As the 2008 US presidential election campaign finally approaches full steam, presumtive nominees Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama are facing off in the media to win hearts and minds. But which candidate is making the most of the of online social media services?

A visit to www.barackobama.com shows that the Obama campaign has established itself firmly in the social media world with an offical presence on major services such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn and more specialist sites such as Glee, Eons, MyBatanga, AsianAve and Faithbase.

On the Republican side, John McCain's presidential campaign has developed its basic Web presence with a mult-faceted Web site but McCain lags far behind Obama in terms of presence and supporters in the key online social media battlegrounds.

Condé Nast Publications (which owns Wired, Wired.com, and a whole bunch of major magazines) has agreed to purchase Ars Technica for an undisclosed sum.

According to TechCrunch, Ars will be placed under the Wired Digital umbrella under CondéNet, which was made whole with the 2006 acquisition of Wired.com, and may be combined with Wired and Wired.com. The sale will be announced some time in the next week, Mashable has confirmed.

Ars looks to be a good fit for Wired and Wired.com, especially given the similar styles of tech reporting available on on both networks. Both include traditional professional feature style reporting on technology and trends. Wired will benefit from the addition of the new writing staff and Ars will gain a new outlet from its reporting. We wouldn't be surprised to see their work appearing in other publications across the Condé Nast house. The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and even GQ (all Condé Nast publications) could stand to benefit from Gear and Gadgets and some of the other ongoing reporting from Ars Technica.

I was fortunate enough to see David Pogue's keynote on the opening day of the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference this Monday in Hershey, PA. PETE&C is a state-wide conference aimed at bringing together school technology directors, teachers, principals, IT professionals, and vendors to advance the state of technology in education.

While listening to Pogue briefly touch on many emerging trends and technologies like VoIP, improved text-to-speech, "Web 2.0" sites, and ubiquitous wireless, it became clear from the audience gasps and collective jaw-dropping that educators are not keeping up with technology changes. Demonstrations of technologies that have been around for more than two years were causing the educators to feverishly put pen to paper so they can take things like Skype back to their schools to use in the curriculum.

Yahoo! is getting ready to take the wrapper off TechTicker, an online program aimed at technology investors.

TechTicker specifically targets technology stocks in a portal type environment. The new program will offer streaming video, blog posts and breaking news targeting the technology investment sector. The portal and show which are said to be launching in January 2008, pick up where Yahoo! Finance Vision left off in 2002. Thankfully high speed connections are far more common in 2007 and better video compression tools are available to make internet based shows a feasible reality, rather than a pipe dream (no, we're not poking fun at Yahoo! Pipes, ok, maybe just a little). As for the other financial information that will be displayed, we assume it will resemble what Yahoo! Finance already does, but targeting technology specific companies.

With Yahoo! Finance high on the list of financial sites, TechTicker could be headed for great things. Of course, track records aside, we will have to wait for the roll out in order to really decide.

Check out what Yahoo! Finance Vision looked like back in the day.

Everyone most likely knows about that little shack in the woods in the Seattle suburb of Medina on the shores of Lake Washington that Bill Gates created in 1997, but have you ever been inside?

The $53 Million dollar, 66,000 square foot estate has all the technological goodies that you might not even be able dream up. With tons of centrally controlled music, lighting and video you can bet that this is the one of the most technologically advanced homes in the world. US News has put together a tour of the estate, from the pool building, to the library, to the underground garage so that you can drool over where the Forbes number one billionaire lives.

Some interesting tidbits:

• 104 electricians used
• All timber used in the house are perfectly finished and nearly perfect with almost no knots.
• All woodwork is flawless
• Acoustics were a big concern. Woods and fabrics were used to ensure perfect acoustics throughout the house.
• Flooring is heated, even in the driveway and walkways throughout the estate.
• Security system is monitored from the Microsoft campus.
• There is a salmon hatchery on the estate.
• 52 miles of communication cable
• Hidden cameras are everywhere, including some hidden inside stone walls.
• Floor sensors can track a person within 6 inches.
• The bathtub can be filled and temperature can be controlled by Gates as he drives home from work.

Was the Bill Gates estate designed on a PC? Well, not exactly, we can thank rival Apple for having a hand in it. (Not to worry, doesn't Microsoft own a small % of Apple anyway.) Check out some additional pictures of the estate here.

Also, check out the money face off, Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates on Blogging Stocks.

Google is schedule to present at the Citigroup Technology Conference in New York on September 6th 2007. The Director of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, and the Group Business Product Manager, Nicholas Fox, will participate in a question and answer session at the conference.

The Annual Technology Conference sponsored by CitiBank will be held from September 4th to 6th, at the Hilton New York. No word on what the team will discuss, but you can sure bet it will most likely be about search and technology. There will be a live audio webcast of the session at http://investor.google.com/webcast.html .

Tools for Twitter are cropping up all over the place to help you get your Twitter addiction game on. Twitbin is one of those enablers tools. As an extension in your Firefox browser, it allows you to post Twitter messages (or tweets as they are called) within the browser and receive tweets as well.

Once you download the extension, the Twitbin icon shows up in your browser. When you click on it, Twitbin opens as a sidebar and displays a toolbar. The gear icon allows you to set your preferences, either public or friend streams, and auto refresh settings.

The home icon lets you log into Twitter and once you do that, Twitbin streams your tweets. Sweet. When you close Twitbin, it stops gathering your tweets, and when you reopen, it will restart the tweet stream.

Twitbin works on Windows and Mac OS X, and possibly Linux as well (anyone test it out yet?). Stay tuned for a comprehensive "All things Twitter" post coming soon.

IBM has been out of the Consumer Electronic Show for ten years, and is now about to resurface again with an insurgence of new technologies to get their buzz going again. The last show they were at was in 1997, and now they have to prove again that they are heavy hitters in the industry. For the upcoming show, IBM is said to be planning to demonstrate how its technology, components, and top level business partnerships with the likes up Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have been used in many leading edge electronics like gaming systems and mobile devices. IBM has been doing a lot of interesting things lately to get in people's minds that they aren't old school anymore, and that they can hang with the cool kids once again. This includes a $10 million investment in technologies that can help build Second Life style virtual worlds.

The first thing I thought when I read that PayPerPost would acquire Performancing was "oh great." I am not a huge fan of PayPerPost and their less than ethical way of doing business. I wasn't happy about hearing that PayPerPost will acquire Performancing. You know, the site that is all about helping bloggers succeed? You'll be happy to know that despite this acquisition going down, the Performancing blog editor Firefox plugin many of us wear out daily, will be spun off into a new brand so that it isn't sullied by the likes of PayPerPost. Yay for democracy, or some kind of illogical sense on someone's part. I am sad now, I liked Performancing, the company and the plugin just the way it was. That's life though, right? To PayPerPost, I still am not a fan, but congrats on the nice acquisition of a great blogging company, please don't screw with it too much, m-kay?

[Via TechCrunch]