When John McCain made the surprise pick of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, the McCain camp dallied in getting a biography of the little-known Alaska governor up on to their official campaign website. In that absence, observers turned to Wikipedia and elsewhere on the web to make immediate sense of the choice. The Obama White House seems to be taking the opposite approach with the choice of Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court. Her official selection was coupled at the start with the White House's attempts to quickly define the nominee and her nomination.

The Obama White House, for example, is emailing out 14 different high resolution pictures of the judge (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14), including shots of her as a young child at a birthday party, at her 8th grade graduation, with her nephews at Yankee Stadium, and in her judges robes. They've posted a photo of her mother, Celina Sotomayor, choking up at yesterday's announcement ceremony that will only not melt your heart if you don't have one. The White House website features a lengthy bio of what they're calling Sotomayor's "American story." Then there's the fact that the WhiteHouse.gov team blogged about an previously-made video from the Law School Admission Council on Sotomayor called "A Wonderful Life." It's an important point: the Obama White House's blogospheric savvy-- plucking third-party material from the web that makes their case and using their high-profile platform to promote it -- may stand them in good stead as Sotomayor's nomination process moves along.

Conservative opponents have pledged to do battle on the web over Obama's judicial pick. The Judicial Confirmation Network's (JCN) chief counsel Wendy Long told the Washington Post, "We need to do this because the White House really has the bully pulpit...The American people, if we don't do things like this, are really only getting half the story.'' JCN has launched AboutSoniaSotomayor.com, featuring talking points against her nomination. The centerpiece of the site: a YouTube clip in which Sotomayor, attending a conference, makes the statement "court of appeals is where policy is made." She quickly noted that she probably shouldn't say such things "on tape." Expect the video to get major play.

The back-and-forth over Sotomayor's nomination has of course just begun. Google, for example, returns no text ads yet for a search on her name.

A potentially interesting note, though: ConfirmThem, the site launched by the conservative blog Red State around past battles over judicial nominations in the Senate, is featuring a post by one "Feddie" (as in, the Federalist Society) that doesn't exhibit much stomach for a fight over Sotomayor. "My take on the appointment?," he or she writes. "She's the best of the worst." That's relatively high praise.

They're not bad. Obama released a 76-page "Cyberspace Policy Review" report Friday, the result of a 60-day process of consultation. And as an opening volley, advocates, activists, and lawmakers are judging it a solid shot. The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, for example, quotes one cybersecurity advocate calling the plan "pretty good." Similarly, NextGov's Guatham Nagesh finds praise for the review at AT&T and the computer security think tank the SANS Institute. And then there's the positive first reaction of both Republicans and Democrats on the Hill; CQ's Daniel Fowler has Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) coming together to "applaud President Obama for highlighting the extraordinarily serious issue of cybersecurity."

You'll find one of the major reasons why folks are happy with the review in the inevitable White House Films movie version of the report's release...

The Senate Judiciary Committee's website is now playing host to the full 172-pages of Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor's vetting questionnaire. The Sunlight Foundation's Paul Blumenthal thinks that this is just the second time that a high court nominee's backgrounder has been posted online, and the White House is bragging that Sotomayor et al finished her document in a modern record of 9 days ( "It took Chief Justice Roberts 13 days, Justice Ginsburg 15 days and Justice Alito 30 days.")

But it's the posting of more than 200 other supporting documents -- everything from court reports to hearing transcripts to speech texts to grainy scans of print interviews with Newsday, the San Juan Star, El Diario La Prensa, and dozens of other publications -- that is striking. The White House appears eager to flood the zone with all things Sotomayor. Doing so saves us all some of the trouble of LexisNexis-ing, and perhaps themselves a delay in the process.

Still, if they really wanted to streamline this thing, a suggestion: hyperlink those endless PDFs to the relevant parts in Sotomayor's questionnaire itself.

The White House new media team engaged in an interesting first-time-ever sort of thing this afternoon...

In the opening remarks to his press conference yesterday, President Barack Obama adopted a stronger tone against the violence and repression in Iran than he had previously, saying "suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away." Fair enough. But can translating them give them legs? After the event, a notable Farsi-language tweet popped up in the White House's Twitter stream. Google Translate's new Farsi-to-English option gives a rough translation as "President Obama's remarks in his press conference about Iran with Persian." The Washington Post's Scott Wilson has the details on the Obama White House's multilingual outreach, including a note from the White House that intention behind the translation is so that "the Iranian people could read it in their own language."

But if the Obama White House now speaks Farsi, it also seems fairly fluent in Twitter. Worth noting is how the White House adopted the #iranelection hashtag -- a signal that they see themselves as part of an ongoing, global conversation.

Once again, President Barack Obama will be taking questions from the Internet. Saying "inaction is not an option," Obama announced through a YouTube video that the White House will today host one of their special-blend online townhalls that mixes together Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and live video streaming on White House Live. The special guest? The president himself. The subject? What Americans are wrestling with when it comes to health care costs, coverage, and choice. Obama will field some of the questions plucked by his staff from the more than 450 YouTube responses to his announcement, as well as Twitter and Facebook feeds. Health care staff will reportedly be on hand to field stumpers, and the White House promises to follow up with some of the questions that they don't get to today. The event starts at 1:15pm EDT, but head on over to Facebook now to watch as they set the stage and prepare for the event. It's not entirely clear that they're aware that the camera is already on.

The White House is promoting today's online town hall by posting some of the YouTube video responses smack dab in the middle of the WhiteHouse.gov home page. Is that you, top left?

In a half-hour live chat conducted on the White House website and Facebook, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra and White House new media director Macon Phillips explained the inspiration for and mechanics of a new federal tech spending oversight site that debuted at PdF '09 earlier this week. IT.USAspending.gov offers a portal onto agency spending data on high-dollar federal technology investments. During the live chat, Phillips pulled in questions from the Internet. (One the chat got rolling, Facebook questions, said Phillips, were coming in "fast and furious.") Kundra answered them -- including an intriguing little riff on how every new historical transformation in the nature of technology compels government to adapt, either to merely survive or, hopefully, to thrive.

Coming in at just under 30 minutes, true geeks are going to want more detail on the Kundra approach to data-enabled management. Most normal human beings are going to want less. But this lunch-time sized session of engagement is a low-bar way to include the greatest possible swath of citizens in the changing nature of government.

President Barack Obama's two-day trip to Ghana this Friday and Saturday -- his first trip to Africa south of the Sahara since taking office in November -- is already setting off considerable excitement on the continent. And that's the case even though the trip is a very brief pop-in to the West African country. Tacking on the trip to the end of his travels to Moscow and then to Italy for the G8 summit, Obama will be in Ghana for some part of July 10th and 11th. Only some small segment of Ghana's 23 million people (not to mention Africa's near one billion people) will be able to see Obama in person during his appearance in the capital city of Accra. And only a tiny sliver of Ghanaians will get a chance to speak to the American president, or even get within hand-shaking distance of him. But the White House new media team is making a go of extending the reach and impact of the presidential stop-in by opening up some high and low tech ways for Ghanaians and all Africans to participate in the trip. Like Obama attempted to do with the multi-lingual, multi-channel plan around his recent Cairo speech on relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world, the White House is hoping to use their tech-savvy to increase the return on the White House's investment in his engagement in Ghana.

Cell phones and SMS texting are common in Ghana, as they are in many places on the continent. But good old radio is still a reliable and tested way of sharing information far and wide to a large swath of the population. Internet access, where it exists, can be painfully slow. (Thing have improved in recent years, but I have a vivid memory of sitting in an Accra cybercafe and holding a pretty good conversation with one of the staff in the span of time between typing www.nytimes.com in the URL box and the site popping up on the screen.) So the White House is taking a sensible multi-pronged approach to reaching Ghanaians. The blend includes SMS -- for both sending messages to the President and getting speech highlights -- and radio -- of both Obama's remarks and his responses to mobile messages, fleshed out with Twitter, Facebook, and live video streaming components. White African's Erik Hersman has the details from the White House:

SMS. We’re launching an SMS platform to allow citizens to submit questions, comments and words of welcome (in English and in French) . Using a local SMS short code in Ghana (1731) , Nigeria (32969) , South Africa (31958) and Kenya (5683), as well as a long code across the rest of the world*, Africans and citizens worldwide will be encouraged to text their messages to the President. SMS participants will also be able to subscribe to speech highlights in English and French. Long numbers for mobile registration pan-Africa: 61418601934 and 45609910343.

This SMS platform is not available to US participants due to the Smith Mundt Act (The act also prohibits domestic distribution of information intended for foreign audiences).

Radio. A live audio stream of the President’s speech will be pushed to national and local radio stations during the speech. After the speech, a taped audio recording of the President’s answers to the SMS messages received will be made available to radio stations and websites. The President hopes to answer a variety of questions and comments by topic and region. The audio recording will also be made available for download on White House website and iTunes.

Video. The speech will be livestreamed at www.whitehouse.gov/live. The embed code for this video is available so you may also host the livestream on any Website.

Online chat. We will host a live web chat around the speech on Facebook (it will be at http://apps.facebook.com/whitehouselive). The White House will also create a Facebook “event” around the speech wherein participants from around the world can engage with one another. A Twitter hashtag (i.e. #obamaghana) will also be created and promoted to consolidate input and reaction around the event.

Hersman also notes that the White House is planning on launching an online trip hub at WhiteHouse.gov/Ghana, scheduled to go live on the 11th.

[VIDEO ABOVE] Obama invited AllAfrica.com reporters Charles Cobb, Reed Kramer and Tamela Hultman to discuss issues facing Africa in advance of the Ghana trip.

I'll admit from the upfront that this post exists almost entirely so that I can tell you how awesome I think Plex is, but I swear to you that it's at least a little bit otherwise relevant to what we're here to do. If perchance you were out enjoying the sunshine this weekend and missed President Barack Obama's weekly address -- this one on job creation under the stimulus -- you have a few choices. You could hop on over to the WhiteHouse.gov blog. You could fire up YouTube. But, my Mac-using friends, you also have a far more graceful and downright awesomer option: Plex. It's a free and open-source fork of the XBox Media Center project, and someone has gone to the trouble of pulling the White House's many video feeds into it. Hook up your Mac (sorry, this is Mac-only software) to your TV box, and you're watching all the Internet has to offer. It's the future of television, and Obama's on it. And on demand.

(With the political hook out of the way, let me offer some advice to those of you tempted to play around with Plex. If you have an iPhone, grab a copy of the Snatch app from the iTunes store and set up the Plex remote. Lean back and operate your Mac from your cell phone. It might not blow your mind, but it blew mine.)

Add one more tick in the column of Obama's departure from protocol when it comes to the White House press corps: it announced first on Twitter that Obama will hold a primetime press conference Wednesday.