When Democratic consultant Nancy Leeds saw the "Hey Girl, It's Ryan Gosling" meme spread late last year, she decided to start a reaction GIF tumblr of her own, devoted exclusively to campaigns and named "Campaign Sick," after a blog she also maintains. What she didn't realize was that staffers and consultants around the country — even some Republicans, she says — would take advantage of the opportunity to send their own submissions in numbers, creating an anonymous escape valve for campaign pressure.

"You're not supposed to be posting stuff on the Internet outside of the campaign because you're a representative of the campaign," Leeds told me by phone Friday. "And second of all, you want to be a soldier. You don't want to be complaining and venting and asking for advice, you want to look like you're in control and nothing ever bothers you."

Here's a dispatch from political-tech land: Anthea Watson Strong, a member of Obama for America's tech team, is moving on. Her last day is today and she's saying her goodbyes on Twitter.

Watson Strong, who you might remember as the left-leaning half of the crosspartisan team that stewarded the Voting Information Project during 2010, is moving on to work with Google as an independent consultant to do work around the election. While working on VIP, a project to collect and provide easy programmatic access to information about elections like polling places and ballot information, she was at the New Organizing Institute; prior to that, she worked as a lawyer in the House of Representatives.

Obama for America is hiring a senior development operations engineer, the kind of person who will "design robust, scalable systems for our web applications" and "support the campaign’s efforts to inform voters, organize supporters and raise money." Among the requirements: Must love Linux. Read More

An Obama for America email, sent yesterday and signed by national field director Jeremy Bird, unveils a new online toy from President Barack Obama's re-election campaign: Today, we're rolling out an interactive campaign ... Read More

In 2008, Obama for America's 50-state strategy contributed to his election. Now it looks like his campaign isn't just adopting it again on the ground — his campaign is rounding up ground troops online as well. ... Read More

Source: Barackobama.com Obama for America has released a website for users to explore data about the campaign's donor base, in order to celebrate, per the campaign, their one-millionth donor. The application allows users ... Read More

First data, now tweets: President Barack Obama's re-election campaign is seeking "social media copywriters." From an ad on the job board for the professional left, Jobs That Are Left, first spotted by New York politics ... Read More

Spotted: Obama for America's analytics department is staffing up on predictive modeling and data mining scientists and analysts: We are a multi-disciplinary team of statisticians, predictive modelers, data mining ... Read More

Rutgers professor Dave Karpf finds Princeton professor Julian Zelizer's "Facebook Politics" response in the great Gladwellian social change debate, a take we took up here, to be rather "second-rate." ... Read More