Its that time once again boys and girls, here’s some updates on the stories I brought you last week,

Celebrity Candidate Endorsements: My Life on the D-List: I haven’t read about any more celebrity endorsements lately, but I have come across some more articles that may help shed light on things including, an article by John F. Brinson entitled ‘Voters shouldn’t put stock in celebrity endorsements’, as well as Anderson Cooper’s take on celebrity endorsements, and finally an article from WIS TV 10 out of Columbia, SC which asked readers, ‘Do celebrity endorsements make a difference to you when choosing a presidential candidate?’

The Iowa Caucus: Porno for Political Junkies: We all know Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee won, but the real question is not who won in Iowa, but how it effected people’s backing of the candidates, especially in the next primary in New Hampshire.
According to polls conducted by Gallup, amongst likely voters in NH, Obama has risen from 32% support to 41% between the polls conducted Dec 17-19 and those conducted Jan 4-6, amongst registered voters the jump was from 32 to 39, Hillary Clinton has fallen from 32-28 amongst likely voters and 35 to 34 amongst registered voters. Support for John Edwards remains large unchanged, as well as for all other candidates. It is interesting to note that before dropping out Dodd and Biden were polling at 4% and 1% respectively so the bump could be explained largely by margin of error and those who support Obama previously supporting those two candidates.

On the Republican side Iowa caucus winning Mike Huckabee has jumped from 9 to 13 and 9 to 14 in the likely/registered polls, and John McCain has jumped from 27 to 34 and 26 to 33, with Mitt Romney falling from 34 to 30 and 34 to 29. Rudy has fallen from 11 to 8 and 13 to 8, with Ron Paul falling a percentage point in each. Other candidates remain unchanged, and most of this is within the margin of error for the December 17-19th poll(5%) and the January 4-6th poll(4%).

What does this all mean? It means that there’s likely a little bump from the Iowa caucus, but not a huge amount, and that it could equally be likely that campaigning in the state has contributed more to NH success then anything else. If you’re interested in the full polling data it can be found here.

Oh yeah, and the news that no one seemed to care about, Romney won the Wyoming caucus.

Is the HD Format War Really Over?: Gizmodo had an article about the sadest sight in the world, the HD DVD sponsored bags at CES, even those HD DVD has pulled post of its support from the show. The Far Side of Tech has a great article about what all this means for HD DVD, encouraging a wait and see stance. Toshiba for its part has declared that the HD DVD format isn’t dead yet, and is shocked by WB’s decision. By all accounts Toshiba still plans to ship HD DVD drives with all of its new laptops this year, and throw more money at HD DVD, counter to my earlier assertion that I thought Toshiba would cut and run, but this may be a move by Toshiba to get rid of all the drives they have already produced before they do indeed cut and run.

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