Daily Digest: Partying Like It's 11/04/08

The Web on the Candidates

• The Latest in Robocall Busting: Starring in one of David Spark's "Sixteen Great Twitter Moments" now up on Mashable is the National Political Do Not Contact Registry's Shaun Dakin and California Green Party congressional candidate Zane Starkewolf. The latter may have the great name, but he's behind an odd and thoroughly uncomfortable robocall in which a sultry female voice brands his opponent a "bad boy." Shaun used Twitter to track down the bad guys behind the dialer -- a story that got picked up in the press. (For his part, Zane's defending the call.) Now Shaun's out with an interactive and entirely non-partisan Google map of automated political calls nationwide. If you're sick and tired of picking up the phone and hearing "Did you know that Joe Smith has voted to ban Little League -- 214 times?!," add your calls to the map. #

• Where the Left Will Be Partying Tomorrow Night: If you're (a) a liberal and (b) haven't settled on a plan for tomorrow evening, than we've got the website for you. WhereDoIGoOnElectionNight.com, from the nationwide Living Liberally network, has details on election night party spots, from the Grandview Cafe in Columbus, Ohio to the the Publick House in Columbia, South Carolina. With more than three hundred Drinking Liberally chapters across the country, the Living Liberally network lays in wait until just such a night as tomorrow evening. Party on. #

• Video Linkage of the Right and Left: The Berkman Center's Ethan Zuckerman takes a compelling look at Shifting the Debate's Video Barometer. The site is a mesmerizing charting of which web videos the online right and left link to most. But Ethan has some non-partisan thoughts. First, he suggests that across the spectrum professional media is more important than we might have predicted, given the excitement around voter-created content earlier in the cycle. Many of the top videos, says Ethan, enjoy fairly high production values that are still somewhat out of the reach of amateurs. But pointing to a bi-partisan favorite featuring a remake of the a-ha hit song "Take Me On," Ethan gets the warm fuzzies: "Turns out we can all agree that remaking eighties music videos by narrating what happens in inexplicably trippy videos is an excellent idea." Indeed. #

• Will No One Defend McCain's Tech Honor?: Wired's Nicholas Thompson is thoroughly ticked off. And not without reason: he spent a great deal of energy setting up a lunchtime policy debate last week between tech advisors to Obama and McCain, only to have McCain's Doug Holtz-Eakin drop out sometime around breakfast. Nick: "There is apparently not a single prominent person who supports John McCain's technology policies and is confident enough to go out there and debate in favor of them." Not to pile on, but maybe Doug was needed to answer phones; FiveThirtyEight's Sean Quinn has a striking pictorial spread showing how ghost-townish local McCain HQs are across the country. #

• Says Who? Says Me, Right Here: A new-to-us site called SayHear lets you record and share why you're voting for one presidential candidate over the others. Using a very Muxtape-y interface, you can listen in while the like-minded and the differently-minded explain the reasoning behind their vote. It's downright addictive to hear first-hand reports from a New York McCain voter, a Massachusetts Libertarian, and an Obama supporter in Alabama. There's a different number to call in depending on your choice of candidates, "American Idol" style. #

The Candidates on the Web

• Obama's Next Trick is Disappearing Voters: A diarist on Daily Kos by the name of "the dogs sockpuppet" is boasting of Obama's new voter management system by the name of "Houdini." Commenters seem to back up the idea that Houdini will let the campaign pester after non-voters until they cast a ballot, at which point they, poof!, disappear from their concern. Now, Houdini sure is a snazzy name. But how is this different than scratching off the already-voted on call lists and walk logs, as campaigns already do on election day? If you know, let us know in the comments. Also on the Obama tech front, this weekend the campaign posted to YouTube a three-minute "Blueprint for Change" briefing video on technology policy. Really, it's just clips from Obama's speech at the Googleplex, dressed up with some spiral-binding graphics. But I'll say it before and I'll say it again: team Obama sure knows how to recycle digital content. #

• Hunting For Democrats in Red Country: The New York Times' Leslie Wayne, has a look at how Democrats are learning to microtarget, a political art heretofore more associated with Republicans. It's those skills that turn Howard Dean's 50-State Strategy from wishful thinking to reasonable plan. But why does Obama care about turning up Dems in Republican territories that -- unless day becomes night, the sun turns into the moon, and Idaho merges with California -- he doesn't stand a chance of winning? Well, for one reason, Obama would love to couple an Electoral College win with healthy popular vote victory that would let him claim a mandate for change. #

• Drawing a Candidate in the Sand: Cuban-American artist Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada is aiming to build a sand sculpture of Barack Obama's face on the beaches of Barcelona big enough to be seen in Google Earth, reports the New York Times' Daniel E. Slotnik. The final size of the project, called "Expectation," remains to be seen, but Jorge says it will be at least 10,000 meters across. Why sand? It's emphemeral, he explains, and that's fitting because "it remains to be seen if the hopes of so many will disappear as quickly" under a President Obama. He could have saved some sand, though -- Google Earth picks up my mid-sized car parked outside my house. Seriously. #

TechCongress and Beyond

• Teching It for Capitol Hill: Despite recent talk of the role of technologists in the next McCain or Obama administration, it's not the executive branch that needs a "geek corps," suggests Harvard Law's Gene Koo. Rather, Congress is in need of technologists to "rework the interface between legislators and their constituencies: to rebuild trust and honest, genuine relationships between lawmakers and We the People." Interesting, but we already have a pretty good start on that front, no? I'm thinking the Open House Project; the Open Senate Project; the Sunlight Foundation; OpenCongress; GovTrack; the online staffs of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the tech teams in the other leadership offices in the House and Senate... #

In Case You Missed It...

Looking at such developments as a self-directed Obama volunteer running a vibrant campaign outpost in conservative Winter Park, Florida, Micah Sifry writes that "Obama's long tail is producing results on the ground."

National Defense University's Mark Drapeau takes a look at how the next president can use social media to give the presidential transition process a serious upgrade.

And finally, here's our daily update on the Twitter Vote Report project. We've introduced some neat charting tools from Plodt tracking wait time reports. We've just released the code so that anyone can grab a state-level map to embed in their site and posted details on the JSON feed that developers are invited to use to create mashups. We've released a "How to Tweet Your Vote" video created by Noel Hidalgo now making its way up the Digg charts. And we've been enjoying a flurry of press mentions, from Craig Newmark to the American Prospect to Current TV. Stop by our press room for details.