Ballot initiatives are notoriously confusing things. Even the very wording of the title that will go before voters can prompt court cases and epic political battles between partisans. Come this November 4th, voters in 15 states will have the chance to cast votes for more than McCain, Obama, Barr, or any other presidential candidate. They'll be asked to be the judge and jury on more than 150 ballot measures, ranging from California's Proposition 8 on same-sex marriage to Colorado's Coors family-backed Amendment 47 on the right of workers to not participate in a union. Complex stuff, but wouldn't you know it -- there are resources online that can help make sense of it all.

The Hill has the story. The tsunami of public interest in yesterday's congressional battle over the bailout bill brought down websites across the House.gov domain, including Speaker Pelosi's and the House Financial Services Committee's sites. In an attempt to stay afloat, the House's in-house administrators are now restricting the number of constituent emails coming into the system.

"Far as I can tell, most if not all the people in my industry who get stuff done are for barack," says Craigslist's Craig Newmark, in introducing a Tech for Obama video; Hungry for Obama, which is said to have raised nearly $10,000 for the campaign thus far, joins the plethora of other grassroots efforts that aim to tap into supporter talents and expertise to support the Obama campaign; "It's the difference between open and closed source." That's the RNC's "eCampaign" director Cyrus Krohn on the Obama and McCain approaches to using technology to power their operations, as quoted by CIO Insight's Ed Cone in a four-part article he's working on concerning the Obama campaign's ground game; and a good deal more.

I gave a talk tonight discussing 10 years in the future, internet and politics, what it might produce. In researching the talk I found some current day political spores. Spore, for those who haven't followed, is a massive single player online game, sort of like facebook for rapidly evolving avatar-beast creatures, where you get to constantly update yourself, in the face of evolutionary challenges. (Spore-players, please correct me.)

A friend and colleague has started a cool new mashup of everyone's two favorite things: food and Obama. The idea is to simply host a dinner with friends, ask everyone to donate a certain amount to the Obama campaign, and have each attendee host their own dinner in return.

It's called Hungry for Obama, and it's catching on, in part because of this cool logo:

Here's something I can't say I recall happening, and I spent a few years hanging around Capitol Hill and keeping a close eye on such things. With the somewhat startling news that the House of Representatives rejected the historic bailout bill, the main House website at House.gov has gone down, at least from my laptop/browser/ISP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi's site -- and for that matter, The Gavel, her blog -- is unresponsive. The website of Rep. Barney Frank's Financial Services Committee, the committee of jurisdiction on the bill, is unreachable. The site of the Office of the Clerk, which keeps tabs on who voted how on the bill, is kaput. And Thomas.gov, the official legislative archive of the United States Congress, just hangs when you search for the bill. At a time when the American people want to hear directly from their elected leaders, it's indeed unfortunate (and the slightest bit unsettling) that we've lost one means of hearing from them. People are a bit nervous today, and with good reason. And getting 404 errors from Capitol Hill isn't necessarily the ideal way to calm those fears.