After all, it is Friday afternoon before a three-day weekend. You can afford to take a few minutes to learn more about Sara Palin and maybe have a quiet chuckle...

Liveblogging the DNC; sleuthing out McCain's VP pick; Sarah Palin will make these bloggers happy; Get your ObamaTaxCut.com; McCain's classy and messy moves; Obama's text-messaging machine revs up.

Day 4 of our DNC Coverage

Here are two words that have yet to be uttered from the stage of the Democratic National Convention: BarackObama.com or Democrats.org. I've slogged through the posted transcripts of the first three days speeches in Denver, and using the "find" tool on Firefox could not find one occurrence of either phrase. This is more than a minor slip by Team Obam, in my humble opinion.

When I go to events that mix the Internet and politics, whether it's Rootscamp or Netroots Nation or our own Personal Democracy Forum, I often seem to know quite a bit of the crowd -- just by virtue of having worked in this space for a handful of years now. Things are different here at the Democratic National Convention. But I'm not at all complaining.

Day 3 of our DNC Coverage

On Day Three of the Democratic National Convention, there are signs that the party is shying away from treating bloggers as activists and starting to treat them as press -- with all the benefits and indignities that can carry.

As the Democratic National Convention churns along down at the Pepsi Center, there's been a pretty steady stream of politicians flowing through the Big Tent, the gathering point for bloggers, activists, and other new-media types a few blocks from the main hall. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin is on his way in, DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen is scheduled to pop by this afternoon, and California Senator Barbara Boxer is slated for tomorrow. It's a smart move for politicos -- divert themselves from the "official" convention for a half and hour or so to rack up a little face time with bloggers, many of whom will make note of the visit.

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, who gave a well-recieved speech in the Pepsi Center last night, just stopped by the Big Tent. Schweitzer is inagurably a pretty funny guy, and he put on a good show here. I caught a little Qik footage of the tail end of his visit. In it, he ties Barack Obama's chances in Montana to guns and Bob Barr, and he gets in a little good-natured snark in about the assembled bloggers. Have a look:

Just like 3 million other Americans, I signed up for the Barack Obama campaign's now famous VP announcement text message. But once I received it, albeit at 3AM, what caught my attention was not the Senator's selection of Joe Biden but rather a confirmation that the worlds of technology, media, and politics were merging even faster than I had previously thought. At the end of the short 160 character message was an invitation to watch the Democratic candidates first joint appearance together, “Watch the first Obama-Biden rally live at 3PM ET” not on CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, or C-Span but “on www.BarackObama.com”

Is 2008 the MySpace/Facebook election? You might think so from the political attention and resources invested in online social networks in the past year or so. But for all the prominence of online social networks, they haven't been as critical to this year's primaries as some had predicted, and recent survey results from the E-Voter Institute provide a possible explanation.