The Hill's Kim Hart has the story on Facebook's run for attorney general in California. Okay, so technically, it's Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly who is in the race, but Kelly concedes that he's well known as "the Facebook guy." His website is, as Hart notes, awfully Facebooky. And as the company's point person on privacy (and a public face for an industry that didn't even really exist a decade ago), he's been working with attorneys general in all fifty states -- putting him in a good position to know both sides of the policy debate on some of the more cutting edge issues a California attorney general is likely to face.

That said, Kelly says that he hasn't really embraced the idea of integrating the social tools he knows well and the digital megaphones he has before him into his statewide race. "You have to appreciate," Kelly told Hart, "that the cadence of a campaign is just important online as it is off."

If you are one, you'll have to find something else to blame. A new report from the fine folks at Pew compares the social isolation and integration of those Americans who regularly use the Internet and mobile phones compared to those who, I guess, read books and go bowling instead. (It's worth noting that the metric that Pew is using here is only the extent to which we have discussions with other people, rather than other kinds of social engagement.) This is the sort of research that helps flesh out the promise of using connective technology to build civil society and the political realm, and what Pew has to say here sets the baseline -- we're not all socially isolated, at least not because we spend time on the computer. Sayeth Pew...

An interesting little outgrowth of the White House's preliminary data release last week of the visitor logs on who came knocking at the White House: the public emergence of, to borrow a term from Facebook, what we might call the White House's "social graph." The Obama White House has committed to uploading the Executive Office of the President's visitor records every 90 days from here on out. Those online public posts, which make up the raw material of the White House's network, looks ready to become something people learn to negotiate -- casually musing over it in public and worrying about their standing in while in private. Kinda like Twitter.

Exhibit A: After Andy Stern, president of the SEIU, drew attention for having visited the White House more than twenty times over the first few months of the Obama presidency, including seven visits with Barack Obama himself and others with senior White House staff. While it's not an awful thing for a union leader to see himself painted as a White House insider, his "friends" in the White House might not love that particular kind of attention. Some social negotiation was in order. The SEIU thus took to their blog to frame why the Obama White House so often welcomed their boss. "Coming off an eight-year period when the voice of workers fell on deaf ears," blogged the SEIU new media team, "the list demonstrates the White House desire to hear from working people." (Photo credit: Lisa DeJong)

At Beth Noveck's event for her new book "Wiki Government" this afternoon in Rockefeller Plaza (write-up forthcoming), the deputy U.S. CTO for open government touched on an intriguing project called Aristotle, a new social networking experiment from the Defense Department. The White House Open Government Initiative describes Aristotle as "a social networking system that provides government and contractor personnel with transparent, but appropriate, access to information regarding tens of thousands of science and technology projects, topics of interest, and collegial networks." After a small pilot launch, Aristotle is being rolled out to 200,000 DOD personnel and contractors this summer. If you're interested in how we can build small but powerful networks of experts in a field to the end of creating better government, this is one project to keep track on.

Also just launched: National Journal's new 3121 project, described by the organization as "a first-of-its-kind network, directory & collaboration tool for people on the Hill." But why's it called 3121? Go ahead and guess. I'll drop the answer in the comments.

While I usually cover only the mobile stuff for Personal Democracy and TechPresident I happened to be one of the few PDF/TechPresident bloggers at the TechCrunch 50 event in San Francisco last week. While I was there launching my own company, I came across Politics4All.com while walking around the Demo Pit area on day two of the event.

While I usually cover only the mobile stuff for Personal Democracy and TechPresident I happened to be one of the few PDF/TechPresident bloggers at the TechCrunch 50 event in San Francisco last week. While I was there launching my own company, I came across Politics4All.com while walking around the Demo Pit area on day two of the event.

Several new projects point to the idea that politicos are coming to understand how much social networks matter in 2008; the world's most famous customer service representative jumps into the wired POTUS debate; the DNC wants to preemptively paint the Republican vice presidential candidate as the next Dick Cheney; the #dontgo uprising enters a second week, and we consider whether this hashtag is becoming a full-fledged movement; and so much more it would take require calling Congress back into session to discuss it all properly.

When it comes to social media, I'm a digital native. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter - these services are deeply integrated into my daily life and, to a certain extent, the lives of my friends and family. The fact that I am a native makes me well-suited to explain the technology and its uses and benefit; the cost, of course, is losing the non-native perspective.

After watching the Iowa returns and reading blog and press accounts, I'm starting to see a potential third way for social network technology. Caveat, I don't have ethnography to back this up, this is just my opinion, but I think there's something here. The old model of social network sites and campaigns proposes that some uber-tool, say a great Facebook app, leverages all sorts of information and eventually gets out the vote or raises funds. That is, the end goals of the electoral process can be attacked programatically, that all problems are solvable with enough data. A nice idea, but not true. Facebook's Beacon and Social Ads are insightful here; even with unlimited data and great programming, machines attempting to "socially" influence fall short; the algorithms and points of interaction just aren't human enough. I don't want to join Blockbuster just because I'm served ads with the face of some guy I've met a few times, and I probably won't switch my vote just because a candidate is spamming my newsfeed.

Buyers of political books on Amazon are clearly divided between people who favor liberal titles vs people who favor conservative titles, with little cross-buying occurring. But a new study of consumer behavior suggests that so-called "influentials" may not matter as much as everyone thinks, and the malleability and gullibility of voters who are easily influenced by others is the more important factor.