My hat is off to Arianna Huffington and her crew for figuring out who made the "Vote Different" Hillary 1984 video mash-up, and even better for getting Phil de Vellis, its author, to say more about his reasons for making the video.

If you were born before, oh, 1975, you might not be familiar with Channel One. Born after, and you probably know it's an in-class news and advertising network beamed out to millions of American school kids. For the fourth time, the network is holding a mock online election that asks students for their presidential picks, a project called One Vote; The Internet might just be used for dirty election tricks this cycle, from denial-of-service attacks on candidates' websites to spoof emails purported to be from election officials, according to a hefty new report;The McCain campaign has launched an "I'm Joe the Plumber" video contest, the winner of which will, the campaign says, be used in a TV ad; and a good helping of more.

Today's announcement of the formation of the Obama-Biden Transition Project, covered in detail here by DemConWatchBlog, left me wondering about two things.
1. If the transition senior staff includes a communications director (Dan Pfeiffer, who was communications director in the campaign), why doesn't it include an internet or new media director?
2. What kinds of interactive components will the transition website include? The announcement included a note saying that "the official website for the transition is www.change.gov and it will be live later today," but so far that site isn't live, at least not for me.

One thing I think we do know: it looks like Blue State Digital, the same powerhouse Democratic internet firm that handled Obama's online needs during the campaign, is building the www.change.gov site. Earlier today I took this screenshot of test.change.gov:

It looks like this url is now password protected.

In January, not only will we have the first African American President, but we have the first "Tech President" as has been said many times before on this blog.

With that, there are a lot of questions being discussed at Obama HQ, in the transition, on this blog, and all over the tubes – what to do with Obama's list? What to do with BarackObama.com? What to do with WhiteHouse.gov? Will President Obama use the internet to make government more transparent (I bet former Blue State Digital partner Clay Johnson and the Sunlight Foundation have a few ideas on that), and how can the President-Elect use all this to be a better President? And many more questions.

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.

Drupal developers are abuzz with the realization that the White House's new Recovery.gov site was built using the free and open-source content management platform Drupal. Pre-Recovery.gov, the perhaps highest-profile use of Drupal had been the Onion website. But that's not the only reason that Drupal fans are excited. I asked two CMS expert friends to help me understand the situation, and here are a few of the reasons they gave for why the White House's embrace of Drupal is momentous...

Drupal developers are abuzz with the realization that the White House's new Recovery.gov site was built using the free and open-source content management platform Drupal. Pre-Recovery.gov, the perhaps highest-profile use of Drupal had been the Onion website. But that's not the only reason that Drupal fans are excited. I asked two CMS expert friends to help me understand the situation, and here are a few of the reasons they gave for why the White House's embrace of Drupal is momentous...

The Kennedy family, you might have heard, quickly erected a Twitter account (at @kennedynews) to push out information on and observations from Senator Ted Kennedy's "memorial and funeral activities," said the feed. But that's the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the digital memorialization of the senator's life that has begun to take place. And consider this. Ted Kennedy is today lying in repose in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. That Boston edifice, dedicated to his brother's life and career, cost of more than $20 million and took more than 15 years to build after JFK's sudden death in 1963. For heck's sake, President Jimmy Carter did the dedication.

But for a fraction of the cost and a sliver of the time, Ted Kennedy's family has already begun to smartly use technology to craft for their beloved father, uncle, grandfather, cousin, and friend a durable version of his life history that will shape how Edward M. Kennedy is remembered tomorrow and countless tomorrows from now. That's a new and powerful opportunity. And it's an opportunity that Kennedy's allies -- including Blue State Digital, the digital firm behind Barack Obama's presidential campaign and Senator Kennedy's longtime web team -- seem to strongly grasp...

I know, you think I'm engaging in a bit of hyperbole when I say that Blue State Digital, the firm closely tied to the online arm of the Obama campaign, is taking over the world. And perhaps I am, a bit. But then you crack open the in-flight magazine of Iberia Airlines on the way home from PdF Europe only to read all about how Miguel Zugaza, director of the world-famous Prado Museum, is revamping the institution's online strategy (working with BSD) to reach some multiple of the number of flesh and blood people who walk through its doors in Madrid each day.

Okay, so there's a slight chance that our interest in the application of the Obama campaign's online lessons to other, non-presidential realms is edging over the line into obsession. But, the fact is that Obama '08 figured out how to accomplish some ultra-ambitious goals using digital tactics and smart strategy. Can Blue State Digital (or anyone else) find success in applying those lessons to other projects? Does the Obama online strategy and its focus on compelling human-centered narrative and thoughtful branding carry over to what other political organizations want to accomplish, the missions that political advocacy groups have set for themselves, the goals corporations hold. Can you do it without Barack Obama?

Who better to keep an eye on, then, than the people who did it for Barack Obama? See, obsession totally justified.

With that settled, we're in the clear to take note of a campaign that Blue State Digital currently has its hand in out in California that aims to normalize, if you will, marijuana use by treating it more like alcohol. The resulting tax gains, argues the "Tax & Regulate Cannabis" campaign, can help California pay for the luxuries they're having trouble affording. Like schools. And hospitals. (You might notice that that's some distance from what Obama himself has said about marijuana, in particular when, during an Open for Questions round, he laughed off the idea that legalization of marijuana could prove to be an economic boon.) The Tax Cannabis campaign is still just getting off the ground, and the goal is to pass legislation later this year.

The effort's slogan? "Yes We Cannabis."

UPDATE: Madeline Stanionis of the San Francisco-based online advocacy and fundraising firm Watershed writes to add some needed context to this post. Stanionis writes that it is her group, Watershed, that is handling the online strategy for the Tax Cannabis campaign, while Blue State Digital's role is limited to being the vendor behind the campaign's back-end contact relationship management software and online fundraising tools.

That is, of course, a meaningful distinction, and I'm glad that she shared it with us.