Welcome to our new group blog on how the presidential campaigns are using the web, and how the web is using them, TechPresident.com. This blog is an extension of Personal Democracy Forum, our online zine and annual conference on how technology is changing politics. Over there, we'll continue to cover all the ways the political arena is being reshaped by new tools and practices born on the web, while over here we're going to drill down on what the presidential campaigns are doing online, and vice-versa, how bottom-up initiatives launched by ordinary people, what we call voter-generated content, are going to impact the campaign.

Rounding up last night's results, explanations, and prognostications; what's CNN? Online politicos tracked the action with Twitter, Google Maps, Flickr, and YouTube instead; Hillary is favored by Microsoft employees, Barack by Google: Hillsoft vs. Goobama?; Voices without Votes gives us international impressions of the race; what do we see when we take a closer look at John McCain?; and online advertising is stuck in the dark ages.

Mark Glaser interviews Patrick Ruffini; Rolling Stone glowingly investigates Obama's grassroots game; Mike Connery at TPMCafe; who's winning the Wikipedia primary?; Flickr for Good launches; and the candidates do some, er, interesting things with splash pages.

Just how many upcoming events does each candidate have near Orlando, Florida and Dayton, Ohio; how many bloggers are writing the phrase "voting for McCain" vs "voting for Obama"; and just how many times did Obama mention the word "pie" the other day in West Philly? Here's the latest meta-data from the social web...

Apps for Democracy is a remarkable contest for software developers launched by the city government of Washington DC. The challenge? Build applications for Facebook, iPhones, Google Maps, and more that make the lives of DC citizens better. And do it while making use of the city's rich data catalog, which contains structured data on everything from ongoing construction projects to crime reports to sites along the African American Heritage Trail. Up for grabs is $20,000 in prize money, including two $500 people's choice awards voted on by fellow coders.

If President-elect Barack Obama and his transition team are looking for a model that uses the power of social networks and citizen democracy to open up government, they ought to bring their own homepage - Change.gov - and replace the g-o-v with a little o-r-g.

Online social activism portal Change.org, whose origins predate (by just a little bit) the theme of the Obama '08 campaign, has opened up a super-connected suggestion box on national policy - and if they're smart, the new Obama Administration will dive right in. I can almost picture a Capraesque scene in the Cabinet Room come January: Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel dumps a huge hamper of Change.org suggestions on the big, shiny and table and calls on the startled Secretaries to "dig in" as President Obama nods in approval.

Not that you'd divine that sort of attitude from the dot-gov side of the Change domain spectrum: Change.gov is a handsome, well-designed billboard with a light Obama agenda, the latest transition news, and the ability to apply for jobs and send in suggestions. It's the polar opposite of the much-lauded MyBO site of the campaign, where the campaign allowed organizers to - well - organize publicly using the Obama team's digital plumbing. And no, your once-prized MyBO log-in and identity won't work in the Office of the President-elect.

Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google and Chairman of the Board of the New America Foundation, spoke earlier today about technology, innovation, the economy, energy, and how they are all linked. Schmidt is on the short list for Obama's CTO, and he is a member of President-Elect Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, so here's an opportunity to learn a little about how he thinks on these topics, through a transcript from his talk.

The Guardian UK has collected hundreds of striking photo messages to Barack Obama on their Deadline USA blog. All it took was setting up a Flickr group and inviting people share their thoughts in photo form. More than 800 messages have since poured in. Some had some general words of advice for the President-elect:

(Photo credit: lorenabuena)

Back in the day, when Yahoo! was the only search game in town, many wondered why Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com), and eventually Google would attempt to break into that market. The answer continues to be the same - although they're good, there's still a lot to be done with Search. Contextual search is still being explored, and in terms of government and campaign information, most documents are not publicly or easily available to the search engines. With the goal of open government in mind, I decided to take a look at five relatively new search companies that recently launched sites, hoping that perhaps some of them could help make search of government and campaign data a little better, honing in on the FEC, OMB and more.

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.