Daily Digest: Google's Blend of Searchin' and Schmoozin'

The Web on the Candidates

• Got to Get Political, Political GOOG's Got to Get: You can count on one hand the number of years it has been since Google took its first tentative steps into the Beltway, setting up a meagerly staffed lobbying shop in DC. But in '08, Google seems to be coming into its political teenagehood. The company has just released Google Power Readers, a Google Reader-based site that collects tagged RSS items from John McCain and Barack Obama (suuure...) and "political journalists" from Arianna Huffington to Red State's Patrick Ruffini. A new, rather minimalist Google 2008 U.S. Election site features Google election maps, YouTube videos, and Google News reports on the candidates. And Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland reports that Google is hoping to make a big splash at the upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions, hosting, for example, a joint Ben Affleck-attended party with Vanity Fair on the final night of the Dem gathering in Denver. #

• America's Golden Boy(s): We've got high-grade Olympic fevah, so we were tickled to find this chart mapping the eerie similarities between swimmer Michael Phelps and Senator Barack Obama. ("Prominent ears? Check.") Fun stuff. But here's hoping the vote in November goes a bit more smoothly that the convoluted judging of women's gymnastics -- where, apparently, two competitors can get the same exact judges' score and only one goes home with the big prize. Boy are we lucky that democracy never gets that messy! #

• Mo' Money Mo', Well, Money: Democratic fundraising PAC ActBlue has just hit the $60 million mark, after reaching the $50 million milestone only back in June. To give you a sense of how quickly ActBlue has grown, we remember quite well when, as recently as 2006, former Virginia governor Mark Warner became among the very first major politicians to tap into the power of ActBlue back when he was preparing a possible entry into the '08 presidential contest. (Hmm, on second thought, maybe that points to how truly interminable this race for the White House has been.) In its release, ActBlue helpfully points out that its fairly new counterpart on the right, Slatecard, has raised just over half of what ActBlue did when it was similarly finding its footing. #

The Candidates on the Web

• Duty, Honor, Blogging: L'affair John Edwards has exposed a rift in the liberal blogosphere, with blogger Lee Stranahan getting himself banned from Daily Kos for both pursuing the story with vigor and insisting to his fellow Kossacks that the left ignored the extramarital rumblings about the former North Carolina senator at its own peril. Now BlogHer political director Erin Kotecki Vest is defending Stranahan and chiding the netroots for pointedly ignoring the Edwards story. We've entered, says Vest, into "the world of 'obligation' for bloggers and their communities" which requires delving into even unpleasant rumors and news. #

• Obama's Secret: Hard Work, Details: MIT Technology Review's David Talbot picks apart MyBarackObama.com in an attempt to divine just how, precisely, the campaign's internal social network has powered its run thus far. (You'll notice a bunch of TechPres folks featured in the article, particularly Personal Democracy Forum co-founder Andrew Rasiej.) Of particular focus in Talbot's piece is how MyBO was harnessed to turn out volunteers and voters in the Texas two-step, the primary/caucus hybrid where Obama turned in a surprisingly strong performance. Some classic Joe Trippi: "This year, it was the network, stupid!" We'll boil down Talbot's take on how the Obamans became the zen masters of social tech for you: they (1) embraced a measured dependence on networked tools and then (2) translated that embrace into making sure they got the little things right. But Talbot's piece is long and rich, and well worth a read. #

TechCongress and Beyond

• It Depends on What Your Definition of "Led" Is: McCain's spanking new tech policy proposal asserts that the senator from Arizona took the initiative in creating both the national Do Not Call Registry and the CAN-SPAM Act -- two of the biggest tech directives to come out of Washington in recent years. But former Bill Clinton Chief Counselor for Privacy Peter Swire begs to differ with that account. (Thanks Shaun Dakin) #

• Seeking: U.S. CTO, ASAP: Lotus 1-2-3 creator, Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder, chair of the Mozilla Foundation, board chairman for the company behind Second Life, and...hang on, taking a breath...Obama tech advisor Mitch Kapor is making the case that the U.S. desperately needs a Chief Technology Officer to put America on the digital cutting edge. It's a governing model pioneered by states like Virginia, which has a Secretary of Technology charged with maximizing the e-potential of that state. But with technology threading through almost every area of government these days, the challenge is figuring out how to empower a CTO to actually, you know, get stuff done without constantly stepping on the toes of everyone else in the bureaucracy. #

In Case You Missed It...

Micah Sifry picks up on the milestone marked by Obama's TXT MY VP effort -- it makes his the first presidential campaign to have a full-featured mobile platform. #