Wow, a 15-year-old did a huge analysis of my blog. Some of the things he’s found:

Since moving to WordPress I’ve typed 2,103,816 characters.
Average of four characters a word.
4706 characters a day.
464,078 words total.
192 words a post.
Compare that to Shakespeare who only wrote 884,647 words.
2405 posts.
I’ve linked to 4,992 pages. 4321 of them unique. Spread out across 1858 domains.
Two links a post, 86% of the links being unique.

Interesting, thanks Yuvi!

Nice to have one of my favorite people, Scott Beale, on the ScobleShow today along with former CEO of Corbis, Doug Rowan, who now is an investor in several photo companies including ZoomAlbum. Talking about photography.

Well, my trip into the world of politics has ended. I’m on Southwest Airlines going back home to Oakland.

I just flew into Reno with John Edwards and his staff. They tell me that last time around they never had crowds like the ones they are seeing. I just walked past a 100-yard-long line of people.

It was really great to see Don Dodge and Alfred Thompson in New Hampshire. Don has a blog up with some photos of me. The reason he was outside was there were hundreds of people who couldn’t get inside the building, so he — unplanned — went outside and talked with the crowd. Here in Reno he’s going to have to do the same thing. There are hundreds of people who can’t get in.
The entire trip Edwards rode with us. Staff, press, and bloggers. The staffers tell me that’s highly unusual for a Presidential Candidate. I got to listen in on their meetings and their reactions.

41,000 people watched him online yesterday in Iowa.

I asked him if he’d continue blogging and getting bloggers access, he said that he’ll invite other bloggers to come along on future trips.

By the way, I sat next to reporters from Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. They told me they pay every part of the trip and won’t accept free travel or other things.

The problem is how do average citizens do trips like this and get access if they have to pay their own way? That’s going to be a problem. Maybe bloggers should start an association to pay for their own representatives to go on trips like this. That way we’ll make sure we keep our independence and credibility, while getting access to things like this.

Heheh, the staff is looking at Webmetrics right now to see what kind of increase in mentions they are seeing on the Web.

Paul Lancour of PodTech called me last night, we had a nice conversation about what I’m experiencing, and he put it up for you to listen in on. Another day, another packed schedule coming.

One thing I’ve never seen as a Californian is the interactions that normal everyday people have with political candidates like they have in Iowa. Mostly that’s cause Democratic politicians know they need to win in Iowa to be nominated. But partly because of the political culture that’s here. I mean 1,500 people packed a hall tonight to hear John Edwards speak with almost two years to go before the general election. The rest of us usually would just ignore this stuff cause there’s no way to engage or make your own impact.

Here Jake Ludington, a geek working on Lockergnome, brings a small Sanyo Xacti camera and records some of one of those conversations and put it up on Google video. No mainstream video press was around.

If this was 1992 I doubt you would have ever seen this conversation shared with all of you. I recorded the entire conversation (Jake only got part of it, his camera ran out of storage space), will have it up next week, along with lots of intimate conversations. Oh, yeah, that is Chuck Olson filming for Rocketboom in the background of Jake’s video.

Note that the people asking the questions sound like “professional press.” But they are not. They are average citizens who got to come backstage before his townhall meeting. The culture in Iowa is to sit down with candidates and have conversations with them and triangulate on what they really stand for.

Another example of technology being used by campaigns is the online townhall meeting that will start in 20 minutes. I hear there’ll be live video streaming too.

During that townhall I understand they’ll give out a text code that you can use on your cell phone to register to join a mailing list. UPDATE: The video feed is here.