Was last night's presidential "town hall" in Nashville hosted by Tom Brokaw was a bust?; NPR social media bloke Andy Carvin's launched an intriguing last-minute "distributed dial testing" Twitter experiment yesterday. To participate, you simply included a one to ten rating of the candidates in your tweet, set off by asterisks; expanding upon the idea of using Twitter as an election protection tool, Culture Kitchen's Liza Sabater lays out some provocative ideas for taking advantage of the decentralized, network world and the humble cell phone to mix things up; and a good deal more.

Did anyone use MySpace's MyDebates page, the "official online companion to the Presidential Debates"? Alas, not too many. And it looks like only four questions of the millions submitted online were asked by Tom Brokaw, the event's moderator. That, plus the pre-agreed rules that prevented the studio audience from asking follow-up questions or even showing emotion, made the "townhall" style presidential debate more like a wax museum animatronic replica of a townhall. What a shame.

We're now two debates in to the general election, neither of which, I think it's fair to say, made a stellar case for professional moderation. Gwen Ifill seemed somehow restrained last night, pushing for consensus where none really existed. (I'm thinking of this exchange on marriage equality). And Jim Lehrer seemed to barely be a presence at the first debate. The whole thing kinda makes you wish for snowmen, doesn't it? The YouTube debate certainly had its ups and downs. But it did push the candidates outside their talking point comfort zones -- something that hasn't happened in the general election.

This morning, the Commission on Presidential Debates and MySpace are announcing "MyDebates.org,," a "landmark partnership" that they claim "will do for the debates what TV did in 1960 for the Nixon Kennedy election." Their joint press release says this new site "will offer a host of interactive tools for viewers to virally engage in the political process." The release notes that "marks the first time that the CPD has paired with an Internet property to include online functionality into the event series and traditional debate format." Unfortunately, the CPD's landmark is little more than a shack. At best.

New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley writes that "Debates give candidates a chance to break loose of YouTube-ification and speak for themselves at length." She couldn't be more wrong about YouTube.

A new site does a great job of illustrating the candidates' health care positions; progressive liveblogging during the Michigan primary; the Caucus Calculator is updated for Nevada; why aren't the Republicans using the web to get out the vote in Michigan?; John Edwards once again teams up with Eventful; Dennis Kucinich successfully sues MSNBC, will attend the Nevada debate; and a new report says that most Congressional website are plain awful.

In last night's back-to-back Republican and Democratic Facebook/ABC debates in New Hampshire, the stakes were high, the chairs were comfy, and Facebook was jammin’. Too bad the Facebook part did little to affect the debate.

More on the CNN/YouTube debate: Save the Debate wants CNN out of the YouTube debate process; Factcheck.org finds a smattering of truth-bending among the candidates; IPDI gets their criticism on; regardless of criticism, the debate was the the most-watched of the season; gay advocates are compiling a list of Giuliani's pro-gay efforts; our own Micah Sifry and David Colarusso get interviewed; and Hillary answers questions on iVillage, doesn't break a sweat.

The Republicans finally had their YouTube debate, but it wasn't as participatory as the producers would like to think, since the public couldn't help decide which videos to show; in fact, only two of the forty most-viewed submissions were shown; conservatives and liberals alike are bothered that the questions were so narrow, focusing overwhelmingly on guns, immigration, and religion; and then there's the gay general, whose link to Hillary Clinton shook things up; the overwhelming opinion is that Mike Huckabee walked away with a victory; some of the candidates' teams liveblogged the event; and for something completely different, check out the New York Times' profile of ActBlue.

I'll be liveblogging tonight's CNN/YouTube debate, and I'm trying out new software from CoverItLive that lets me continuously post using their widget. My posts should appear in a beautiful, continuous stream below. The coolest thing is that you guys, the readers, will be able to add your comments to the flow. I can even throw out polls during the debate. Sounds cool, right?

There are no guarantees with this, as we've never used it before. It could fail for some unknown reason, so bear with us.

You can sign up to get notified in the box below, which is where my posts will also appear started around 8pm tonight.