Digg just announced the addition of two new topics on the site – one about a boring software company I don’t follow and the other, the US 2008 Presidential Election. It’s going to get heated in there – people assume that Digg has a liberal bias but conservatives are very comfortable going there as well. Michelle Malkin, besides making one of the most well produced video blogs on the web, has encouraged people to go there in droves, if I remember the story correctly. (Here’s the discussion of the announcement.)

Anyway, what better time than now to post here a wonderful SplashCast creation – one embedded media player that contains all the candiates’ offical YouTube videos and updates automatically as it’s populated by RSS feeds. Woo hoo! I’m going to be working on promoting this one and many other related channels to relevant bloggers in the coming weeks. I don’t even like any of the candidates – not at all, I just think this is a very cool use of SplashCast. So let’s celebrate Digg’s insane move into thumbs-up, thumbs-down partisan politics on a large scale with a player right here and now.

Having run out of dour topics to post about here 🙂 I thought I’d share a quick link that I think people will appreciate. Are you wondering just what’s going on with the Belgian papers suing to get out of Google News? Danny Sulivan has written an excellant post about it, complete with an interview from one of the Belgian parties. It’s here.

The shortest version of the story here is that Danny suspects that the Belgian papers don’t really want out of Google, they just want Google to pay them before indexing their content. That’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t. Very interesting story though, in its details.

A week after a number of media sources wrote about Arab terrorists posting violent footage on YouTube, some press has begun to take note of video on the site uploaded by drug traffickers in Mexico. See the example video embedded at the end of this post. Though these films are essentially murder-photo montages set to music celebrating gang warfare, few of them appear to have been removed from YouTube. I hope they don’t take them down. This is a very real part of life in this world and people ought to see it. Why do these men end up shooting each other and making videos about it for money, adventure and dignity? For political context, I’ll refer you to my favorite article on the topic.

Further context is offered if only indirectly from the Wikipedia entry on involuntary human trafficking, including the estimation that 14,000 people are trafficked into the US as slaves every year. A fair number of those people are brought through or to the city I live in, Portland, Oregon. Just some things I’m thinking about this morning.

Starting Sunday or Monday I’ll be filling it at TechCruch for a couple of weeks while Michael Arrington is traveling. He’ll still be posting but I will help make sure things get covered while he’s on the road. I’ve been more focused on the video/media sharing part of the web 2.0 world lately than I have on the industry in general – so if you’ve got hot tips send them my way. I can be reached for this purpose at marshall@techcrunch.com. I’ll keep posting at SplashCast during this time as well and I hope you’ll read the blog there too. Wowzers, here comes a couple weeks of super blog-o-rama insanity. I’m looking forward to it, for old times’ sake if nothing else.

Check out this great video about the nature of the web by Prof. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. Very well produced and thought provoking. It’s titled “The Machine is Us/ing Us” and I found it via Frank Gruber. After the first video plays, check out the other videos Mr. Wesch has posted to YouTube (they are in the same player on this page). If you’re reading this post via an RSS reader and can’t see the SplashCast player below – here’s a link for you to preview the whole show I’ve put together with the RSS feed of Wesch’s videos.

What a great use of online video for education!

I’m flying to Palm Desert, CA for DEMO in the morning and then shapow – we’ll all be syndicatable via SplashCast. It’ll be great, you’ll love it. If you’re a blogger who’s interested in writing a review drop me a line and I’ll send you our bloggers press pack under embargo.

Update: We’re live, here’s the announcement. Much thanks to everyone for all your support; I hope SplashCast will become an important tool in your online communication.

Looking for some insightful new voices to read in the blogosphere? Check out the just launched Media 2.0 Workgroup – a very cool aggregation of some smart, engaged bloggers.