Thanks to the high speed Internet at PDF, you can enjoy your daily Second Cup this morning. Check back for some posts on the conference soon.

Next Week: Conference Reverse-Engineers the YouTube Election, Wired.

Many of the leading lights in online politics, technology, business and academia will gather to share their ideas about how to really execute the idea of letting citizens have more of a say in how they are governed.

"What's different this year is that the entire political and media establishment has finally woken up to the fact that the internet is now a major player in the world of politics and our democracy," says Andrew Rasiej, co-founder and publisher with Micah Sifry of the TechPresident blog and annual Personal Democracy Forum. "We are watching a conversion of our politics from the 20th century to the 21st."

Lefty blogs, tech blogs, and coalition politics 101, NextRight.

We all understand the rallying effect of the war clearly. Net neutrality is an obscure and poorly understood regulatory issue that seems to energize the online gaming community, high-bandwidth users, and others. And telco-immunity gets lots of coverage from civil libertarians and technology people.

The upshot is that the success of the Democratic netroots may be as much or more about basic coalition politics than any great technological or political innovation. Afluent, socially moderate-to-liberal, tech-saavy people were attracted to the Democratic coalition through these arguments, anger at the war, a message about the GOP becoming too socially conservative, They were given a series of tools with which they could organize, and they developed more, like Act Blue.

On Facebook, it's game on for McCain, CNN.

Anyone who thought John McCain’s campaign – which launched its very first Facebook application just two days ago – would make a major push on the social networking Web site when pigs fly… is right.

McCain’s new “Pork Invaders” application, launched Friday, is a video game that requires users to dodge incoming projectiles from flying pigs. If a user takes a hit from one of the application’s pigs, the user loses one of the three lives granted at the beginning of the game.

Saying thanks in a conference presentation, SethGodin.

I hear quite a few presentations given at conferences. Approximately 5% of the official welcome speech consists of a litany of thanks. The organizer is busy thanking the committee that handled the arrangements, the sponsors, the executive director, the tireless volunteers. I've heard people try hard to read the names superfast, or really slowly, or mumble through them...

Not only is this a total waste of time for most attendees, it doesn't even satisfy the core objective, which is thanking and rewarding the folks who helped. And it certainly doesn't encourage others to look forward to helping out.