company notes that Sarah Palin used it in the Vice Presidential debate, in order not to fail as spectacularly as she did during candid (and non-teleprompted) interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson. “They call it ‘gotcha journalism’ but really it was because we were still perfecting the device,” Abi Normal, CEO of iWear noted. “We had endless loops and null divisions – it was a mess. When we tried it out on a second tester – Tina Fey for her SNL skit – we reran the same software version. The effect, while still way off, was uncanny.”

“We finally had to do a complete rebuild, in order to get basic functionality…and that’s what Sarah ran with for the VP debate – the basic version” added Mr. Normal.

In the case of John McCain, a special image set was created, with images of waving flags and George Washington crossing the Delaware projected onto his retinas. This allowed the Republican candidate to wax even more poetically (and jingoistically) for nearly twenty minutes during the last debate:

“That’s what America’s all about. I believe in this country. I believe in its future. I believe in its greatness. It’s been my great honor to serve it for many, many years…I like grandmothers and baseball and puppies and apple pie. I like puppy pie, too, and grandmothers hitting home runs while Washington cuts down cherry trees and vows never to tell a lie…

Future revisions of Telepromptya include the following preset themes:

• Sarah Palin draped in an American Flag (and nothing else) – NOTE: this model has already been pre-ordered by millions of Republican men in the US
• Images of Barack Obama on the campaign trail with text from JFK’s “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” speech
• Images of Fred Thompson’s Hollywood roles and character, with the abridged text from Camus’ The Plague

Welcome, yooRyoo readers, to our Sunday feature – “Is It Real?” where we present a new Web 2.0 tool or technology, give you a brief overview of the product, and then ask you to vote on if it is real or not. There is a catch, though – you cannot use the internet in any way to help you guess your answer. That’s right – this is a gut-check guess!

We reveal the answer in the following Friday Fishwrap posting. That means you have all week to vote on whether you think this is real or not. Understood? Then let’s get started:

As you know, the Obama campaign is always on the forefront with new technologies to help promote their candidate…and the McCain campaign is desperately following on their heels. When Obama launched a Twitter feed, suddenly 30 McCain twitter feeds were created (29 of which are decidedly fake, but much more entertaining). Incidentally, Barack Obama has more than 80,000 people following his Twitter feeds.

You may have heard, the Obama campaign recently released their very own iPhone application – a way for Barack supporters to stay in touch with the candidate. Not to be outdone, the McCain campaign is now introducing their very own iPhone application. Similar to the Obama application, the McCain iPhone app allows users to get instant messages and campaign updates from their campaign.

But, as an added touch, McCain’s iPhone application contains a fun, imbeded game where you can control an animated version of McCain and Palin, and have them shoot at Iranian invaders, wolves (from a helicopter) and Russians from across the sea. This game is called “Grumpier Old Men” (since it’s loosely based on the movie).

So, yooRyoo friends, we ask – do you think that the McCain iPhone application is indeed real? Vote below…the answer will be revealed on Friday!

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Note to yooRyoo readers, the following item is entirely true…sometimes we can’t make these things up:

A Google engineer released a new extension to Gmail that is designed to prevent “drunk emailing.” Entitled “Mail Goggles,” the engineer posted the following description on his blog:

Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can’t always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we’re launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help.

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?

If you add Mail Goggles to your existing Gmail account, it will automatically turn on late on Friday and Saturday nights. Everytime you try to send an email, it will ask you a series of math questions to prove your sobriety. Here is a screenshot of some of those questions:

Again, we have to stress that although it sounds like one of our fake postings, this is entirely real.

Here is a screenshot of the settings panel:

Still don’t believe us? Feel free to download and install this at the Offical Gmail Blog.
 

Confronted with the possibility that Sarah Palin may possibly become the Vice President of the United States, a Silicon Valley technological manufacturing firm has developed a state-of-the art patch to cut out the shrill notes when Governor Palin is speaking.

This will become available in February, to coincide with the February 17, 2009 date when all television signals change from analog to digital (as well as the same date that the Cthuhlu old gods using the digital signal as a gateway to enter the earth plane and destroy the universe).

What the technology does is similar to what happens with MP3s” says the Palin Patch creator, Kip Fraunhofer. “It cuts out the irritating shrill notes that are audible to the human ear. What we’ve found with Palin, though, is that once you remove the shrill notes all you are left with is folksy sayings, parroted memorized phrases, winks and the occasional head cock. Hardly worth listening to at that point.”

A similar development effort is underway to replace all utterances of the word “Maverick” with white noise. The McCain campaign responded with: “White Noise? Are you attempting to pull the race card?”

Happy Friday everyone! Welcome to our weekly “Friday Fishwrap” where yooRyoo combs the web for fun, interesting videos that are designed to help you take a break from your work-week and give you a bit of lift!

In today’s Friday feature we first want to direct you to a really cool site online, designed to appeal to all you science geeks out there – the Periodic Table of Videos. Created by the science department at the University of Nottingham, they feature a video illustating every element on the Periodic Table. Enjoy!

For our very own imbeded video, as a break from the political ads and the grim news on the economy, today we feature a light film about a Code Monkey – animation set to the great song by Jonathan Coulton.

Have fun, and see you on Sunday, for our next installment of “Is It Real?”…

A new internet site originally created to serve television shows over the internet has been taken over by the Cthuhlu old gods as a gateway to enter the earth plane and destroy the universe. Similar to the current economic downturns, this sudden change in streaming online TV content has been been predicted before…but received no media attention.

Nearly a century ago, one of the original cultists (Old Castro) of the Ct’Hulu intoned:

They were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape…but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die

In retrospect, it is now known that he was talking about the advent of streaming online television content and the much balley-hooed conversion to digital TV programming.

The “much-discussed couplet” from Abdul Alhazred‘s Necronomicon confirms it:

That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange æons even death may die.^[15]

This not only refers to shows that are in endless syndication on nearly half of online HD cable networks (such as The Seinfeld Channel, Sci-Fi Channel’s Star Trek-a-paloosa and TV Land’s I Love Lucy – Eight Days a Week) but also direly prophecizes on-demand downloads of obscure TV programs from sites such as www.Hulu.com. These programs include Adam-12, Firefly and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Effectively, this is signaling the creation of the technology that would lead to the end of the world as we know it.

Astrologers and Ct’Hulu experts agree that the end of the world will start on 12:00:01 AM, February 17th, 2009 – which, coincidentally is the date that analog television will cease to be transmitted, and digital television programming exclusively broadcast.

The cultists of the Ct’Hulu gods state that a suitable transferrence medium will finally be available to herald the start of a new era:

The secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth….Then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

Or, as Congresswoman Marsha Black states on her website, “The technology allows broadcasters to transmit programming with higher resolution and dramatically improved picture/sound quality.”

Cultists remain skeptical.