Daily Digest: Short Hop from Wasilla to World

The Web on the Candidates

• Organizing's Defenders, Well, Organize: The line prompted huge guffaws in the Xcel Center last Wednesday night, but some were not too pleased with Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin's remark that working as a community organizer is just like being a small-town mayor "except that you have actual responsibilities." Facebook's We are all Community Organizers group has quickly expanded to some 9,200 members after springing up late last week -- growing at a rate of about 1,000 added people a day. The McCain camp has since tried to run back from the laugh line; a campaign spokesperson: "Certainly community organizers serve a valued function in civic affairs." But putting a meme back in the bottle is no easy trick. The views are piling up on strong video defenses of community organizing. Among the more popular, CNN contributor Roland Martin's has accrued more than 60,000 YouTube views, Our Hispanic Voices' 42,000, and YouTuber nerdette's 34,000. And t-shirts and other gear bearing the biting slogan, "Jesus was a community organizer, Pontius Pilate was a governor" have popped up on CafePress and elsewhere online. #

• Young, Wired, and Voting: Inside Higher Ed's Andy Guess suggests that the campaigns' increasing reliance upon tech tools like text messaging and email are fueling political engagement among younger voters. #

• A Personal Email Between Millions of Friends: Any chance you got multiple copies of a forwarded email on Palin from a Wasilla, Alaska resident named Anne Kilkenny last week? Yep, me too. NPR reports on how her missive, which they describe as "a Sarah Palin primer for non-Alaskans," went nearly instantly viral. Kilkenny explains that she wrote the email, largely critical of the Republican VP nominee's time in local politics, to answer an influx of questions pouring in from curious friends. She tried prepending a note to her message saying: "Please do not post it on any websites, as there are too many kooks out there." Yeah,
  good luck with that! "I'm not sure exactly what a blog is," Kilkenny tells NPR. "Heck, we only have a dial-up connection." techPresident's Zephyr Teachout muses about what the Kilkenny tells us about how political narratives spread today. #

• Conservatives Feeling Buried on Digg: MediaShift's Simon Owens reports that some on the political right are feeling left out of the Digg party. Give a read to Simon's take on the rather popular community-rating site to learn all about "bury brigades," "power users," "Digg fatigue" -- and how some on the left are mastering the art of using Digg to draw eyeballs and attention to their work. #

• Searching for Night Life: Much was made of Google's footprint at the just-concluded Republican and Democratic political conventions in St. Paul and Denver respectively, and one of the centerpieces of that presence was undoubtedly the joint parties with Vanity Fair held in each city. One report is saying that the Republican event at the Walker Art Center was a bit more festive and rather more elegant than its Democratic counterpart at the Exdo Event Center. #

The Candidates on the Web

• Palin Tops Biden in Post-Convention Buzz: Nielsen Online is out with some brand new numbers tracking online post-convention "buzz," measured in terms of newly-produced user-generated content. The results? In order of descending buzziness: Obama (indexed at 100), McCain (97), Palin (80), Hillary Clinton (33), and Biden (26). Nielsen also found that traffic to the official McCain-Palin site jumped 242% just before and during the RNC, while traffic to the Obama-Biden site grew just 32% during DNC week -- though it should of course be noted that BarackObama.com still pulled in about double the amount of traffic as JohnMcCain.com during that period. #

• Quickies: Sponsored-link ads -- those one or two line paid-for results that pop-up alongside Google searches, for example -- are playing a big role in election '08, reports USA Today's Byron Acohido...Relatedly, the progressive think tank the Drum Major Institute's* middle class scorecard campaign is finding great success using Google keyword ads that target "a new kind of voter" who is "curious and on Google"...It's Day 11, and there's still no bio up for Sarah Palin on JohnMcCain.com...Former Governor Frank Murkowski's Westwind II jet that Palin often talks about putting up on eBay? She indeed listed the plane on the auction site, but it eventually sold offline. The VP candidate has never claimed otherwise, but her running mate has been a bit more loose-lipped about it. Out of the campaign trail, McCain has boasted that Palin "took the luxury jet that was acquired by her predecessor and sold it on eBay -- and made a profit!" He might want to Google up that story before telling it again. #

TechCongress and Beyond

• Army of One (Blogger): The Nation's Ari Melber dives into how the military powers-that-be are coming to terms with a world where every soldier can self publish. #

In Case You Missed It...

Nancy Scola investigates how Twitter was used to organize and outfox the police during the protests around the RNC last week. She also has the somewhat surprising report that "notq," who served as a much-watched hub for protest information last week, was operating from Tempe, Arizona -- some 1,800 miles away from the action in St. Paul.

*Disclosure: I serve on the Drum Major Institute's Netroots Advisory Council, but have had nothing to do with this campaign since its launch.