Romney campaign beefing up its digital operation

• The Romney campaign is advertising technology-related jobs on Mashable. (via @adamostrow)

  You heard it first on Personal Democracy Plus: Romney digital director Zac Moffatt says a robust internal tech staff is the new normal for presidential campaigns, but those positions weren't a priority during primary season.

  "This is what people are doing online in 2012," he told techPresident Thursday morning. "This is the team that we need to build to be successful."

  The job openings range from interaction designers to Drupal software engineers to business analysts. Moffatt says that the campaign will focus on infographics, shareable content, and "reducing" the "friction," as the campaign parlance goes, involved in people's interactions with Team Romney online.

  The Obama campaign filled out many of the same positions while the Republican Party continued its search for a nominee. Short version: Comparing the Obama and Romney campaigns' digital efforts up until now was comparing apples and oranges. Obama still has a clear advantage in staff size and financial resources, but an in-house team may give Romney better ability to compete online in the day-to-day war for attention and fundraising dollars. — Nick Judd with Miranda Neubauer

Obama's gay-marriage bump

• President Obama's support of same-sex marriage sparked an immediate and wide-ranging reaction online yesterday. Gawker outpost Jezebel shared an image of Obama on a unicorn wielding a rainbow and other gay marriage supporters created a Tumblr celebrating their reaction called "When Obama Endorsed Marriage Equality." The DCCC began advertising on Facebook in connection with the announcement, and updated its website after the announcement. According to Buzzfeed, the campaign received $1 million in donations in the first 90 minutes after the announcement.

Freedom of the press, and search rankings?

• A report by UCLA professor Eugene Volokh on behalf of Google argues that search engines' right to decide how they order their search results is protected under the First Amendment in the same way that news organizations can decide “all the news that’s fit to print,” paidContent reported.

Around the web

• Rush Limbaugh has created a Facebook page for conservative women titled Rush Babes for America, and it already has 48,800 likes.

• The Obama campaign is encouraging supporters to suggest new songs for its Spotify playlist.

• Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said the commission will test the viability of government and commercial wireless operators sharing spectrum.

• Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) suggests that Google's data collection from WiFi networks requires new legislation.

• Techdirt reported that the House Armed Services Committee will be doing a markup of the National Defense Authorization Act. Proposed changes could give the Defense Department authority to carry out military operations online, including clandestine ones.

• At a congressional hearing, the Federal Trade Commission and the administration called for online privacy legislation.

• Several industry groups called on President Obama to advocate for tough intellectual property protections in negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. The White House is pushing for voluntary anti-piracy efforts, while Senators want legislation, the National Journal reported. Over 30 law professors call for more transparency in the TPP negotiations.

• A New York Times writer updates on how the debate over net neutrality is currently playing out in Congress, and with companies such as Netflix and Comcast.

• Senator Mark Kirk (R.-Ill.) released a video showing how he has been recovering from a stroke.

• Lifehacker presents a fictional narrative that outlines some possible ways that the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which passed in the House of Representatives recently could impact daily life.

• Global judging has started for contestants in the Nasa-supported International Space Apps Challenge.

• Readers can participate in a Google Hangout with Nicholas Kristof and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice on May 17.

• A review by the New York City Board of Elections and a voting machine manufacturer found that overheating led to "over voting" by electronic voting machines in the Bronx that left around 30 percent of votes uncounted.

• A report indicates that the technology industry is growing faster in New York City than anywhere else in the country.

• Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he didn't read a report which highlighted errors in New York City's 911 system.

• A Jewish-oriented Internet filtering company aimed at very religious Jews has blocked access to the blog of a rabbi who is planning a counter-protest to a planned Internet-critical rally at New York's Citi Field later this month, according to Failed Messiah, a blog that reports on the Orthodox community.

• A Houston hospital planned to livetweet brain tumor surgery yesterday.

• The town of Hobbs, N.M. has been selected as a "ghost town" where researchers will be able to test intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks, the A.P. reported.

• Bitly analyzed its links to determine when the best times are to post on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

• ICANN says it plans to reopen its domain application system May 22.

• Ustream and Bambuser, two livestreaming sites, said they were under sustained attack in connection with citizen journalists covering Russian protests. "This is the third DDOS attack in the last few months, specifically targeting Russian citizen journalists on Ustream. This is a actively managed attack of a scale we have never seen that continues to change and iterate as we counter," Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable said according to GigaOm.

• The New York Times took another look at the sucess of the German Pirate Party, which is likely to gain entry into the state parliament of Northrhine-Westphalia, the most populous German state, Sunday. That race was also increasingly playing out online for the other parties. German news magazine Stern alleged that the incumbent, Social Democratic Ministerpresident Hannelore Kraft, had paid off bloggers whose critical reporting had contributed to the end of the previous conservative administration. Kraft denied the allegations and said there was no connection between PR-contracts it had paid and the blogs in question. At the same time, her current conservative opponent came under fire after a video of a TV interview he had given on a somewhat obscure public affairs channel circulated online. In the interview, asked about his future plans depending on whether or not he wins election, he said "unfortunately the [CDU party] doesn't decide that alone, rather the voters decide that."

• Germany's conservative CDU Party, the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, has created a new social online platform, that connects with other social networks, called CDUplus.

• Vice President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes outlines in a Guardian column how technology can help health care in Europe.

• European Digital Rights warns that ACTA is not dead, with five European Parliament committees set to vote on the treaty in the near future.

• In the Queen's speech, the British government unveiled its plans for TV cameras for some court proceedings and Internet surveillance with "strict safeguards." Britain also intends to overhaul its libel laws to give better protection to journalists.

• More than 100,000 e-mails have come in a week in response to an Italian call for citizens to identify misspent public money.

• Vietnamese bloggers could be facing increased censorship.

• The New York Times looked at recent efforts to censor the web in Iran and China.

• Google funded a new study looking at the Israeli digital divide.