Andrew Rasiej and I are excited to announce that next year's Personal Democracy Forum, our seventh, will be taking place on June 3-5 in New York City, with the main conference on June 3rd and 4th at the CUNY Graduate Center and an unconference on June 5th (location TBA). Early registration will open with special discount rates just after New Year's, so watch this space. In the meantime, we think you will want to hold the dates so you can join the illustrious group we have already confirmed as speakers:

Today is the first day in the office for our new reporter/researcher, Nick Judd. He's going to be expanding our coverage of the nuts and bolts of tech-politics, starting with updating our consumer guide to companies that offer internet-politics services, and developing other premium content for PdF Network members. So if you get a phone call or email from Nick, be nice to him and answer his questions. Or else!

At last year's Personal Democracy Forum conference, Linkfluence gave a remarkable visual presentation about the political web under "Presidential Watch 08." The crowd responded favorably, particularly when we could see spheres of influence like the Obama and McCain websites with respect to progressive and conservative blogs. The data is fascinating to observe. Yesterday in Washington, they gave a similar presentation at the Fem 2.0 conference on the "Feminist web."

Time for some editorial housekeeping. In our never-ending quest to cover how technology is changing politics and serve the growing community of activists, technologists, journalists, politicians, government workers, bloggers and plain old citizens who are engaged in making this change happen, we are pleased to announce two new additions to our editorial crew. Dave Witzel and Allison Fine are coming on board Personal Democracy Forum as senior editors who will help expand our coverage on PersonalDemocracy.com of how mass, networked participation in the public arena is affecting all the important arenas outside of electoral campaigns (which we cover obsessively at techPresident).