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...

The fact that the campaign web team wasn't relegated to some back office but was instead placed at the center of the action on Howard Dean's 2004 campaign -- the campaign that spawned Blue State Digital and a handful of other web firms -- was consider a considerable mark of respect, a sign of how far things had come. With the Obama '08 campaign under the company's belt, the 110 men and women who make up Blue State Digital (BSD) are, today, being offered more than a decent office seats. BSD's reach extends beyond American politics to advocacy, policy, and cultural campaigns here and abroad.

Here's a look at some of the ways the firm that helped power Barack Obama to the White House is selling what it has learned since those Dean days. Through it all run the same simple but powerful threads. Tell stories. Make design a priority. Focus on people. Use video whenever possible. Build community. Treat your email list with great respect. And, in doing so, help to turn visions of how the world should be into how it is. Blue State Digital is busily working to figure out how well what has done to American politics translates in other realms and around the world...

The Republican National Committee might have been a bit red in the face when a skeletal Request for Proposal on the revamping of its website became public, but Minnesota's Republican Governor -- and possible 2012 presidential candidate -- Tim Pawlenty has decided to make shine sunlight on the innerworkings of the process for upgrading his TimPawlenty.com. Pawlenty, whose PAC Freedom First has reportedly been working with new media vets like Mindy Finn, Patrick Ruffini, and Liz Mair, pointedly posted the RFP for the site's redesign, an overhaul that will include design and branding, a new content management system (home-grown or out of the box), an email backend, platform features like user accounts and event planning, fundraising capabilities, a contact database and plan, as well as a recommendation for a mobile provider. "PAC staff," details the RFP, "will have the ability to send text messages to its base of supporters, with an ability to segment geographically and on any other data points we collect."

Posting the RFP -- and having allies like Ruffini tweet out that the RFP had been posted -- is probably a double win for Pawlenty. First off, a more open process might just attract new talent and new thinking in a field that has traditionally been monopolized by a few vendors, some of whom work by developing one site template for one candidate or campaign and then replicating to near the point of total exhaustion; Pawlenty makes a point of inviting bids from "from all comers, even if your firm has not traditionally been involved in politics." Secondly, peeling back the curtain on a PAC's internal happenings helps paint Pawlenty as a new kind of politician, one embracing of the strain of openness and transparency that is proving to have some political appeal on both the right and left.

Better get cracking, though. Proposals are due by November 4th, which is two weeks from yesterday. And Team Pawlenty wants a first version of the new site up and running within 45 days of the awarding of the contract.