We noted a while back the curious case of an anti-Sarah Palin email sent by two New York women to 40-odd friends that attracted a reported 150,000 responses. That humble missive has evolved into a multimedia campaign.; In these final days, the presidential campaigns are scrambling to reach out to undecideds or soft supporters and convert them into votes; Now that Obama has won -- the WebMarketing Association's Web Award for the better of the two candidates' websites, of course -- thoughts are turning to how a President Obama would use his much-vaunted Internet savvy to actually govern; and a good deal more.

Out of the minds of Google's Creative Lab's, where Googlers go to whip up the future, comes VoteHour.org. CEOs from eBay's John Donahoe to KPMG's Tim Flynn to the Donald himself urge their minions to take an hour from their work day to go vote; What's missing from GOP.com?, asks Mother Jones' Jonathan Stein. The answer is: a guy by the name of John McCain; Gartner Research group is out with a fascinating look at the state of government "social computing," which includes everything from social networks to collaborative web tools; and quite a bit more.

It's the story of a scrappy bootstrapped organization thinking it can take on the big boys through grit, long hours, and some of the neatest tools the Internet's ever dreamed up. Nope, it's not the story of Shawn Fanning and Napster or Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com. It's the rise and presidency of Barack Obama, says the New York Times David Carr; Of course, it's still possible to look at this election and see it as simply the triumph of a uniquely able politician, his crafty band of savant strategists, and a favorable political climate. Indeed, the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza writes a 7,000-word "How Obama Won" piece with hardly a mention of the Internet; The Washington Post's Shailagh Murray and Matthew Mosk suggest that the Obama White House will have an even "more ambitious" version of the campaign's 95-member new media department; and a good deal more.

Slate's Farhad Manjoo explores Barack Obama's transition from a hyper-networked candidate to a 21st century president from whom, now, much is expected; The Nation's Ari Melber keenly notes that a recent Washington Post story slipped in the unattributed bombshell that the Obama campaign's email list topped out at some 10 million members; The organization known as the Obama-Biden Transition Project (I just love that name -- so very '70s experimental band, no?) has brought on someone perhaps best known in these parts as a blogger, Open Left's Mike Lux; and a good deal more.

In the beginning, the blog on Change.gov looked like entirely neutered version of what passes for a blog looks in the rest of the world. Soulless early posts like "President-Elect Obama...Calls for 'Swift Action' on the Economy" left me wondering if we'd just witnessed the birth of yet another press-release blog. And while Change.gov's blog posts are still penned by some unnamed staffer and there's no way to drop a comment either on the posts themselves or any of the videos on the site, some of the more recent posts raise hopes that Team Obama gets that the Internet has value as an almost-instantaneous feedback loop between the man in the Oval Office and the people he's elected to serve (especially after he's forced to power-down his beloved Blackberry).

Fenty and CTO Vivek Kundra created an integrated strategy combining transparent operations, so the public and watchdogs can analyze District operations, plus new tools to help DC workers become more efficient and, the icing on the cake, a wildly-successful program directly involving the public in generating low-cost ideas for services.

The key to all 3 is making available to the public and employees (frequently on a real-time basis!) previously hard-to-access governmental data plus Web 2.0 tools to interpret those numbers.

President-elect Barack Obama wants you in on a meeting. Which meeting? All of them. In its latest bid at transparency and participation, the transition team is putting all the memos, documents, and other written material presented by outside groups up on its Change.gov, in a new section called "Your Seat at the Table." No word, yet, from the transition on whether such openness will continue on in the White House after January 20th, Inauguration Day. But what it has accomplished already has set a tone starkly different than the Bush-Cheney Administration, which went all the way to the Supreme Court in a bid to keep the prying eyes of the public away from the closeted proceedings of the Vice President's Energy Task Force and its meetings with oil and energy companies, Enron among them.

The United States government is acting like the befuddled Soviets in Dr. Strangelove, says a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies -- keeping its cybersecurity strategy quiet, thereby kicking the legs out from any deterrent value it might have. No real opinions yet from this corner on CSIS's new 90-page "Security Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency" report, but given the think tank's DC pedigree, it's likely being considered by its intended target, the incoming Obama administration.

Dozens of senior web managers spanning federal agencies from USDA to HUD to NASA to EPA to ASDF (okay, we made that last one up) have penned a useful white paper with recommendations for the next presidential administration...This latest and last video installment of the life and times of Barney, the White House dog, is truly something to behold. The Bush family gathers to celebrate Christmas in this stilted and scripted piece, and you have to get a load of the President acting out some intentionally goofy lines, like when he admonishes his pet to quit "nappin' to the finish"...If you ever get the question from colleagues, allies, or clients, "We want to get all web 2.0 up in this piece. Hmm, where do we start?," then we've got something for you...and more.

(We recently posted a white paper from the Federal Web Managers Council detailing how the incoming presidential administration should focus on "putting citizens first" when it comes to the web. The FWMC, an interagency group composed of more than two dozen web managers from cabinet-level agencies, independent agencies, and the legislative and judicial branches, was established in 2004 to build U.S. government sites "on par with the best websites in the world" and create a nationwide community of skilled and creative government web managers. Earlier this year, the FWMC began preparing for the 2009 presidential transition. The incoming administration will enter a world where rules and regulations make the simplest Web 2.0 acts -- posting to YouTube or creating a Facebook group, for example -- the cause of bureaucratic headaches. Those are challenges the members of FWMC know intimately, and in this new paper, "Social Media and the Federal Government," they detail how the Obama administration can overcome them. -- the editors)