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.

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.

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.

Surely this is one of the great mysteries wrapped inside an enigma of our day. Robert Gibbs sparked a a bit of a flurry in our niche the other day by saying on C-SPAN that Twitter is blocked in the White House. Gibbs used the Twitter blockade to explain why he, as White House press secretary, isn't in the practice of tweeting his own reflections on life inside the White House.

I noted at the time that Gibbs' interpretation couldn't be the full story. There were clearly holes in this blockade. For one thing, the White House's own account at @whitehouse is regularly updated with notes on the President's schedule, pointers to tweets coming from elsewhere in government, and even the occasional "FTW" celebration. Unless White House staffers were using non-White House computers to conduct official business, somewhere in the Executive Office of the President someone had been connecting up to Twitter. Those folks are in the White House's new media operation, which handles the White House's and Obama's social media profiles and outreach.

Over on Mediaite, Rachel Sklar has done some digging into the situation and concluded "Twitter Not Blocked In White House, As It Turns Out." Indeed, according to White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton, a pair of White House new media staffers -- new media director Macon Phillips and online programs director Jesse Lee -- are updating the White House Twitter feed. But the truth of the matter, says a White House contact, is that that pair of staffers are the exception to White House rule. They are two unrestricted aides out of the couple thousand employees in the Executive Office of the President...

It took going to the source, but we now have some clarity on how to interpret YouTube's Insight statistics on how popular various videos are in different places in the world, a question that came up when everyone from us to Politico's Ben Smith to the White House tried to use the figures to make the case that President Obama's video to the Iranian people on the Nowruz holiday made an impact inside Iran.

After a tutorial from YouTube's Aaron Zamost, it's clear that Obama's Nowruz video did in fact enjoy a great deal of popularity in the country it was targeting. But interpreting the YouTube Insight map that shows the White House video as "Most Popular" in Iran requires understanding how YouTube thinks of popularity. What YouTube is doing here is using a popularity index that blends two things: the relative popularity ranking of video within a particular country and the pegging of that ranking against that of videos in other countries...

The White House's going after the Drudge Report over its health care reform coverage might strike some as a case of the chief executive punching below his weight. But on Internet's level playing field, Matt Drudge and crew still have a sometimes breathtaking ability to set the national agenda. We saw that most recently where Drudge highlighted a somewhat dated video of Delaware Republican Representative Mike Castle being confronted by "birthers" at a town hall meeting, which pushed the issue almost immediately onto the national stage. By targeting Drudge, the White House is demonstrating that it gets how this ecosystem works. And it's going to use its might to shape it.

In a new three-minute web video, White House Office of Health Reform communications director Linda Douglass calls out those who are in the practice of "taking sentences and phrases out of context and cobbling them together to leave a very false impression." Douglass never utters the word "Drudge." She needn't. The "drudgereport.com" in the URL box she pulls up on her computer monitor leaves no doubt of who's the target. Douglass takes particular issues with a recent Drudge entry titled "Uncovered Video: Obama Explains How His Health Care Plan Will 'Eliminate' Private Insurance."

Douglass concedes that Obama's barnstorming on behalf of health care reform creates a rich record of public remarks that makes him somewhat vulnerable. "Because he's talking to the American people so much," says Douglass, "there are people out there with a computer and a lot of free time...they take a phrase here and there, they simply cherry pick and put it together and make it sound like he's saying something that he didn't really say." In a bit of jiujutsu, Douglass than uses the video record from a recent AARP forum where, contra Drudge, Obama stresses that "nobody is trying to change what works in the system."

While the well-known Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report make a useful targets, the White House is also clearly concerned with what's flowing farther beneath the political radar. Both the "birther" controversy and rumors about Obama being of Muslim faith, for example, percolated out of site for a long while before leaping up to the national stage. The White House would rather know about that sort of thing sooner than later. On the White House blog, new media director Macon Phillips asks for help spotting what's out there. "These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation," blogs Phillips. "Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."

The run of trouble in keeping someone in the U.S. cybersecurity czar spot continues, with acting coordinator Melissa Hathaway announcing her resignation this week. The Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Gorman has the story. President Obama had attempted to staunch the bleeding of prestige and power away from the post by announcing a comprehensive overhaul of U.S. cybersecurity policy this spring. That plan moved the cybersecurity coordinator post into the inner rings of the White House, a partial fulfillment of Obama's campaign pledge to "appoint a National Cyber Advisor who will report directly to me." But Hathaway, Gorman reports, ran into conflict with Larry Summers' National Economic Council for, among other things, recommending that private network operators be regulated to ensure they're protecting their assets properly.

President Barack Obama used the first segment of this week's weekly video address to "debunk some of the more outrageous myths" about health care reform, before segueing to a morality-driven call to make this "the moment we earned our place alongside the greatest generations."