Daily Digest:

The Daily Digest will be taking a long weekend to ring in 2009 and will return Monday. Have a safe and happy start to what should prove to be an exciting year.

• A Connected White House...: Sure, you could spend these last waning hours of aught-eight in existential reflection on how admirably you spent the last twelve months, examining how to be a better you the year ahead. Nah. Spend them catching up the ongoing transition from wired Obama campaign to a presidential administration connecting with supporters and non-supporters alike, via the Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas's recap piece, "e-Hail To the Chief." Vargas captures some provocative quotes, including a few gems from our own Andrew Rasiej and this from former Bush White House Internet director David Almacy: "Obama is the first online social networking president."

• ...Meets an Electrified America: Speaking of social networking (Contrived segue? Who, us?) Pew's out with a new study that finds that a good chunk -- 62% -- of Obama voters have it in their heads to support President Obama's legislative agenda by pestering their friends, neighbors, and arch nemeses, and a full quarter of them expect to do it online. That's a sizable slice of supporters laying in wait to help push the new administration's priorities where it matters most -- in the hearts and minds of those people closest to them. When it comes to the GOP side of things, Pew found that 5% of online Americans and 9% of wired Republicans have poked around on sites dedicated to efforts to rebuild the party (like RebuildtheParty.com, for example). Single digits, sure, but not nothing when you think that Democrats have just laid claim to the the House, Senate, and White House.

• Training of the Rightroots: Speaking of rebuilding the GOP, NextGenGOP's Aaron Marks makes a case for the idea that "we might be on the verge of establishing a true and effective Rightroots movement." Notably, Marks focuses on discrete tool and projects -- the aforementioned RebuildtheParty.com, DiggCons, and Top Conservatives on Twitter (#TCOT). The Next Right's Patrick Ruffini sensibly plays the contrarian, arguing against tech tool fetishism -- "less meta and more purpose." What the online right needs, says Ruffini, is to put some hard-nosed political objectives up on the chalk board. Only then should the question be asked about how to use technology to move those goals into the accomplishments column. A useful reminder, but we'll match Ruffini's contrariness with our own. Young GOP operatives aren't born with a complete mastery of how to use Twitter (with Patrick as the possible exception). You can look at things like #TCOT as essential teeth cutting, without which conservatives won't know which arrow to pull out of the quiver when the time comes.

• Twitter, Not for Serious People Doing Serious Things: The Israeli government is eager to make its case that the ongoing airstrikes in Gaza are justified and restrained, and are using Twitter and YouTube to do it, as Nancy Scola covered on techPresident yesterday. On her cable TV program last night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow had a good deal of fun with the Israeli consulate in New York's experimental "press conference" yesterday held entirely on Twitter. (It comes about two minutes into that clip.) The crisis in the Middle East, says Maddow, is something that very clever people write big heavy books about, a topic of such complexity that smart newsmen and women struggle to explain it -- not Twitter fodder. Strawman, party of one! Perhaps reporters should refrain from asking presidents, prime minister, and press secretaries questions about the crisis in Gaza and instead correspond via competing graduate theses? Take a look at the White House's latest press conference on the conflict. White House Deputy Press Secretary Gordon Johndroe answers often don't go much beyond 140 characters. In other news on the Gaza-gets-wired front, Benjamin Nethanyahu is out with a YouTube video, saying "imagine your town, your neighborhood, your home was being rocketed again and again by thousands of incoming missiles, again and again. Imagine what you would do." And @gazanews is an anonymous Twitterer passing on news from the Palestinian perspective; sample tweet: "Military expert: the continued firing of rockets from resistance mean the failure of Israel."

• If Millions of Gallons of Coal Ash Spill and No One Hears It...: The websites of Tennessee's elected leaders offer nothing to constituents on the recent spill of millions of gallons of toxic coal ash in eastern Tennessee, the appropriately-named Michael Silence of KnoxNews reports. "[A]ll this does is reinforce Congress' image of being slow, inept and ineffective," writes Silence. "In many situations, that's good for America. But not this one." (Thanks Jay Rosen) You can, however, follow #coalash on Twitter. That's no substitute for political leadership, of course. But you will find there some awesome content, like this video of a canoe trip on the lake of sludge.

• TPM, DC: The Talking Points Memo empire isn't waiting to see how the future of the news business shakes out, continuing its expansion by installing two new blogger-reporters in Washington DC to cover the ever-changing political scene. One blog-porter will cover Capitol Hill, the other the White House. (Does that mean they've scored credentials?) "Significantly redeploying our resources," proprietor Josh Marshall calls it, and they're asking for reader suggestions on how to improve the way Washington reporting is done.

• One-Click Congress: TweetCongress has added a way to follow every member of Congress now on Twitter in one fell swoop.

In Case You Missed It...

Nancy Scola look at how the viewership of Change.gov's YouTube channel has dropped off of late, though the transition's new media team should find comfort in the fact that they still rank among the site's most-viewed.