Change.gov has just wrapped the second round of its Open for Questions feature with a twist. Round One's answers came in the form of (brief) written responses to site's top-rated questions. This time, incoming White House press secretary Robert Gibbs taped a video response to a handful of popular questions. Notably, though, some of the most highly-rated questions in Round Two didn't get the Gibbs treatment. With 23,000 votes, the site's top rated question came from Democrats.com's Bob Fertik on appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush Administration. It was dealt with here in a footnote -- "answered" by a quote from Vice President-Elect Joe Biden: "I'm not ruling [prosecution] in and not ruling it out. I just think we should look forward."

The highest-rated query for President-elect Barack Obama over on Change.gov's Open for Questions feature certainly isn't a softball along the lines of "What are you going to name the First Puppy?" It's whether, as president, Obama will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush Administration on everything from torture to wiretapping...Boston Globe's David Talbot looks back at how Blue State Digital became the Obama campaign's go-to web firm, with insight into the Massachusetts-based technology "boiler room" run by BSD's Jascha Franklin-Hodge...Obama may have bested John McCain when it came to campaign tech, but here's a reminder that the GOP isn't sitting around licking its wounds...and more.

Presidential silver medalist John McCain jumped back into the political fray yesterday with the launch of a "grassroots organization" called Country First...Speaking of the PACs you launch after you don't quite make it to the White House, Democracy for America -- the organization that grew out of Howard Dean's presidential run -- is putting some pressure on his apparent successor as Democratic National Committee Chairman...It's worth reading the L.A. Times' Kate Linthicum's interview with Scott Goodstein, who headed up the text messaging program for the Obama campaign, just to hear what question prompted this answer: "South Carolina. Oprah Winfrey"...and more.

(Crossposted from ClickZ.)

Barack Obama's presidential campaign spent over $16 million on online advertising in 2008. John McCain's camp spent a fraction of that: around $3.6 million. Google was far and away the winner, taking in an estimated $7.5 million of Obama ad dollars in 2008, about 45 percent of the campaign's digital ad spending, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Some of that money went toward display and text ads in Google's AdSense network, and some was used for ads appearing in search results on Google's site.

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Over at NPR, Andy Carvin is leading a project to extend what we learned from Twitter Vote Report, launched by a humble blog post here on techPresident, to cover the upcoming inauguration weekend, January 17th through 20th, in DC. That's terrific. Central to the thinking behind TVR (of which Andy was a core part) was making the project as open as humanly possible so that it could be repurposed, repackaged, and improved upon. What's particularly exciting to see is that Andy and his co-conspirators, fellow TVP veterans Dave Troy and Andrew Turner, have a plan to achieve something we fell short on in the chaotic scramble of Vote Report: turning local journalists onto the valuable content that was pouring in through the channels we'd set up.

Making stimulus bill first example of Obama transparency strategy can improve the bill, build support by GOP & voters who are skeptical after banks' behavior after first bailout, and begin comprehensive "democratizing data" effort to improve agency performance and involve public.

This afternoon, Team Obama ported the day-of-service feature from the Presidential Inaugural Committee site to its own stand-alone domain, USAservice.org. For some background on what they're up to when it comes to citizen service, see here. What still isn't so clear where this effort slots into things after inauguration weekend. I suspect those details will simply shake out elegantly (enough) in the next few weeks. But I'm a process geek, and so I can't help but obsess about how all the working pieces -- Obama-Biden Transition Project, Presidential Inaugural Committee, Obama Administration-to-be -- fit together.

Some of the most popular state, local, and general-interest blogs in the progressive blogosphere were brought low this morning, when the lone developer behind the hosted community-blogging service SoapBlox threw in the towel. Well-regarded sites like Pam's House Blend, Blue Jersey, Michigan Liberal, Swing State Project, and MN Progressive Project found earlier today that they couldn't access either the public-facing front ends of the site or their sites' content-management backend. As of this afternoon, the sites are (mostly) back up, but that hasn't eased fears that a core part of the left's online infrastructure isn't all that sustainable.

We've been doing some housecleaning (in preparation for rolling out a site upgrade) and it's been some time since I dug in and updated our list of top political blogs. Indeed, an embarrassingly long time. Sorry!

Anyway, here's a fully revised and up-to-date list of the top 50 political blogs, along with two top 20 lists for the top liberal and conservative blogs. All three lists are based on Technorati's measure of "authority," which is the number of incoming links to the blog for the last six months. Let me be the first to emphasize that this is hardly a perfect metric. The number of incoming links shown by Technorati sometimes varies, which is a quirk of how their databases work. And not all incoming links are created equal, but Technorati has no way of saying so. In other words, please don't obsess about a blog's exact position on these lists, as bloggers like to say, your mileage may vary.

As we keep up the vigil on Barack Obama's naming of a Chief Technology Officer, let's have a look at both what some close watchers want from the first federal CTO and what the gossip on the street says about what the incoming administration has in mind for the job...In congressional meetings on Obama's proposed stimulus package, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor pushed the President-elect to "put the entire contents of the legislation online in a user-friendly way to see how the money is being spent"...There's an interesting under-the-radar online tussle happening around the future of American agriculture and the future of Tom Vilsack...and more.