Starring in one of David Spark's "Sixteen Great Twitter Moments" now up on Mashable is the National Political Do Not Contact Registry's Shaun Dakin and California Green Party congressional candidate Zane Starkewolf. The latter may have the great name, but he's behind an odd and thoroughly uncomfortable robocall; If you're (a) a liberal and (b) haven't settled on a plan for tomorrow evening, than we've got the website for you; A diarist on Daily Kos by the name of "the dogs sockpuppet" is boasting of Obama's new voter management system by the name of "Houdini;" and a good deal more.

It featured minimal graphics, no sound effects, and deeply flawed gameplay. Yet one of the most important game titles of 2008 was played by thousands and helped change the face of American politics. That game was My.BarackObama.com.

Obama Campaign's Trickle Down Belief in the Bottom Up; GOP Insurgents Stump for the Fierce Urgency of Getting Wired Now; Political Discourse, YouTube-Style; Huh, Looks Like Facebook Really Can Get You a Job; Fixing the FCC Begins at Home (Page); The Most Depressing Tweet You'll Get All Day; Summit on Social Networking for Social Change; and more.

The efforts to engage citizens in the Obama administration since Election Day have bounced from increasing volunteerism to throwing random ideas against a wall and hoping one sticks. We need to get focused and constructive before we look up and it's April and all we have are millions of frustrated people who are feeling left out. This election was about transforming government, that's the real change that we need.

Conventional wisdom is that Election Day 2008 went off without much of a hitch -- a stark contrast to past electoral debacles. But are we pulling that "truth" out of thin air and unsubstantiated media assumptions? Heather Gerken, Yale Law professor, was part of the Obama campaign's election protection team. Over on Nieman Watchdog, she writes that the press's ingrained habit of reporting on voting problems only when they involve the single hanging chad standing between Al Gore and the Oval Office means a great many important voting problems go unnoticed -- except, in this case, inside Obama HQ.

The Democratic side of the House Energy and Commerce Committee under John Dingell (for now) has issued a 110-page condemnation of the reign of Bush-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin...We know -- you've been dying for a mobile tool that tells you up-to-the-minute federal stats on the UV index in your city. You're in luck!...If you pay attention to these things, you get the sense that no one in the Obama campaign ever really did a head count in its much-celebrated Internet shop...and more.

This morning, the Harvard Internet & Politics conference continues with two "deep dives" into the McCain and Obama campaigns. We continue to operate under Chatham House Rules, so the following liveblog will remain unattributed, but the speakers in these sessions played a role in the campaigns. This second morning session is about the Obama campaign.

(Laura is the deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Social Justice at New York University Law School. We're thrilled to have her analysis of how we should best think about a critical component of this election cycle's fundraising landscape: small donors and small donations. -- the editors)

Ever
since the Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) first published an analysis
of the Obama
small donor numbers

several weeks ago, the ink has been flowing. CFI's central claims
-- that small donor influence on Obama's fundraising is a "myth"
and that the percentage of small donations in Obama's cash haul (26%)
does not differ from Bush's 2004 numbers (25%) -- made a big splash.
Besides the New
York Times, MyDD and The
Politico, Bob Bauer, Obama's election law attorney, Rick Hasen, a law professor, and Brad Smith, a campaign finance opponent, all
weighed in. On the heels of the flap, Michael Malbin, the study's
author, defended
his conclusions

as based on established categories in campaign finance analysis.

Much
of the discussion in the campaign finance community centered on whether
it is fair, in
a long election season, to characterize the mid-range donors who gave
multiple gifts that put them over the $200 mark (whom CFI calls "repeaters")
as something other than a "small" donor. Malbin's defense of
CFI's line-drawing centers around the indisputable fact that $200
is the reporting threshold for donors under federal law.

But
whatever the nomenclature, this complaint with CFI's act of unmasking
misses the forest for the trees. We may just be counting the wrong
things altogether.

Jose Antonio Vargas has been covering the intersection of politics and technology for the Washington Post since February of last year, and he's got a pre-New Year's wrap up of what he's learned along the way...Some of the digs against Digg, the community-ranking site, is that it's biased against women and weighted in favor of liberals. On the latter, enter #diggcons...MoveOn's Eli Pariser is out with a nice Washington Post op-ed laying out the case for why a President Barack Obama will need to tap into the wisdom and passions of the electorate if he's truly going to make transformational change on health care, the Iraq war, and energy policy -- the issues at the top of both his and the American people's agendas...and more.

Joe Rospars might seem like a household name in the households occupied by those of us who hang around these parts. But Google the name of the Obama campaign's new media director -- as Rospars himself claims never to do, in this solid new National Journal profile by Amy Harder -- and you turn up just 30,000 hits. Compare that to David Plouffe, who, despite never ascending to Karl Rove or Joe Trippi-like levels of campaign manager fame, still returns ten time the Google results as Rospars.

Rospars, by intention, remained a force largely behind the scenes during the presidential run, despite architecting the very way millions of Americans engaged with the Obama campaign. Writes Harder:

Every campaign needs a "cast of characters" supporters can connect to, Rospars says. Obama, Michelle Obama and Joe Biden starred. [Sam] Graham-Felsen spoke to supporters every day through his blog. Some supporters' e-mail inboxes were filled with more messages from Plouffe than from their own families. But Rospars was most instrumental by being least overtly involved. His voice was loudest when the voices of others were heard. He's the invisible host responsible for making conversation easy.

Despite the novelty of being a new media guru, Rospars did many of the very traditional things a good manager does: build a exceptional team, set a clear and strong vision, and then fight for the resources necessary to get the job done.

The profile also provides some insights into why Rospars didn't follow many of his campaign colleagues to the White House:

Rospars admits to being only "vaguely interested in how to make government more transparent. It's not where my heart and passion is." But he's still rooting for the conversation between Obama and his supporters -- a conversation Rospars himself helped enable -- to continue. "I have a somewhat personal emotional investment in the relationship," Rospars said. His firm advises Organizing for America and Rospars wants to help cultivate the network, albeit not to the extent that he did during the campaign. "The relationships didn't end on Election Day," Rospars said. "We built those relationships in a way that it was never really about Election Day or a candidate. It was about a common sense of purpose and what the people wanted the country to be."

The full profile is well worth a read, and you can find it here. Also check out Ari Melber's own reflections on the piece and its subject.