Who are we? What are we thinking about or responding to or passionate about or interested in? On October 21, 2009, I gave a talk to NPR Weekend Edition and Digital staff, during their staff retreat. The topic was "Navigating the World Live Web." My goal was to look at how we can tell new kinds of stories from the intentional and unintentional data streams being created by millions of users of the internet. Or, to use Paul Simon's memorable phrase, "the way we look to us all." Here's the video:

The political world is buzzing today with condolences and reminiscences of Senator Edward Kennedy, and we here at PdF add our respects.

It's going to be an interesting day to watch how the live web reacts to the news and shapes its importance. Here's what I'm seeing so far...

The news that American southerners are the most likely to question whether President Obama is actually a native-born citizen got a lot of attention last Friday, when a Research2000 survey on that question was released by DailyKos. Eleven percent of all Americans apparently do not believe Obama was born in the United States, but 23% of southerners (compared to roughly 5% of people from the other regions of the country) share that belief. I thought it would be interesting to see what various trend-culling tools might add to this picture.

A look at Google Trends is certainly illuminating. The top ten states where people are searching on the phrase "Obama birth certificate" are:
1. Louisiana
2. Mississippi
3. Colorado
4. Oklahoma
5. Alabama
6. Tennessee
7. Arkansas
8. Missouri
9. South Carolina
10. North Carolina

The Next Right's Patrick Ruffini warns the GOP that if it concludes that President-elect Barack Obama earned the title merely by pushing the right levers on the Internet, "they will draw the wrong lessons from this year;" Where does Chris Hughes fit into an Obama administration?, tweets NYU's Jay Rosen. The Facebook founder was Obama's director of social-networking -- a job that's wholly without precedent in the West Wing; Google Hot Trends offers a peek into what people were scouring the Internet for just after the race was called last night at 11pm ET; and a good deal more.