While network TV has cut back its coverage of the national political conventions to an hour a night, and within that hour we often get more of the network "stars" bloviating than straightforward speechifying from the convention floor, the internet is, as my colleague Andrew Rasiej likes to say, "the Tivo of our times." A glance back at the speeches and media moments in Denver and their YouTube views suggests a couple of episodes must have strong word-of-mouth, since people are going to watch the stuff they heard about but missed.

Liveblogging the DNC; sleuthing out McCain's VP pick; Sarah Palin will make these bloggers happy; Get your ObamaTaxCut.com; McCain's classy and messy moves; Obama's text-messaging machine revs up.

Here are two words that have yet to be uttered from the stage of the Democratic National Convention: BarackObama.com or Democrats.org. I've slogged through the posted transcripts of the first three days speeches in Denver, and using the "find" tool on Firefox could not find one occurrence of either phrase. This is more than a minor slip by Team Obam, in my humble opinion.

Will bloggers armed with cheap, high-tech tools change the news, or will the age-old rule that the closer you get to the powerful, the harder it is for you to criticize them, hold? This week at the Democratic convention we're seeing a new model in action, the Qik-powered videoblogger, but the results are still unclear.

My twitter feed is going crazy with people vying for my attention.

My friend Jay Rosen noticed a tweet from me earlier where I said I wasn't going to the conventions this year, and instead planned to "watch the web watch the conventions." He wrote back asking how I planned "to add value to and interact with the convention?" Here's an extended version of what I wrote back to him in response.

When will the political conventions enter the Connected Age? That question has been bouncing around my mind recently as we at techPresident keep fielding phone calls from reporters doing stories on Barack Obama's decision to announce his VP choice first by text message. Don't get me wrong: It's a great attention-grabbing gimmick, and it's helping his campaign build a powerful new way to reach people (primarily the young), but it's hardly a revolution in politics.