Daily Digest: Transition Filling Out with Familiar Faces, Facebook Friends

• Online Team Takes Shape: The online arm of President-elect Barack Obama's transition is filling out with some familiar faces, Talking Points Memo's Greg Sargent reports. Macon Phillips, formerly with Blue State Digital and deputy new media director during the campaign, will head up new media for the transition. The campaign's video guru Kate Albright-Hanna will serve as "content lead." And Jesse Lee, who has done online outreach from just about every corner of Washington, from the DCCC to Speaker Pelosi's office to the DNC, and will handle online communications. Our Micah Sifry offers some context, as does our Colin Delany. (One thing's for sure. The online comm team will have its hands full -- what with every seven year-old blogger in America now expecting to get a response from the president-elect.)

• Techies in the Transition: But Phillips, Lee, Albright-Hanna et al aren't the only tech savvy folks joining the transition, reports Politico's Kenneth Vogel and Lisa Lerer. FCC chairman Reed Hundt is helping to guide the transition. Level 3 Communications' executive Don Gips will be reviewing the state of our federal agencies for the president-elect. And Tom Wheeler, former CEO and President of the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, is also on board the transition team.*

• Vetting in the Age of Facebook: Sure, even the bold-faced names in Obamaland from Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to possible Attorney General Janet Napolitano seems to have a Facebook profile, as the New York Observer's Gillian Reagan reports. But, details the New York Times' Jackie Calmes, applicants for every one of the thousands of available executive-branch jobs must be open to having their online lives thoroughly vetted. Administration hopefuls are not only required to submit links to their Facebook pages but must also detail their blogging habits and reveal "all aliases or 'handles'...used to communicate on the Internet." This thoroughly modern vetting raises a question: has what's considered acceptable behavior also been updated for the digital age? Or is some wall posting deemed too risque for buttoned-down Washington enough to keep you from your dream job?

• Campus Election, County Post: While we're talking Facebook, here's a fascinating story out of New Hampshire. For less than a cost of a calculus text book, a Dartmouth junior ran Facebook ads for targeting her campus and Plymouth State University. She's now Grafton County's Treasurer-elect, winning by fewer than 600 votes. "I took advantage of new media, and she did not," explained Vanessa Sievers to the New York Times' Katie Zezima, about her 68 year-old opponent and the $51 Sievers spent on the Facebook ads. That opponent isn't happy with her dirt-cheap microtargeted social-networky approach, complaining that "College students are not involved in local things at all."

• Yes We Can. Still.: Back to all-things-Obama. So, what is the campaign-turned-transition to do with all those volunteers who powered their victory? Campaign field director Jon Carson told NPR's Mara Liasson that "We've run sort of a giant experiment here in volunteer management, and we want to take a look at the lessons learned from that." But some of those volunteers aren't waiting for instruction. The Field's Al Giordano points to Wisconsinite J.D. Stier, who barely took a break after the election before redirecting Obama campaign's momentum to organizing his community. He's not alone. The new Yes We Can Racine is dedicated to "those who understand that the "Yes We Can" spirit lives beyond slogans and campaigns, beyond politics and elections..."

• 50 Ways to Save the World: Social Signals' Alexandra Samuel has a great post detailing 50 ways the president-elect can make use of the Internet, culled from around the web. "He'll need to pioneer a model," Alexandra writes in introduction, "that combines the grassroots energy of (online) community organizing with the information-rich deliberation advocated by many public engagement practitioners." Alexandra's piece is a great primer on the many good ideas swirling about on how to best blend web-powered politics, policy, organizing, and outreach.

• News Fakery: "McCain Advisor Martin Eisenstadt" Edition: The idea that Sarah Palin didn't know that Africa is a continent has been a post-election albatross around her neck, and so some in the media have been eager to ferret out the source of that all-too-juicy story. McCain campaign advisor Martin Eisenstadt of the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy has stepped forward to acknowledge himself as its source. Quite the scoop! And the mainstream press and bloggers ran with it. Except, of course, there's no such thing as the Harding Insitute and Eisenstadt doesn't exist either. The fake "Martin" is happy to be uncovered. "A smell of fishiness has crept into the whole story," he writes on his faux-blog, of what has always been a rather suspect anecdote.

• News Fakery: "Iraq War Ends" Edition: Fake editions of the New York Times were distributed on the streets of New York, Chicago, LA, and other cities yesterday, declaring an end of the Iraq War and reported other good news, like "High-Speed Internet Hits Fast Track to Appalachia" by one B. Vannevar. (Clever.) Accompanying the print edition was a spot-on website. Playing good sports, the New York Times dutifully reported on the elaborate hoax. Their Sewell Chan reports that a loose-knit group of collaborators "financed the paper with small online contributions and created the paper to urge President-elect Barack Obama to keep his campaign promises."

In Case You Missed It...

Tom Watson calls Change.org's "Ideas for Change in America" the perfect complement to the Change.gov -- "the 'outside,'" says Tom, "to the politician's 'inside.'"

Dan Mannet offers the incoming Obama-Biden Administration ten ways to make the most of multimedia, from a webcast inauguration to WhiteHouse.tv.

And Nancy Scola suggests that rather than settle the fight over California's Proposition 8 on same-sex marriage, last Tuesday's vote served to turn a local legal battle into a 'net fueled cultural moment -- one that's now seeing the proposition's opponents use the review site Yelp to businesses that supported the measure.

* Corrected to reflect the fact that Tom Wheeler is a former President and CEO of CTIA, not its current head.