Hurricane Gustav was a huge story, of course, and thankfully it’s now finally looking like New Orleans and Gulf Coast areas are taking far less damage than what might have been expected. This story, from Web Worker Daily, outlines T-Mobile’s efforts to open up its WiFi “hot spots” for free so that people in affected areas could more easily communicate with family and friends. Good for T-Mobile, and great to see how technology can have some small positive impact during times of emergency.

Twitter is a huge part of course in how people are reporting, communicating, and staying informed during unfolding events. I’ve become particularly interested in services that take advantage of Twitter’s open API to pull data out and do interesting things with them.

That ties into the US presidential election, which is kicking into high gear, and perhaps levels beyond that too. Between Barack Obama’s historic and electrifying speech at the Democratic National Convention, John McCain’s selection of little known Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential selection (you can find me obsessing about all of this on good old Twitter), and the Republican National Convention and the wrench thrown at it by Gustav, there was no end of things to chat about for the political world over the weekend.

Govtweets (found via TechCrunch pulls Twitter “tweets” based on politically-oriented keywords, and serves them up in an eye-pleasing stream. For instance, right now there are lots of tweets displayed based on the keyword “Palin.” They featured a thumbnail picture of the potential Vice President and are color-coded GOP thread. Likewise, “Obama”-based tweets feature the Democratic nominee and are colored blue. The thumbnail picture of the tweeter is also featured as well. It’s a neat little site, and I expect that we’ll see a lot more of these kinds of niche services based on the huge galaxy of conversations taking place on Twitter (and other social media platforms) over time.

Finally, I was up late one night and wound up surfing around Hulu looking for old television shows to check out. Struck by a sense of ’90s nostalgia perhaos, I wound up watching an old episode of Party of Five. I later caught a TechCrunch story rumbling up some theories about how Hulu could end up as a bigger business than YouTube.

My take is that Hulu does a pretty state-of-the-art job of delivering high quality vetted video content and serving ads around it. However, I wouldn’t bet against YouTube (and Google) to lead out the development of a next-gen standardized video ad model.