• The Aussie-ified version of Fix My Streets is, naturally, called It's Buggered, Mate.
• New York City call on an algorithm in an attempt to help people find jobs.
• Voters in Takoma Park, Maryland, get a chance to double check their votes online.
• Russ Feingold wants a web-friendly annotated Constitution.
• California Data Camp is taking place tomorrow in San Francisco.
• Expect the release of the White House's Open Gov Initiative mid-month, says @opengov.
• Senator McCaskill says that petition tweets to her don't work. (Thanks Shaun Dakin)
• A crowd gathered in front of the Egyptian Cultural Bureau to push for the release of a long-imprisoned blogger.
• The DSCC emails out an ask for Facebook, Twitter, and mobile followers.
• A upcoming IPDI event: Trust and Authenticity in Social Media: The Case of the U.S. Military.
• And Daily Kos goes green for an AFSCME-sponsored push for health care reform.

(With Micah Sifry and Nick Judd)

(With Nick Judd)

When it finally came time to tallying the votes late Tuesday night, New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg's victory over Democratic challenger and city comptroller Bill Thompson turned out to be remarkably narrow -- and surprisingly so, in part because of the gap the size of the Hudson between what the candidates spent on this race, some $81 million from Bloomberg's pocket to the $6.6 million Thompson dropped according to recent filings. What's particularly interesting for us here is how that difference in spending played out not only offline, but online as well.

PaidContent's Joseph Tartakoff reports that once and future Mayor Bloomberg poured some $2.1 million into online advertising though late October. And those records thus don't include Bloomberg's burst of web ads during the last week of the campaign, a blitz that made him nearly ubiquitous for online New Yorkers. A Google rep described that network-wide spending burst as "massive."

Indeed, spending records from the New York City Campaign Finance Board show that Bloomberg handed over more than two million dollars to Connections Media under the category of "Internet ads." Do the math, and it turns out that out of the whopping $145 that Bloomberg spent to pull each of his voters into the polls on Tuesday, just about $3.75 per voter went to buying Google ads and other online advertising. The DC-based Connections Media is headed up by web veteran Jonah Seiger.

Thompson, on the other hand, spent about $13 per voter, in his 46% to 50.6% defeat at the hands of Bloomberg, and while Thompson's spending records don't break down online advertising costs as cleanly as Bloomberg's do, the underdog Democrat laid out just $205,000 in consulting fees to the Obama-affiliated firm Blue State Digital. The one spending burst identified as going directly towards online ads came at the end of August, and rang in at just $10,000.

Both candidates, though, spent multiples more on television advertising than they did on online ad spots. Here too, getting Thompson's buying power anywhere in the neighborhood of Bloomberg's would require shifting the decimal point. Bloomberg handed over $29.5 million to the DC firm Squier Knapp Dunn, and Thompson spent $1.7 million in TV ads, directed to the Philadelphia and California admakers The Campaign Group.

When all is said and done, the number reflect just out outmatched financially Thompson was in his competition with Bloomberg, online and off. Thompson, for example, spent just slightly more on the web gurus Blue State Digital as Bloomberg paid in postage.

With the House about to vote on the Democratic health care bill tomorrow, I thought it would be interesting to check in on the pulse of the online debate over health care reform. This is of course an unscientific look at the public zeitgeist, but the popularity of certain key words on Twitter suggests that the tide has turned and anti-heath reform rhetoric has peaked, or at least isn't spreading.

Take a look at this trendline from Trendistic, looking at three terms: "obamacare", "public option" and "hcr". The first is used often by opponents of the Democrats' plans; public option is the battle-cry of the progressive base; and "hcr" is a generic tag that is mostly used by supporters of the Democratic mainstream.

The August peak on the chart is from the height of the townhall battles; the September peaks are from President Obama's joint address to Congress and more recent highpoints in the movement of legislation (the Baucus bill drop, etc). As you can see, the "Obamacare" meme has gotten weaker, not stronger, from its peak in the summer months.

Why, it's nearly as good as having a seat in a House conference room, surrounded by congressional Republicans! The National Republican Congressional Committee is going full-on multimedia in its push to zero in just how long their Democratic counterparts' health care legislation is, and to make the point that processing all that legislation from scratch is a lot to ask for in 72 hours. On both Facebook and Twitter, the NRCC is progressively "reading" the 2,000 or so page hunk of legislation and providing real-time updates like "36 new government entities and we're only on page 1,089." Want to read H.R. 3962 while on the go? There's an app for that, says the NRCC in a new YouTube video that jokes about how a bill that big will bring your iPhone to a screeching halt.

• A rather amazing block-by-block look at the results from New York City's mayoral race Tuesday between Mike Bloomberg and Bill Thompson, from the New York Times.
• Interest in House Dems' health care legislation brings down Open Congress...
• Interest that includes House Republicans using the site to vet the bill text.
• The DNC didn't really want Mainers to get active in New Jersey on election day, and blames an email mix-up.
• Ask the U.S. about Sudan strategy.
• Draft legislation emerges on web-based voter registration.
• Quiz time! Do you know your government innovators?
• And Marc Ambinder encourages a deep reading of CharlieandObama.com.

(With Micah Sifry)

The Hill's Kim Hart has the story on Facebook's run for attorney general in California. Okay, so technically, it's Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly who is in the race, but Kelly concedes that he's well known as "the Facebook guy." His website is, as Hart notes, awfully Facebooky. And as the company's point person on privacy (and a public face for an industry that didn't even really exist a decade ago), he's been working with attorneys general in all fifty states -- putting him in a good position to know both sides of the policy debate on some of the more cutting edge issues a California attorney general is likely to face.

That said, Kelly says that he hasn't really embraced the idea of integrating the social tools he knows well and the digital megaphones he has before him into his statewide race. "You have to appreciate," Kelly told Hart, "that the cadence of a campaign is just important online as it is off."

The New York State Senate's new Open Legislation portal launched this morning, meant as an upgrade to this. Among the new features on this beta version of Open Legislation: the dead-simple Google-like search interface you see above, and, thanks to the advent of permalinks, the ability for Google to actually crawl and serve up the site. Beyond that, the new portal has an assortment of options for tracking and pulling structured legislative information, either via API or data feed (XML, CSV, and JSON). What's more, there's built in commenting, so you can make your opinion known. Down the road, says state senate CIO Andrew Hoppin, the site will grow to be a tool for preemptive disclosure, as a home for documents and materials previously available only through Freedom of Information Law requests.

Give it a test drive.

If you are one, you'll have to find something else to blame. A new report from the fine folks at Pew compares the social isolation and integration of those Americans who regularly use the Internet and mobile phones compared to those who, I guess, read books and go bowling instead. (It's worth noting that the metric that Pew is using here is only the extent to which we have discussions with other people, rather than other kinds of social engagement.) This is the sort of research that helps flesh out the promise of using connective technology to build civil society and the political realm, and what Pew has to say here sets the baseline -- we're not all socially isolated, at least not because we spend time on the computer. Sayeth Pew...

An interesting little outgrowth of the White House's preliminary data release last week of the visitor logs on who came knocking at the White House: the public emergence of, to borrow a term from Facebook, what we might call the White House's "social graph." The Obama White House has committed to uploading the Executive Office of the President's visitor records every 90 days from here on out. Those online public posts, which make up the raw material of the White House's network, looks ready to become something people learn to negotiate -- casually musing over it in public and worrying about their standing in while in private. Kinda like Twitter.

Exhibit A: After Andy Stern, president of the SEIU, drew attention for having visited the White House more than twenty times over the first few months of the Obama presidency, including seven visits with Barack Obama himself and others with senior White House staff. While it's not an awful thing for a union leader to see himself painted as a White House insider, his "friends" in the White House might not love that particular kind of attention. Some social negotiation was in order. The SEIU thus took to their blog to frame why the Obama White House so often welcomed their boss. "Coming off an eight-year period when the voice of workers fell on deaf ears," blogged the SEIU new media team, "the list demonstrates the White House desire to hear from working people." (Photo credit: Lisa DeJong)

• Global Voices launches Threatened Voices.
• Media Matters launches a database of conservative funding.
• And Organizing for America (sorta) relaunches a version of Neighbor to Neighbor that has privacy activist Shaun Dakin pleased.