It's OneWebDay on Saturday. C'mon Trippi, Rospars, Daou, Finn, Turk, Tagaris, Carbone, Guerra, Ruszkowski, Phong, Wolf, Harbath, Fedewa, Tabor, Ferry, Lam, Lowen, and Jewell. Whaddya got?

It's that time again, when we present our favorite political videos of the week. Some have gone or will go viral, and some will fall by the wayside. But all of them hit some kind of political or cultural note that proves the ever-increasing influence of online video. Sometimes videos come from the ground up and grab the mainstream media’s attention, like the video of University of Florida student Andrew Meyer getting tasered. But sometimes a video comes from big media first, like Sally Field getting cut off by Fox as she gave an anti-war speech at the Emmys.

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani and his critics continue to fight via video, a Ron Paul supporter goes over top with a video in support of the Texan candidate, and there’s much love for the intertubes.

Have a favorite video? Send it to us at techpres AT personaldemocracy DOT com.

We have so much fun picking out our favorite web videos every week, we thought we'd try something new with our video experiments. In this, our third techPresidentTV video, I look through a handful of our favorite web videos of the last week (we also wrote about them here).

We're still experimenting with our video efforts, so let us know what you think!

Video after the jump...

A MySpace poll of their users claims that young people are perhaps more politically engaged than older generations; WaPo profiles John McCain, makes another tag cloud; the Slashdot community interviews Garrett Graff, chaos ensues; notes from the annals of e-democracy; results from the first National Presidential Caucus; the National Journal's Technology is closing up shop; a new Politico column from Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry looks at the Republicans and tech; and a new site from Bill Richardson might be the gloomiest thing ever.

Last week at ETech, one of my favorite tech conferences, three Brits convened a delightful panel on "moving theft-based activism to the global stage." The title actually made the discussion sound a bit illicit, when really all the three were talking about was how civic-minded hackers have being taking government data that ought to be in public view, and making it available to all--with transformative and beneficial effects.

I'm at the National Press Club for the launch of Stanford Prof. Larry Lessig's new project, Change-Congress.org. He's here as part of Sunshine Week, and his speech is co-sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation (which I consult for) as well as the Omidyar Network. As you may know, last year, Lessig decided to shift his focus from the fight for free culture to the fight for a clean government. Here are my notes on his talk, paraphrasing as best as I can...

Go read British Cabinet Officer Tom Watson's speech on the "Power of information" and imagine a Member of Congress making a similar speech on how technology can radically reinvent government. Imagine one of our presidential candidates making it (even Barack Obama, who has done the most thinking on this topic.) You can't. But maybe, if we pay more attention to our cousins across the pond, soon someone will.

Five years ago, Watson was one of the first MPs to blog, and notes that even though it opened him up to daily abuse, "the blog broke down the walls between legislators and electors in a way that interested me. So I persevered." Now he says, "I believe in the power of mass collaboration.... I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made are going to change for ever."

Is a nationwide truckers' strike just over the horizon? As gasoline prices climb towards and past $4 a gallon, something is brewing that--with the help of the web--could very well upend the flatlining presidential primaries and force hard economic questions that none of the presidential candidates really want to wrestle with to the center of the national conversation.

Lots of people are being hurt by the emerging recession--people whose homes are being foreclosed, people who are being laid off, people who can't find a job--but for the most part their pain is private, and their efforts to seek solutions or answers tend to also remain private, even in the age of what writer Clay Shirky has aptly called "ridiculously easy group formation." By contrast, truckers have always been uniquely well connected to each other, via old-fashioned CB radio technology. But now the Internet may add a powerful boost to their nascent calls for a social response to economic pain.

Confronted by the prospect of internet-driven public participation in crafting legislation, the past head of the American League of Lobbyists says, "What's next? Are we going to let the American people decide our defense policy, our trade policy, our immigration policy?"

Is the Internet good for democracy, or not? John Palfrey is up leading a distributed conversation on that topic for the second plenary session. I'm going to take notes on the conversation, but as always treat these as paraphrases at best.