From techPresident

• The Obama campaign chose what content to ask someone to share on Facebook based on what it knew about that user's Facebook friends.

• Mahmoud Salem wrote about how an Egyptian belly dancer's video mocking the Muslim Brotherhood has gone viral.

Around the web

• Nooga.com, a local website focused on the Chatanooga area, spoke to Daniel Ryan, director of frontend development for Obama for America, who highlighted the success of the campaign's "Life of Julia" interactive.

• In the National Journal, Matthew Dowd writes about the "Mythic Narrative of the 2012 Election," among which he includes that "The advanced, technologically driven ground game the Obama campaign organized made the difference in the election by changing the shape of the American electorate and surprising everyone on Election Day by turning out unexpected voters." Dowd attributes the win to larger changes in demographics that were already taking place independently of turnout operations.

• Pew released a report on the final week of news coverage during the presidential campaign and found the following:

  The conversation on the three social media platforms studied moved in different directions during the final week of the campaign. On Twitter, Romney had his best stretch of the general election in the final week; 32% of the conversation was positive compared to 45% negative. On blogs, however, it was Obama who had his best week of the entire period studied; positive posts were roughly equal to negative (28% positive to 27% negative). The tenor of the Facebook conversation changed relatively little-the conversation about Obama stayed steady and Romney's declined a small amount. On Election Day, the differences between the three social media platforms emerged again as each served a different purpose. Twitter was the most instantaneous; 53% of the conversation involved users sharing breaking news or personal opinions. On Facebook, half (50%) the conversation involved personal political expressions. Blogs were more focused on the meaning of the election results, where 47% of the discussion involved post-mortem insights or the relaying of stories regarding broader themes.

• McKay Coppins suggests on Buzzfeed that the conservative blogosphere lost because it focused too much on attacking Obama's character and trying to find evidence that he was a radical.

• Freedomworks is encouraging its supporters to contact elected officials to stop the implementation of the health care law exchanges.

• After Buzzfeed said it had posted a "supercut of the most indecipherable moments from last week's Gaza debate on HuffPost Live," AOL had it removed from YouTube.

• The group Christians United for Israel is asking that Twitter ban Hamas from the social network.

• An Israeli TV producer has tried to encourage an international Instagram campaign with the hashtag #stoptheterror.

• The Code for America Brigade recently launched a new application contest that will be based on how much an application is used by city residents.

• The Knight Foundation blog spoke with Philadephia's first chief data officer, Mark Headd.

• Buzzfeed reported on what Democratic think tank Third Way learned from its research on the marriage equality issue and how those lessons were applied in the successful campaigns in 2012.

• Twitter highlighted posts from the newly elected and reelected members of Congress.

• The Verge reported on "the operation to rescue Manhattan's drowned Internet" after Hurricane Sandy, noting how the surge had flooded the downtown office of Verizon, full of copper wiring. Crain's reported on a renewed interest in back-up power sources and generators.

• The Columbia Journalism Review detailed how a photo went viral that falsely suggested that Occupy Sandy was training National Guard members in relief work.

• A Staten Island City Council member recounted to the Staten Island Advance how he helped another family endangered by the waters during Hurricane Sandy. "After the episode, the Councilman, as well as fellow City Councilman Vincent Ignizio (R-South Shore) and state Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis (Mid-Island/Brooklyn), spent the remainder of the night fielding Facebook requests with the intention of directing emergency workers to folks needing help.'Facebook saved lives,
  said Oddo. 'The night of the storm, it was 911 and 311 rolled into one.'"

• Activists from the Climate Reality Project, founded by Al Gore, organized a live 24 hour webcast called the Dirty Weather Report to raise awareness of global warming and its link to extreme weather such as Hurricane Sandy.

• Fuels America, an association of organizations linked to the biotechnology and ethanol industry, is running online ads advocating against waiving the renewable fuel standard.

• Gmail now supports Cherokee, its first Native American language.

• Google, Facebook and Netflix testified in federal court that net neutrality rules should be upheld. Meanwhile several public interest groups have filed an amicus brief criticizing Verizon for comparing net neutrality to censorship.

• Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) is asking for feedback on Reddit to help crowdsource a domain name seizure legislative proposal.

• Mexican telecommunication providers will participate in an international database to track stolen mobile phones. In addition, the FCC and Mexico's Secretariat of Communications will work together to ensure that mobile carriers fulfill a pledge to not allow the activation of stolen phones on their networks. The National Journal compared the agreement to a "a telecommunications take on "Fast & Furious.'"

• Before it looked like Hostess Brands and Twinkies might be saved from bankruptcy after all, a We The People petition asks "Barack Obama to immediately nationalize the Twinkie industry." While that one has not reached the threshold for an answer yet, a petition to impeach Obama has.

• On his website, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) has an entry titled "Secession: Are We Free To Go?" He writes: "Is all the recent talk of secession mere sour grapes over the election, or perhaps something deeper? Currently there are active petitions in support of secession for all 50 states, with Texas taking the lead in number of signatures. Texas has well over the number of signatures needed to generate a response from the administration, and while I wouldn't hold my breath on Texas actually seceding, I believe these petitions raise a lot of worthwhile questions about the nature of our union." He finally concludes, "If a people cannot secede from an oppressive government, they cannot truly be considered free."

• Nieman Lab spoke to Tumblr editor Jessica Bennett about the site's role as a news platform and the influence of gifs.

• The Daily Beast explained how it produced a visualization on the success of Super PAC spending.

• The Huffington Post notes many rural AT&T customers still lack broadband Internet even though that was a condition of a 2006 merger between AT&T and BellSouth.

• For City and State, Aaron Short reviewed campaign technology that could be helpful for candidates in the 2013 New York City-wide races.

• As part of a Break the Bubble campaign promoted by the Boston mayor, students from Boston-area colleges attended a panel discussion allowing them to network with local entrepreneurs such as Morgan O’Neill, co-founder of the website Recovers.org.

International

• John McAfee, the founder of the eponymous antivirus company who is reportedly wanted for murder and on the run, is blogging. In one post, titled, "If I am captured," he writes that the blog will continue since "I have pre-written enough material to keep this blog alive for at least a year."

• An Austrian court has upheld a ruling blocking the public state broadcaster ORF from having a presence on Facebook since "the country’s broadcast regulators ruled that its statutes do not allow it a presence on the social media site," the AP reported. The regulator had concluded that pages for its non-news focused properties gave the broadcaster an unfair competitive edge over competing private broadcast and print media, a conclusion that ORF had appealed.

• Newly released e-mails show that Canadian election officials were desperately trying to correct erroneous robocalls attributed to the Conservative Party that were going out voters in the days before the 2011 federal election, CBC reported.

• The Guardian mapped how cuts affected local authorities and councils in Britain. In a related article, the Guardian reported that councils in northern, urban and London boroughs under Labour administration had seen greater budget cuts than those areas administered by the Conservative Party.

• Voice of Russia, a media service sponsored by the Russian Government, suggests that American criticism of Russia's Internet filtering policy is misguided, since the U.S. "imposed Internet censorship in 1996" to protect children with the Communications Decency Act, before it was suspended for violating the Constitution.