Daily Digest: Politics? One Column, Two Sentences, a Headline!

(We're trying out a new feature to make it easier to link to individual items in the Daily Digest, should you be so inclined to shower some link love upon us. Each bulletpoint is now marked with a # which provides a direct link to its place on the Interweb.)

The Web on the Candidates

• "Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline!" We've got Fahrenheit 451 on the brain this morning. Ray Bradbury painted a scary portrait of a dystopian future where factoids replaced thinking and the public attention span resembled that of a gnat. If it has felt lately that we're living in that world, are there maybe signs of hope on the horizon? It seemed like much of the world tuned in yesterday to watch the entirety of Barack Obama's 26-minute speech delivered from in front of Berlin's Victory Column yesterday. Even Rush Limbaugh played extended clips. It's impossible to know how many people have watched it on YouTube, as those numbers appear to be stuck -- they've been at 66,996 for hours now. But Obama's field video director has reported that one of the surprises of the campaign has been how people seem to prefer longer documentary-style videos to polished sound bites. At under half an hour, Obama's speech did seem a bit short. Maybe that's the ideal length for a long YouTube video? #

• In his Berlin speech, Obama called for the world to start standing up for the "the blogger in Iran." Given that the traditional press has been so repressed for so long in so many countries, why would Obama focus specifically on bloggers? Well, there's the fact that Tehran recently instituted the death penalty for blogging on some topics. And it doesn't hurt Obama to look like he's standing up to Iranian authorities. But Reporters without Borders' latest Press Freedom Index makes a point of saying that bloggers are, in fact, just as persecuted as the offline press is in many countries. So maybe this was another effort by Obama to show just how nuanced his grasp is of the modern world. #

• The anti-FISA group that began on MyBO continues its fascinating evolution by expanding into new territory: cable television. Feeling the need to attract some attention beyond the bounds of the Internet, the group is using an intriguing service called SaysMe.tv that serves as an ad broker that offers targeted space on local cable television. Ad spots, say the company, go for as little as $38 on MSNBC in Miami or a little over a thousand bucks for CNN in Brooklyn. The group has put together a straightforward ad spotlighting a tombstone that marks the death of the 4th amendment, and is calling on supporters to fund the ad to run wherever they want to see it. #

The Candidates on the Web

• John McCain has launched McCain Nation, which seems a lot like the event planning tools we've seen in past campaigns. By starting out slowly online, McCain might have set the bar of expectations unfairly high for himself. But McCain's going to have to innovate a bit to earn the same level of praise that has greeted Obama's online efforts. #

• Not helping McCain -- glitches in the audio system that plagued McCain's appearance with Lance Armstrong yesterday. The troubles don't seem to be the campaign's fault, and McCain handled it well by blaming it on Democrats (a joke he's used before -- except in those more innocent days of the primary contest he blamed it on both Dems and "closet communists"). But you can help but contrast McCain's mic cutting in and out against Obama's exquisitely produced Berlin rally of 200,000 people. Obama, perhaps in an affirmation of the "well-oiled" vibe of his campaign, dedicated several minutes to the post-WWII Berlin Airlift -- a triumph of logistics if there ever was one. Healthy or not, there's an expectation in 2008 that a campaign is a produced affair, and the production values of McCain '08 continue to get him unwanted attention. #

• Here's something to consider, though. McCain is relying upon the GOP to provide much of the cash to make him competitive with Obama. Maybe he's likewise leaving it to the RNC to blaze some trails online for him? Republican HQ has just launched a new web browser toolbar that collects a few cents each time a user does a Yahoo search. The New York Times' Sarah Wheaton reports that the tool bar was developed by FreeCause, which has also launched a similar app for Susan G. Komen for the Cure and AnySoldier.com. A neat feature is that the bar lets you keep track off how much you've kicked into RNC coffers. The Next Right's Ethan Demme, Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland, and e.politics Colin Delany also covered the launch of the bar. It's interesting to note how the RNC, with ties to the commercial tech world, is tapping into web magic pioneered outside political circles. One advantage of leaving this stuff to the party? It creates institutional knowledge -- meaning that each candidate doesn't have to reinvent the wheel every cycle. #

TechCongress and Beyond

• Fast Company.tv's Robert Scoble recently sat down with Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) to talk tech and transparency. Coburn, who co-authored the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act with a senator from Illinois by the name of Obama, had this to say: "Tech is how we get our freedom back...the technology revolution has given us an opportunity to recreate what our founders intended, which is a total transparent federal government where the people who are the subject of that government can see what that government is doing." (via The Next Right) #

• NPR's The Takeaway covered the Blogging While Brown conference taking place this weekend in Atlanta. In other conference news, with Netroots Nation and RightOnline both sucking up so much oxygen, we didn't give enough attention to BlogHer, the conference for women who blog, held last week in San Francisco; Huffington Post's Sarah Granger has a good recap. #