Today the Associated Press estimated 200,000 people attended Obama's speech in Berlin. One of the iconic photos from this historical speech will surely be Jae C. Hong's (with the AP) image that you see above, a similar version to this is already on the New York Times website right now and will probably end up printed on the front page tomorrow.

The only thing more powerful than this picture of this amazing crowd would be an aggregated of collage of the 458 people that have their cameras in hand, which are marked as white dots here. At 1:00 am on July 25th, there are currently 1,060 photo's tagged with Obama + Berlin. You can be sure tens of thousands more will be shared and posted in the coming days on flickr and other sites.

We’re still following what’s happening with FISA, and we saw some interesting trends today. Look at the difference in coverage of FISA on different mediums.

Here’s at look at the number of posts about FISA on Twitter over the last two weeks.

You can see that there was more chatter about FISA on Twitter yesterday than at any point over the last two weeks. That’s a different story than what you see when looking at coverage from mainstream news sources and blogs.

Here are the stories about FISA picked up by Google News over the last two weeks:

And here are the blog posts about FISA picked up by Technorati over the same period: Read more »

Sometimes monitoring blogs and mainstream news sources just isn’t enough. This can become very apparent when you’re trying to manage your company’s brand or image while an issue is exploding in your lap.

One example of this is the uproar that happened when Senator Obama decided to support the compromise bill on FISA immunity recently passed by the House. These tweets were posted on Twitter just as the group Senator Obama Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity — Get FISA Right, was forming on my.barackobama.com to protest Obama’s stance on FISA.

The anger that caused people to post these tweets has helped the anti-FISA group become the singe largest in Obama’s own online community: a fact that has received significant media coverage from mainstream sources. Read more »

I heard the news this morning that Hillary Clinton was dropping out of the Democratic primary race. As soon as I could, I went to Managing News where I’m tracking news about the candidates to see what was happening.

Right away I noticed that one keyword in particular received a huge spike: the Associated Press. Here’s a screenshot showing the jump in mentions of the AP today compared to the last two weeks in the political news I’m tracking.

The AP had been mentioned in about 0.5% of the stories pulled in by Managing News over the last two weeks. Today that figure jumped over ten-fold to 5.3%.

So why was there suddenly so much traffic around the Associated Press? The AP was reporting that Clinton will concede the nomination to Obama this evening after the results come in from Montana and South Dakota, and a lot of other sources were citing them on this.

That story drew an immediate retraction from Clinton campaign spokesperson Terry McAuliffe (who, as you can see shown in blue below, saw his own bump in mentions today). Read more »